We Wear Our Wheels with Pride by Robyn Orlin

Queen Elizabeth Hall London March 2025

The full title actually reads, We Wear Our Wheels with Pride and Slap your Street with Color… We Said “Bonjour” to Satan in 1820. Which only alerts you to how little you probably know about the subject of Robyn Orlin’s wild, 70-minute dance.

The press material I received calls the piece “a homage to the rickshaw drivers of South Africa’s past” and refers to ”the ornate decoration of Zulu men’s vehicles and headdresses, as well as their sprightly dance-like steps.” Given only that much, I went straight online to do my homework.

What happened in South Africa in 1820? The first British settlers arrived. Having acquired the Cape of Good Hope colony in 1814, to address a serious problem with unemployment at home Britain encouraged its citizens to immigrate and settle there.

What do rickshaws have to do with South Africa? It seems a sugar baron had them transported from London around 1890 to establish a cheap form of public transport for the growing port city. Originally, white-owned companies hired the vehicles to migrant Black laborers, known as “pullers,” who came from the surrounding rural areas to escape poverty by finding work.

Over the years the job became a family tradition, the rickshaws passed from father to son, and eventually the pullers bought them from the owners when their companies closed. But with the increased prevalence of cars and buses, local laws restricted the streets on which rickshaws were permitted as well as the licenses to pull them.

One article claims that in 1902, 24,020 men registered as pullers for 2,170 vehicles. In 2004, only 24 rickshaws were operating on the city’s beachfront. Today, about 20 survive as a tourist attraction.

Orlin remembers them from a childhood visit to Durban, where she was “mesmerized by their energy, humor, and colorful presence.” Working with the company Moving into Dance Mophatong, a contemporary dance troupe based in Johannesburg, she has lifted the pullers’ proud traditions and desperate routine of servitude out of history’s shadows.

She describes the piece as “a tribute and a reflection on labor and dignity, past and present.” It struck me as an exhilarating vision of a tough reality, less formal than most dance compositions yet better structured than any improvisation. United as the electro duo uKhoiKhoi, the stunning singer Anelisa Stuurman and the composer Yogin Sullaphen stitched together Orlin’s ideas, the six dancers and the audience by knotting them into a mazelike mesh of multilingual vocals and irresistible rhythms.

As if permanently tethered to physical strain and fatigue, the dancers inhabited the spirits of the pullers and of horses—a rickshaw was called hashishi, horse in Zulu—jumping, twitching, pawing the ground, riffing with their bodies like a band of jazz musicians exploring a single melody in a shoving, impatient pack.

Inert as empty sacks, they slumped, exhausted, over a waist-high bar fringed with painted tin cans, the bar that defined the pullers’ constant prison. Freed from their harnesses, they strolled in a parade of silhouettes past a solitary dancer, still at work as night fell. And one by one, they laid aside their horned helmets, embellished with buttons and ribbon like homemade icons, to dance alone as the pullers had once danced to entertain passengers with their flashiest moves.

The chaotic jumble of backbreaking effort and crowded streets expanded as the video artist Eric Perroys lay the surprises of video capture onto the live action. An equal member of the ensemble, orchestrating his images in perfect synchrony with the dancers’ apparent spontaneity, he deftly magnified the movement, duplicated it all the way to the vanishing point, stopped it mid-stride.

At several points, Orlin lured the audience into swaying or humming with the cast, possibly to tie the viewers into the propulsive group energy onstage. She needn’t have worried. Even without its backstory, the dance would have held us captive all by itself.

Part of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Festival