The Sprung Floor

Dancer and choreographer Dane Hurst bought a former Rambert Company vinyl dance floor to take back home to South Africa, for under-privileged children to dance on.

Dance is like a magic carpet - it transported young Dane out of the volatility and violence and poverty of his childhood in segregated Port Elizabeth to life as a Rambert student and dancer in London.

He believes it can transport other young people. But buying the floor was the start of a larger dream that Dane calls the Moving Assembly Project (MAP).

In the next few years, Dane plans to construct a prototype dance space out of shipping containers and install the floor in it - to give dance training to thousands of underprivileged children, transporting them for a moment out of their frustrations and grief.

Follow Dane as he starts on his dream, visiting MAP’s pilot project - workshops with vulnerable children at the Ubuntu Centre in the old township of Zwide in the northern areas of Port Elizabeth.

Hear how modern dance touches local teenagers, as Dane visits his childhood dance school in another part of the city’s northern areas where he finds children in severe need.

Producer: Frances Byrnes

A Rockethouse production for BBC Radio 4, first broadcast in May 2016.

*** Photograph credit: Karl Schoemaker