DARION

Motion is the leitmotif of Darion Adam’s life. It might refer to dance – his lifelong fascination, obsession, career and fuel for his ambition – but motion also represents his desire to evolve, to pivot and keep moving forward.
Today, at 32, Darion has showcased his dancing and choreography worldwide and founded an organisation that uplifts disadvantaged artists like him in his community – and he’s just getting warmed up.
Success and stability were and remain a rarity for young men like Darion. He was born and raised in Manenberg, a suburb of Cape Town’s sprawling, low-lying Cape Flats region. It was here that thousands of people from Cape Town’s coloured population – a classification that sat between white and black in the apartheid regime’s racial ranking – were forcibly moved to, after the areas in which they were living were deemed too nice or too central, becoming legally reserved for whites only. Darion’s mother and her six siblings were evicted from District 6, a neighbourhood that later became synonymous with the cruelty of the Group Areas Act. It had been a hub of culture, diversity, community spirit and tolerance – social mores the regime wanted to destroy among its subjugated populations. Like other neighbourhoods of the Cape Flats, Manenberg is a place of struggle: opportunities are scarce, and crime, violence, gangsterism and substance abuse are rife. For Darion, his mother was a model of resilience, “I was raised by a single mother, who is very independent and very self-sustaining.” She left Darion’s father when she was five months pregnant, “She did it because she knew she couldn’t trust him,” Darion explains. When he was older, his mother shared more stories, and he came to a deeper understanding about why she’d left, “I told my mother, ‘No girl, you made the right decisions!’”