danceGATHERING Catalogue

ISSUE

D G 2O17 \A NT CH \EL RA IG NO GS

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CATALOGUE____LAGOS CONTEMPORARY DANCE FESTIVAL___FIRST EDITION___1-5 MARCH 2017

C O N T E N T

DIRECTORIAL NOTE

4-5

DANCE GATHERING VENUES

6-7

INSTRUCTORS & PARTICIPANTS

8-11

PETER BADEJO

12-15

PERFORMANCES

16-25

FATOU GOT IT ALL AT “SIMPLY THE BEST”

26-29

CROSSINGS

30-47

CORKS AND MEMORIES

48-49

MO[VE]MENTS HOW TO ADD DANCE PERFORMANCE TO A COLLECTOR’S ITEM

54-55

AFRICAN DANCE IN TRANSITION

58-61

AFRICAN DANCE AND THE STRUGGLE FOR IDENTITY

64-65

TRENDING POP DANCE MOVES

68-71

CHOREOGRAPHING DEATH IN THEATRIC PRODUCTIONS

74-75

POETRY BY ZENA EDWARDS

78-79

SEGUN ADEFILA @ 44 : A PEEP INTO THE FUTURE OF BARIGA

80-81

MY ONLY TRUE COUNTRY IS MY BODY : FAUSTIN LINYEKULA

84-85

THERE WILL BE NO DANCE REVOLUTION

88-90

IS THERE A TECHNIQUE TO TEACHING AFRICAN CONTEMPORARY DANCE

91-93

TECNOLOGY OF CIRCLE

QUDUS ONIKEKU DIRECTOR

HAJARAT ALLI PROJECT MANAGER

YADICHINMA KALU ART DIRECTOR

AWELE DEKPE CO-EDITOR

CHINELO CHIKELU CO-EDITOR

OLAOLUWA ALABI MEDIA STRATEGIST

IFE ADENIRAN PR CONSULTANT

MATTHEW YUSUF TECHNICAL DIRECTOR

JAHMAN ANIKULAPO ADVISOR

96-103 104

VOTE OF THANKS

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TEAM

PARTNERS

106-107

DANCE GATHERING PROGRAMME

108-109

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DIRECTORIAL NOTE

In the beginning wasn’t the word, in the beginning was MOVEMENT. The word was initially a thought in the mind of God, a moment within a sacred movement in God’s mind, a moment of desire to create, to assemble and to recreate. It is within this “desire,” its metamorphoses, its sight, hearing, sense of smell, taste, touch – in short, its expressive power – that we are set to place our maiden edition of danceGATHERING; a contemplation of and a reflection on Dance and Movements. Offering a get-together, bursting with encounters, performances, master classes, discussions, dance/photo exhibition, dance film screenings, jam session, cocktails, dancer’s hangout, debates, this cumbersome catalogue on your hands, and a command performance of the outcome of the two weeks long Dance Lab. Thinking of the amount of hard work and generosity that had gone into all these, makes me pause, to offer my immense gratitude to all participants, supporters and everyone who cooperated with us to make this sheer act of magic a banality. danceGATHERING is one of its kind in its entire conception, a Dance Lab and festival aimed at the promotion and presentation of the aging art of contemporary dance, to a larger Lagos and international audience, educating about dance, its language, as it records time and the instability of daily life, as it shifts our notion of beauty, embodies memory and explores social, political, historical and contemporary matters.

The artistic directorial style of danceGATHERING 2017 proposes MOVEMENT as a major character, not solely a thing to be watched, but something that allows our audience to be jostled, activating different hotspots for dance in the breathtaking city of Lagos, making a deliberate action of turning the entire city into our play area. Because the city is already noisy and fast and surreal, and dramatic with constant movements, I have curated a program, which rotates between 10 venues around Lagos, both in conventional spaces as well as improvised spaces. In a span of five days, we create an opportunity for our audience to step out of their comfort zones and move with the flow, going against traffic from Ikoyi (QDanceCenter, Omenka gallery, BogoBiri, JazzHole), to Iwaya, back to Lagos island (City Hall Rooftop), then Victoria Island (African Artists Foundation, Revolving Art Incubator, Silverbird Galleria), to a stop in Bariga (Crown troupe, Mbari Mbayo arts center) and Surulere (Corperate Dance World), before culminating at the National Theatre Iganmu.

For a Lagos Contemporary Dance Festival, where there are millions of people to be reached, my interest as the artistic director is in finding new ways to be much more significant within such

landscape, challenging both the local and visiting artistes to step out of bounds, provoke reactions and insist in being fully part of the city life, creating situations where a wider range of audience is stimulated and entertained, by providing for them a palette of diverse dance forms, both from local and international dance artists, for mainland as well as island audiences.

In such, we are therefore working to include dance, as part of the art-forms rendering visible the multiple juxtapositions that shape daily life in Lagos; in the process, dance becomes a code for social participation, signifying an experience that is constantly on the move.

I am particularly excited about the radicalism that the works presented under Dancing Cities portends, the high artistic quality of works to be seen at the Dance Platform which will be held at the National Theatre, here are internationally acclaimed works, which had blown me away, and I’m excited to bring them to Lagos for our audience to experience during the festival.

CROSSINGS is another program that I myself am looking forward to, the coincidences and the encounters between two different artistes, sharing notes on their creative process and thought patterns, is something to discover. The MO(VE)MENTS photography exhibition took a lot of my time to put together, and I am very proud of the 9 exhibiting artistes, who shall be up at African Artists Foundation during the entire period of the festival. Don’t miss our Jam Session at the RoofTop, and Dancer’s Hangout hosted by Bogobiri. All these are incredible build-ups towards the Closing Night, where we shall witness the works of our extraordinarily talented participants, whom we’ve gathered all the way from Lagos, Ibadan, Abuja, Kaduna, and Bamako for the first edition of danceGATHERING. Lagos.

At the bottom line, all of these is simply about creating more access points to the arts, which I believe is the secret to a quality and satisfying life, thus, a basic human right for every individual. I equally believe that artistes are a leading voice for freedom - and for this directorial approach, it is freedom of expression and freedom of movement, which is vital for an artist’s work, together with my amazing team, our esteemed partners and other generous individuals at home and abroad, we have worked to protect that very right. A will to showcase dance related works that cross all divides and belong to every individual in whatever spaces. I invite you to experience dance together with us; it makes us feel human, and moves us to protect the humanity of others. I invite you to interact with our guest artistes, let’s together awake human consciousness and create more connections, inspirations and give self-confidence to people who believe in something, but feel that they are alone. Join us in the MOVEMENT.

BEYOND MO[VE]MENTS

Qudus Onikeku

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VENUES

DATES 01/03 - CDW - CROWN TROUPE - IWAYA

CROWN TROUPE REVOLVING ART INCUBATOR

Opp. CMS Grammar School, Bariga.

BOGOBIRI HOUSE 9, Maitama Sule Street, Ikoyi, Lagos.

Silverbird Galleria

02/03

JAZZHOLE

168, Awolowo Road Ikoyi, Lagos.

NATIONAL THEATRE

Iganmu, Lagos.

ROOF TOP

GOETHE INSTITUT NIGERIA, City Hall, 30, Catholic Mission Street, Lagos Island.

OMENKA

24, Modupe Alakija Crescent, Lagos.

AJILEYE FIELD

Bariga

CORPORATE DANCE WORLD Surulere, Lagos.

- CDW - CROWN TROUPE - BOGOBIRI - IWAYA - ROOFTOP

03/03

- CDW - CROWN TROUPE - AJILEYE FIELD - REVOLVING ART INCUBATOR - BOGOBIRI

04/03

- CDW - CROWN TROUPE - OMENKA - REVOLVING ART INCUBATOR - NATIONAL THEATRE

05/03

IWAYA

- CDW - CROWN TROUPE - JAZZHOLE - NATIONAL THEATRE

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INSTRUCTORS

MAKINDE ADENIRAN - DRAMATURGY Dramatist, writer, social activist, and a Fellow of Theatre Arts (FTA), Makinde Adeniran, is one of Nigeria’s few new-age and true dramatist who practiced in the theatre and film profession across the globe and has the awards to prove his achievements.

QUDUS ONIKEKU - CREATIVE PROCESS Qudus Onikeku is the Artistic director and founder of YK projects. Born in Lagos in 1984 and a graduate of The National Higher School of Circus Arts - France. Knownn in Europe, U.S.A, Latin America and the Carribean for his solo pieces, writings and research projects. Qudus is currently developing various artistic projects in Lagos where he has opened a dance centre called The QDanceCenter Lagos

SEIFEDDINE MANAI - DEEP FLAVA Choreographer, dancer and performer, Seifeddine Manai of Tunisian origin, was dancing quite early in his life. His path to professional maturity began after his training with the Sybel Ballet Theatre Company, working with Syhem Belkhodja.

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ONYE OZUZU - TECHNOLOGY OF THE CIRCLE Onye Ozuzu is a dance administrator, performing artist, choreographer, educator and researcher currently serving as Dean of the School of Fine and Performing Arts at Columbia College Chicago. She has been actively presenting work nationally and internationally since 1997. She is currently a Chicago Dance Makers Forum 2016/17 Lab Artist

RASAKI OJO-BAKARE - DANCE AS LANGUAGE Professor Rasaki Ojo-Bakare is a Nigerian playwright, scholar and choreographer, who has sown the seed of drama in many Nigerian Universities as a lecturer, including teh Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, University of Uyo, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife, and the University of Abuja, where he was appointed teh Artistic Director of the Abuja International Festival, raising the stake of the yearly festival.

HORACI0 MACUACUA - IMPROVISATION The Mozambican dancer and choreographer is the artistic director of the dance company which bears his name. Having no aesthetic limitations the company develops projects that are open to the creativity of all the collaborators

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PARTICIPANTS

SEUN AWOBAJO Lagos

OLUWABUKUNMI OLUKITIBI Abuja

DAVID NOSIRI Abuja

DEBORAH AIYEGBENI Lagos

EMMANUEL NDEFO Lagos

FATOUMATA BAGAYOKO Bamako

PEARSE OLUFEMI Lagos

ADILA OMOTOSHO Abuja

MIRACLE NELSON Bamako

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GLORIA UGWARELOJO Lagos

SUNDAY OZEGBE Lagos

JOSHUA AKUBOH Kaduna

OYINKANSOLA OLABANKE Ibadan

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PRECIOUS IFELOLA Kaduna

BUSAYO OLOWU Lagos

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“Movement even in its tiniest form is essential in the human ability to communicate” - Peter Badejo

PETER BADEJO Peter Badejo is one of Nigeria’s foremost choreographers, dancers and African performance specialists. He has worked in all over the world as a dancer, teacher and choreographer in a career spanning over 50 years. Though he is also an accomplished Ewi exponent, comic actor and storyteller his skills as a dancer positioned him to be a pioneer in the field of dance drama and modern African dance emerging from the universities at the time in Nigeria.

In 1960s and 1970s he was part of pioneering art and theatre projects led by Wole Soyinka and Peggy Harper at the then University of Ife. As a young performer touring Europe he caught the eye of the late Robin Howard and was invited to train at the London 12

Contemporary Dance School. He spent a year there before returning to work in Nigeria. After an introduction to British audiences in the 1980s through the LIFT festival in London he was soon invited to work with a number of Blackled British companies which positioned him to become a pioneer of contemporary African dance in England. Peter’s list of collaborators and commissioners includes Adzido, Kokuma (History of the Drum and Awakening), Irie (Agbara), Sakoba Productions, H Patten, The Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester, Cambridge Arts Theatre and Pan Project. He has also appeared in major productions including Cambridge University’s Eshu’s Faust, and Phyllida Lloyd’s productions of Medea MO[VE]MENTS

and Death and the King’s Horseman. Alongside these collaborations he opened his own company Badejo Arts in Britain in 1990.

A brief look at Peter Badejo’s choreochronicle shows that he has a deep interest in social and cultural change, how society renews and sustains itself and the mechanism through which people handle cultural transition. He sees dance in Africa as having important role in spiritual survival in times of transition for individuals and communities and indeed cultures. Ebo Iye – Transitions, which he originally created in 1989, contrasted the values of life in a Yoruba village with a western urban centers and the traffic of

African people between them.

The pain of Aspirations explored the life of Black Britons through contemporary African dance exploring the dilemma of adapting to a dominant culture and what that might mean. Sisi Agbe Aye (Opening the Gourd of Life) made in 1995 was collaboration with Koffi Koko. Peter Badejo and Koffi Koko co-choreographed this piece, which examined the calabash as a metaphor for the ‘womb of the World’, which produces people of different races and personalities. The use Yoruba dances as the starting point for experimentation producing new and hybrid choreography.

Emi Ijo (The Heart of Dance) created in 2000 was a site specific productions in three parts – the first took place on a boat down the river Thames called journey to the land of hope, the second performed on an outside stage at the Royal Festival Hall called The emergence, depicted the emerging multicultural society of Britain, and the third part which took place on one of the roof tops of the Royal Festival Hall was called The arrival. Through a combination of storytelling and dance it demonstrated that at ‘the heart of dance is the survival, transformation and the gift of cultural exchange’. Elemental Passions in 2003, celebrated the Bata dance form. Starting with the birth of Shango and a thrilling duet between Shango and Oya, it went on to explore the characteristics of Bata, which gave it the mutability to travel and survive journeys into the New World.

Dance critics have noticed the importance of traditional dance forms to Peter Badejo. Reviewing The Pain of Aspirations for the Evening Standard, Anne Sacks for example, described Peter Badejo of being ‘a traditionalist at heart’

but ‘not precious about his heritage but open to contemporary influences’. In the early 1990s when the dance sector in Britain was going through infrastructural changes, Peter Badejo emerged as an advocate for the development of African theatrical dance practice in Britain. In 1993 he wrote what is now considered a seminal paper ‘What is Black dance in Britain?’ where he argued that the training of ‘African dance’ should be built upon discreet dance forms. Though institutions support this proposition directly and contemporary African dance in Britain is largely based on choreographic explorations rather than technical training, his intelligent analysis was recognized. Not long after the presentation of ‘What is Black dance in Britian?” the Arts Council began sponsoring Badejo Arts Summer School, ‘Bami Jo’. The Bami Jo Summer School, which started in 1993, over the next thirteen years, brought British based and International dance professionals from Africa and the Diaspora together to teach, perform and engage in discussion.

These included Were Liking, Les

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Freres Sene, Jules Diepa, Kayode Bolaji Idris, Isioma Williams, Esther Abimbola Olaniran, Sikiru Alabi, Zab Maboungou, Flora Thefaine, Airy Andriamoratsiresy, Diwele Lubi, Linda Angelica Volahasiniaina, Dominic Donkor and L’Atoinette Stines, amongst others. Due to changes in funding the school ended in 2005. The summer school left a lasting legacy. It opened the eyes of dancers to the possibilities of dance artistically and socially and it contributed to an international network of dance practitioners enabling them to develop contacts for further research and career development. Peter Badejo’s point of view is that contemporary African dance should be based on the experimentation with the movement and music traditional forms of dance. From early in his career he has had an interest in academic research and has studied, taught and engaged in research in Universities in Ghana, California, London, and Amhadu Bello University, Nigeria. His convictions about dance training led him to create the Batabade technique. The technique is based on a selection of Bata movements

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movements and music phrases through which the students can learn the technique of dancing Bata from a musical and physical perspective. Since creating the technique in the early to mid 2000s he has shared it at the Richmond University in the USA. From the mid 2000s he began to work more in Nigeria, participating in the Black Arts Carnival in Lagos, consulting and contributing to cultural events often in collaboration with Wole Soyinka.

He was one of the director’s of Nigeria’s contribution to the Cultural Olympiad in 2012. He continues to freelance worldwide and is the recipient of many awards. He was awarded an OBE in 2001 in Britain in recognition of his work with and commitment to African people’s dance. He was given a Life Time Achievement Award by the Association of Dance of the African Diaspora (ADAD), which is now part of One Dance UK. One Dance UK this year invited Peter Badejo to be one of the organizations patrons. As Peter Badejo turns 70 we recognise his contribution to dance and culture and we say thank you Sir. Many more years of life, creativity and fulfilment to you.

Written 2016

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by

Funmi

“Dance is the physical/spiritual/emotional expression.

Hypnoptic! When codified, dance combines other forms of creative expressions into full means of communication.

Expressed, it could be in abstract form; it could be a combination of symbolic gestures that derivesfrom cultural experiences, dance transmits feelings and educates its participating audience. Dance simply is chamelonic in nature adopting and imbibin othe artistic expressions. In summary, dance is a combination of movement, sound, using other art forms and human experinces to express intentions or feelings.”

- PETER BADEJO

Adewole

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PERFORMANCES

COS SIA “AMEN”

: Princess Tope is every man’s dream and the joy of her community, but on the most important day of her life she is possessed by a demon. No one can agree on how to help her and this causes division within the community. Will they stay divided or find a way to bring unity? As humans, we face disagreements even for a good cause. But what if we agreed with each other and stand on the power of Cos Sia (Amen, So shall it be, unity)?

INVOCATIONS

Invocation is a call in prayer, a call to witness and for inspiration from the sacred essence within the feminine force; her deepest purpose, her inner beauty, her unique meaning, the guiding force behind our individual lives.

This feminine quartet, attempts to communicate to us through the universal language of symbols, dances, poems and songs.

These metaphors, movements, words and sounds hope to teach us about the very core to our lives, and our ultimate responsibility to the world.

BY QUDUS ONIKEKU

01/03 6pm -10pm AAF

BY CHIBUZOR OKAFOR

02/03 3pm-5pm Iwaya

IN

BROKEN

A single, old and unmarried lady tells her story…

The piece describes her feelings, fears, experiences and struggling with love and loss of self…

For I was once not like this! I was young, hopeful for love, now I wonder if it will ever exist for me, now the fear of love overwhelms my desire to be loved.’

BY MIMA ANGULU

01/03 6pm -10pm AAF

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This is a research based dance choreography featuring 10 dancers choreographed

by Ojudun Taiwo Jacob, and focused on the struggles of young people telling their true-life stories through dance. The subjects view these challenges as reality, and proceed individually, then, collectively find a creative solution to the problems.

Ojudun began his professional dancing career with the Crown Troupe of Africa cultural dance group for six years (2008 2014). Post his crown troupe days, he has created artistic works as a performer, choreographer and a curator. Ojudun works largely focus on essentialism and existentialism which projects the fundamental 02/03 hegemony of humanity. He has worked 3pm-5pm with veteran art practitioners home and Iwaya broad, from Segun Adefila, Ebel Itueor, Jelili Atiku, Ben Tomoloju, Segun Sofowole, and Emeka Udemba.

He is a co-founder of Illuminate Theatre Productions, a collective of young people who create artistic projects specifically for performance in the African conventional space. BY ILLUMINATE THEATRE MO[VE]MENTS

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M.A.K.T.O.U.B

UNTITLED BY F.O.D GANG

What do you want to do with your life?

Maktoub...

An artistic life appears always easy at first, but once it begins, it becomes more complex. The paths are so different, the choices, multiple. What path do I follow? Which one should I take? Which one should I Choose? Do not miss the starting point, which is above all a human path. Only “Destiny”.

Remains the aspect over which we have no control. This unavoidable variable, which opens a door, an escape route from “The uncontrollable”.

What inspiration can one draw from this world of certainty. How does one go about? This debate produces a body without organs that shall be called “Non-human Body”; “Empty Body” devoid of sensitivity. That is what I am today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow? And after...

Maktoub.

BY SEIFEDDINE MANAI

02/03 3pm-5pm Iwaya

QDANCE SESSION

The QDanceSession is generally a performance lab, a semi curated gathering of performers, curious audience, creative minds, story tellers, seekers of truth, makers of beauty, workers and students of life amongst others, coming together just as they are, for a rare moment of sharing and for the purpose of creatively occupying the “Now”.

With QDanceSession, it is our interest to physically examine the human body as a storehouse of memories, a repository of ancient and current knowledge such as myth, legend and history, digging the body memory to a point where its language becomes cryptic and its message diverse in its multiple capacity to rewrite the past and remember the future.

03/03 6pm-10pm Rooftop, Goethe Institut

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03/03 3pm-5pm Ajileye Field, Bariga

iStand

Based on the principle of ‘I am because we are, and We are because I am’, choreographer Abiodun Bakare Ismail directs a piece that revolves around a woman’s struggle for survival and a place in patriarchal society. Abiodun’s works include performing and choreographing Space Up, a contemporary street dance experiment, Soul-i-loquy, and a participant in Rhythm Combine, a collaborative dance drama with by Germany, Madagascar, Ghana and Nigeria. iStand is conceived by dancer, choreographer, drummer and singer, Esther Essien and performed by dancer and bassist musician, Oyebisi Tosin Akinboye, who delights in exploring new ideas and per03/03 forming in unconventional spaces.

3pm-5pm BY TOSIN, ESTHER AND ABIODUN Ajileye Field, Bariga

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IJO AGBA

PROJECT?

Ijo Agba (Dance of The Elders) Studies and samples the music of classical indigenous or countryside music from various legendary artistes across Nigeria, with Evergreen tracks from the likes of ‘King Sunny Ade, Oliver de Coque, Haruna Ishola, Osita Osadebe, Ebenezer Obey and Ugbogu Okonji’ as case study for this body of work.

The part of this series of work that was selected to be featured in ‘Lagos Dance GATHERING Festival’ is *Soyoyo* by Haruna Ishola who was the originator of Apala music genre that started in the late 70’s.

What makes this piece uniquely and fun to watch is tl the intelligent fuzion of urban dance movements drawn from styles like, Hip Hop, Pop and Lock, Naija Urban and Jazz styles into classical ‘Apala’ music.

BY SUNDAY OZEGBE AND SMAUEL UDOH

Project ‘?’ is an art intervention that takes its’ inspiration from Bojúbojú. Bojúbojú is a Yoruba term that denotes both, a children’s rhyme, a song of praise, awe and respect for one of Nigeria’s vast rich culture, as well as a children’s game, which loosely translates as ‘hide and seek’ into English.

Masks, masquerades, spirits and ancestors are inherently linked to the concept of Bojúbojú and this is where our project takes off. We are creating new stories about Nigerian masks that have travelled through different hands and have been removed from their context. Masks that are kept and exhibited in public museums across the world.

BY BUSAYO, SIMI AND JERE

03/03 3pm-5pm Ajileye Field, Bariga

03/03 6pm-10pm Bogobiri

HER WORDS MASQUERADES AS ME

QUI

Another choreography (and experimental) piece about life choices. Here, dancers and co-founders of iXtreme Production, Ice Nweke and Ukalina Opuwari, explores humans’ tendency to make ‘comfortable’ choices out of fear of the known, and more often than not such choices lead to regrets.

Nweke and Opuwari founded the iXtreme Production in 2004 to bridge the gap between the artistic and commercial worlds by producing quality performances for audiences on the lookout for new exciting, innovative and creative experiences. iXtreme’s creative works range from western dance forms, contemporary African dance, spoken word, motion graphic, film musical theatre and paintings.

BY ICEE NWEKE AND UKALINA OPUWARI

03/03 6pm-10pm Bogobiri

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Choreographed by the intellectual, intensive dancer, creator of teh dane study and apparatus, Technology of Circle, and the Dean, School of Fine and Performign Arts, Columbia College Chicago. Onye Ozuzu, Her Words Maquerade As Me explores African America Octavia Butler’s Story, The Evening And The Night And The Morning.

In thsi performance, Ozuzu deploys Butler’s “ability to leverage convincingly refracted realities as metaphors that launch from the everyday experiences of black 04/03 people.”

3pm-5pm BY ONYE OZUZU Revolving Art Incubator

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FIGHT

VOICES IN MY HEAD

This piece about mental rather than physical battle for survival in the thorny rosy bush called life, is choreographed by Wisdom Emeka Ojije, the artistic director and co-founder of Hidden Language Production House. Between 2004 to 2017, Ojije directed works like Love Is The Musical, Pincode Show, choreographed Block 13, and performed at the opening of the 2015 African Movie Viewers’ Choice Awards (AMVCA).

Fight is a 10-minute piece featuring five dancers with the Hidden Language Production House.

BY WISDOM OJIJE 04/03 3pm-5pm Silverbird Galleria

04/03 3pm-5pm Silverbird Galleria

THE GENESIS

Merchandise of raw skills, a group of young individuals who are so talented but has no platform to exhibit their gift, and as a result of that it swings alot of them into the street, which provides a space to become, and eventually led to a life of hooliganism, but little did they know that their gifts and talents will bring them limelight, and to the world over. With Genesis we bring back all the reigning songs from the street, right from the days of Fela Kuti, Daddy Showkey, Baba Fryo, Daddy Fresh, Marvellous Benji, Raymond king, Terry G, exploring the evolution of nigerian contemporary dances ranging from Alanta, to antelope, down to PSquare’s Alingo amongst others.

BY SANI IMONIKHE

04/03 3pm-5pm Silverbird Galleria

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I hear voices in my head someone please stop the pain.

I hear voices in my head I feel I am going insane.

I take my meds just as the doc said.

Instead of being in silence I feel like the walking dead.

So numb inside can you hear my cry?

Please help me find out the reasons why.

BY MICHAEL EJIKEONYE

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IWALEWA

IWA L’EWA is a Yoruba conception of beauty which favors plurality in essence, as against a standardized idea of beauty, which can be ascribed to all things equally. According to one of the Yoruba myths of creation, the Ayajo Asuwada (Poetry of togetherness) postulates that, while the individual is the unit of social life, he or she is also an integral part of a whole, and therefore needs the fellowship of others to feel whole and complete.

IWA L’EWA puts a light on some voices we rarely hear within our social structure, to tell their stories and how they perceive our society from their own eyes. This in a way, makes a statement that, people 04/03 simply have bodies that cases up their 6pm - 10pm humanity, it is societal programming that National Theatre dis-ables or en-ables, dis-empowers or empowers.

BY QUDUS ONIKEKU

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TRAMPLED ROSE

FATOU T’AS TOUT FAIT

In Fatou T’as Tout Fait (Fatou You’ve done it all), I address the topic of female circumcision (excision). After some research in the village, I took up the challenge of representing in a scene an event I witnessed and of which I was a victim in my time. I am talking about the suffering caused by female circumcision? The injustice? The feeling of resentment that I still have today as a result of what was done to me.

BY FATOUMATA BAGAYOKO

04/03 6pm - 10pm National Theatre

A mark, an inescapable and irresistible sense of lack, which I have to carry with me for the rest of my life. Through this solo, I hope to assert my disagreement with this practice which no longer has its place in our modern world or today. My wish is to raise awareness and launch a social dialog to change things.

The inflexibility of the established paralyzes the movement, dims the ingenuity, casts a shadow over surprise. The outlines of the spontaneous is blurred to disappear, the margins of the predictable are softened and we know the interrogation point that questions the raison d’ être of 04/03 the automatic response.

6pm - 10pm Trampled Rose National Theatre Life force makes us adaptable, it gives us the opportunity to transform space and to translate energy into matter, matter into evolution. The body allows us to transcend and dance is a strong manifestation into that state.

Let’s dance ...

BY HORACIO MUCUACUA

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FATOU GOT IT ALL AT “SIMPLY THE BEST” Qudus Onikeku

tem where I’d either mark a simple YES or NO, NEVER AGAIN or WELL, beside the names of the dancers.

At the end of each video, I’d mark the appropriate sign on the little sheet of paper with each participant’s name. I graded them based on the level of acceptance of pain they were capable of inflicting.

YES, I reserved for the ones I can stand, and NEVER AGAIN, marked the unbearable video applications..

Few weeks after that, I was emailed a list of 7 finalists, three of which made it into my bearable list, while turned a blind eye to the selective parameters deployed with the remaining four finalists in the list.

Now, I must state that it has been a while since I have seen the works of emerging choreographers from Africa, moreso, overcoming the continuous disappointment, that probably, the bar I have raised for myself is invariably too high for this generation of dancemakers. Since the scandalous triennial of the Pan-African Contemporary Dance scene, where, none of the staged works transported me to that height of the god forsaken bar, I approach such regional contests warily. Little did I know that not only was the bar to be reached but by an unassuming and unexpectedly robust female dancer, to snap me out of my weary non-expectations.

Last year, a good Burkinabe friend of mine Serge Aimé Coulibaly, visited me in Lagos, while researching for his emblematic piece KALAKUTA REPUBLIK. From such audacious title, you would have guessed that it is somehow centered around Fela Kuti and Afrobeat. While in Lagos, I became his unofficial guide, and we were both sitting on the floor of the dance studio at the QDanceCenter, when he mentioned his project, ANKATA which is in its second edition that year. ANKATA: Simply The Best, is an international solo dance competition for emerging choreographers from West Africa.

Coulibaly said that I was to be part of a seven-man international jury, to select 7 finalists from 7 West African countries, out of the 18 applicants. We are to watch these assortment of solo dance pieces at our own convenience, and send in our seven-preferred works without justification. It will be left to the organizers to compile the seven finalists from our selections. These finalists will compete for the 26

cash prize, a trophy and an international tour for the winning three As a choreographer, we are generally doomed by cognizance, which follows that I can no longer watch anything in a theatre, without the wearying awareness of seeing every detail to be silently scrutinized and analyzed, it had become a past time exercise I secretly entertain, while I pretend to be a neutral audience member in a theatre. This time, I have been offered a license to judge, so I had thought it was going to be a pretty much laid back endeavor. Well, there was nothing laid back about the task, and the pain of having to watch 18 largely incoherent and torturous solos, that seem to last for an eternity, night after night, after night, of watching projected videos of the solo pieces on the walls of my living room. In my selection process, I didn’t bother with detailed analyses or the rigorous routine form of judgment I apply to a theatrical piece. I only weighed each work according to the amount of pain I felt watching each. I had developed a grading sys

MO[VE]MENTS

She was Fatoumata Bagayoko, nicknamed Fatou, a young Malian dancer and choreographer. In her piece entitled, Fatou T’as Tout Faire (Fatou, You Have Seen It All), the dancer expresses the practice, horrors, and psychological effects of female circumcision.

At the beginning of every performance at ANKATA, performers do a voice introduction of the work we are about to see. And when Fatou’s voice heralds details her oncoming performance, I felt scared on her behalf. Scared that the details of what she hoped to portray were just too grand and scary for an emerging dancer to project.

“The work I am about to show is about female circumcision, about the horrors of it and the psychological experience engendered on those females who went through such, I myself am a victim of this, and I as an adult I disagree, I disagree with the traditions that still allows this human disaster, and a complete loss of womanhood to be perpetuated,” the voice rang in inelegant French language.

At this point, I was drawn in beyond logic, as she effortlessly blends music, and carefully chosen words.

It is not just another clever piece or art, it rings as a genuine quest. From hence, art began to disappear.

“I wanted to know more of how this was done to me, so I followed them to the place where these homicides were being committed. I documented that experience. It was horrible. It was atrocious and I was even more revolted, as a young woman now. I still think of the damage that I still have to live with, and numerous other girls and babies waiting to be sent to these slaughter houses. So, I decided to make this solo work, to speak out my disagreement, that’s why I titled the piece Fatou T’as Tout Faire. This, is what I want to show you tonight.”

Darkness fell on the semi open air theatre in Bobo Dioulasso, and with the echoes of her last words, weighing down on my heart, my heart simultaneously beat faster in speculation. I thought, “What exactly is she going to show us? During her visit to that house, did she go with a secret camera? Did she interview other victims?”

A fine light opens on a lone Fatou, standing up stage right, the misty harmattan air, resemble the lone eye of God, a thing between a full moon and a mysterious bright object in the night sky, undoubtedly invading her earth-space, looking directly down upon her, and forms a pathway right behind her towards down stage left. She has both hands raised above her head, then falling, below her neck.

With the positioning of the lone light, I cannot grasp entirely what it was, but no doubt the world was about to fall upon her world, there was silence.

Stage left, lay a piece of white cloth, and what seemed like an uncountable number of blood pints, but they are Bissaps (reddish traditional drink found on the streets of Bamakko, similar to the Nigerian zobo drink), tied in small scales of little transparent nylons.

Clearly, there is no room for the faint-hearted. She is headed straight for the jugular and it will bloody. This for me is where art becomes most powerful, where the dancer hides nothing, just as she has announced. What we, her audience do not know is how she intends to replicate the experience of female circumcision to us. That is Art. Art for me is never about the what; rather in the how. True craftsmanship resides in the how.

The music begins, and hands poised above her head in stillness, she slowly comes alive. Her movements gradually suggesting enchainment, but with the amount of fluidity and grace she exhumes, I heard a resounding OH YES! within me.

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The evolution of her movement within the path, which the diagonal lone light creates on the floor, shows the victim’s resistance to avoid going into the slaughter house. Then came the slaps, real slaps from both hands on her cheeks, which she transformed into movement ideas, into music, and a pretext to explore layers of both upright, falling and floor movements. Members of the audience that was not a member of the jury – that had the need to keep a safe distance for analyses – at this point were far drawn into this enigmatic spirals. The quality of attentiveness, which was expressed through the stagnant silence in the room, was simply tumultuous.

Gradually she moves up stage left, where the bissaps were carefully placed, but first, she reveals the white cloth, a muffler, she placed over her head, and allows it drop down to create a veil, a cover behind which she began to speak, the words came in Bambara language, that were directly subtitled into French, over a big white screen occupying the back drop in center stage.

There was a distance between herself and the written texts. No doubt her texts were powerful but I was drawn to her form, the sound of her words in Bambara and her simple movements, and the sublime image of her kneeling before the array of bissap (representing blood pints), enabled me to let go of the literary connotation, and stay with this comprehensible imagery of that, in order not to miss the

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first thing she was going to do, in this moment we’ve all been waiting for.

Kneeling with the veil above her head slightly touching the surface of the reddish looking crystal pints all over the floor, she extracts a knife, picking a piece of the blood pint – with the subtitled words were still rumbling in our heads, in tune with the music was loud, and the veil still on her head – she pierces and cuts into the blood. A gush of thick red liquid bursts forth, as she cutsBut Fatou is not done yet. She eventually drops the knife, and began, through spontaneous rhythmic movements, to directly pick the pints of bissap, and with both hands, slam them simultaneously at the surface of her vagina, and red liquids will jet out through every possible direction. She did the same with her chest, with her head, with her backside, for what seemed like forever, until it became a trancelike immersion into total self-abandonment.This is not one of those grossly graphic documentary films about circumcision, that makes you want to look away, in this, your conscience is pricked too close to look away. There is no more space between her and each member of the audience, to cloud the scent of bissap, and yet you know it is not just bissap, rather it is suggestive of the horror and the sublimity of the poetic forms she summoned to her aid, her mastery of her body movement, while still remaining musical, still remaining within the artistic realm of dance.

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All were executed with such proficiency, was delight yet revolting thing to watch.

This, makes the work most compelling, that knowing yet unfamiliar, that transcendental experience, which is the reason for which we go to the theatre, mixed with this need to want to escape and simply live a safe life free of pain; those two opposing forces which pulls us both in and out of her journey, is the precise reason why this work is so mesmerizing and so necessary.

of the muffler, and subtly rolls the clothe around the pints, till it reached her bladder position With her legs wide open, I saw a woman experiencing miscarriage. The sound of the liquid on the floor is unforgettable, she gradually pressed harder and simultaneously draws out the veil from her face, the look on her face, that the audience had not seen in a while, reminds me of my unborn daughter. It reminds the audience of sisters, mothers, and every female, who has the right to feel what every other woman feels. Gazing straight at the audience, she squeezes out the remaining liquid on the once white, now totally red veil, squeezed it to the last drop of red, then dropped it. Immediately looking away at the up stage right, she walks off and outof-sight.

Pain isn’t a noun when a superb dancer is in charge, pain becomes a verb. It’s experience require sound, because to the one who experiences great pain, the faculty that leads to hearing is deafened. This is simply what I refer to as great art. There was a minimalist use of space and of music. Her movements were straight to the point, no extra padding And darkness falls onstage. in this experiential telling. Her narrative is simple yet mastered. Through her dense and repetitive movements, she captures and transmitted the experience of a witness. She makes obvious that the essence of the performance, is not to draw attention to her mastery of techniques or dance styles, rather, that dance is in the service of the dancer’s intention. With this work, Fatou climbed my list of African dancers to watch out for in the future.

At the end, standing upright, in an ocean of bissap, her costume drenched red with the liquid, she packs a hand full of pints, on the veil is still. covering her face, she places the pints at the tip MO[VE]MENTS

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CROSSINGS

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02/03 BOGOBIRI 12 - 1PM

TOSIN OSHINOWO 1

What is the place of MOVEMENT as a philosophy in your works?

In my work as an Architect, movement signifies transition and fluidity in ‘created space’. Being able to plan ‘programme’ or a ‘series of activities’ conscious of how people interact and move around as individuals, groups and communities within that space. When designing a building everything I do is conscious about occupation and movement within that space

2

What is Dance in your own words?

I approach dance from a lame perspective but dance to me is the rhythmic movement of the human body in most cases to music or sound

3

Is art hope or solace, mirroring reality or reinventing a better world ?

Art represents the reality of our everyday existence, it is also the opportunity to be a portal for a utopian approach to how things should be.

4

What is beauty, and what’s it’s role in your creations ?

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Beauty can be a challenge to define as its is based ultimately on an individuals perception of what beautiful is... there are collective appreciations of beauty but not everyone agrees on what is beautiful. Within my work, I push for beautiful ‘clean-aesthetic’. It is important that I consider my buildings beautiful as it is only from my inner confidence that I can sell my ideas to my Clients.

5

What will you consider to be the mother of all arts and why?

Architecture and Sculpture...

6

What happens when you see a good performance and tell us of your most memorable ?

The beautiful thing about performance is the temporal nature of this art but the impact it leaves in your memory and how you felt watching it. I went to see ‘Breakin Convention’ at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in 2006 and I will never forget the contemporary performances I saw.

7

Solitude or Gatherings?

Gatherings! I spend too much time in solitude

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8

Tell us of a defining MOMENT in your career.

I would say I look forward to more growth in my career but giving a speech at the opening ceremony of my building ‘Maryland Mall’ tops it for now.

02/03 BOGOBIRI 12 - 1PM

KAFFY 1

What is the place of MOVEMENT as a philosophy in your works?

Movement for me is the vehicle that loads the weight of life and carries it on a journey that helps one dispose off that load where it can be managed.

2

What is Dance in your own words?

Dance to me is the Unsong hero of art living through life. It is the voice of the soul, a refuge, a place of the purge. Though technically defined by rythmic movement of the body, for me dance id teh most powerful tool of expression, painting pictures in various forms and breathing life to words in a way that graciously defines the thoughts, emotions and communication of the human mind.

3

Is art hope or solace, mirroring reality or reinventing a better world ?

To me, art is both an element of hope and solace. Itnot just mirrors reality it helps create a microscopic insight and unveils layers and layers of hidden expressionand communication as well as help rejuvenate the mind . It is the window that reveals the

beauty of our world that the Almighty created.

4

What is beauty, and what’s its role in your creation?

Beauty as said is in the eyes of the beholder but feeling beautiful is in the mind of man. As we are all created good according to God. I don’t try to create a beautiful piece, I create to enjoy and be enjoyed.

5

What will you consider to be the mother of all arts and why?

I consider dance to be the mother of all arts as she nurtures every form there is and has a place fro them all in her heart.

7

Solitude or Gatherings?

When in the zone of art I like gatherings, but with my creative mind I like solitude.

8

Tell us of a defining MOMENT in your career.

There are a lot, but breaking the Guiness World Record is one, Dancing with Ciara and being a creative director and choreographer of the Masta Blasta Band winning three times, consecutivele (one of my most challenging feats) are8yum the top of my list But off work it will be having my children.

6

What happens when you see a good performance and tell us of your most memorable ?

I am easily excited by the honesty and truth in the delivery of a dancer when he or sheh loses himself in a performance. You don’t see teh joints created by technicality, passion, charisma, athleticism, choreography, music choice. Instead you see all of these mentioned seamlessly creating a fabric so smooth I get chills. I like so many, I can’t mention any at the moment, but definitely home and abroad.

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02/03 BOGOBIRI 1PM - 2PM

ICEE NWEKE 1

What is the place of MOVEMENT as a philosophy in your works?

5

What is Dance in your own words?

Dance is my emotion in motion.

What will you consider to be the mother of all arts and why?

The mother of all art for me doesn’t exist. Art is equal and what brings about art is the mind that conceives the idea and the hand the carries it out

3

6

2

Is art hope or solace, mirroring reality or reinventing a better world ?

Art for me is hope. My duty and obligation as an artist is to create works that mirror the society in hope to change it for the better.

4

What is beauty, and what’s it’s role in your creations ?

Beauty for my is the definition of completeness in a creative work.

When all the various ingredients is in place. The role of beauty in my creation is that it helps to create balance in my piece and also beauty from my perspective can be seen in a form best described as ugly. I see beauty in ugly.

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What happens when you see a good performance and tell us of your most memorable ?

I am moved into the world and mind of that artist. I undergo a mind expansion experience.

My most memorable performance was on broadway, watching Aladdin and On your Feet

7

Solitude or Gatherings?

Gatherings

8

Tell us of a defining MOMENT in your career.

The defining moment of my career was when I staged my first musical production in 2012 , it was the same moment I launched my production company “XTREME PRODUCTIONS”.

02/03 BOGOBIRI 1PM -2PM

VICTOR EHIKHAMENOR 1

What is the place of MOVEMENT as a philosophy in your works?

Central. Movement is the paramount to the way I create, it is the most constant of my philosophy, both physically and mentally.

2

What is Dance in your own words?

The external manifestation of one’s deepest joy.

3

Is art hope or solace, mirroring reality or reinventing a better world ?

I don’t think the full meaning of art can be described by a selection of words, art can mean so many things to different people.

However, it could be hope, solace, a mirror to view reality as well as distort reality. Art also has teh power to heal and guide humanity to a better world.

4

What is beauty, and what’s it’s role in your creations ?

Beauty is personal and a starting point for some of my works. It is primary promordial way of seeing art - as in “That is a beautiful work”. But there are times I highlight ugliness in which case beauty becomes what I would have preferred in what motivated the work executed.

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.5 What will you consider to be the mother of all arts and why?

There is nothing like that for me, to place or categorise the various forms of art in a hierachical order is heresy. Sometimes I can not paint without music; so what would be the mother of arts in that regard - the music that helped me achieve my goal or the final painting that was executed successfully because of the music? How we engage arts in it’s many forms as humans are different, what is king to one person could be pauper to another.

6

7

Solitude or Gatherings?

Soligath! That is, I like both in equal measure, but I lean more towards gatherings, especially with people bearing ppositive energy.

8

Tell us of a defining MOMENT in your career.

Everytime I make an artwork, be it a small drawing or a largescale installation, a moment is defined.

For an artist, I do not think there is a singular defining moment because you cannot discount the percursor to what people may consider a defining moment.

What happens when you see a good performance and tell us of your most memorable ?

Ii grew up in a village where everyday you get to witness one performance or the other. A good performance is capable of waking up my innermost emotions - sometimes I cry but in most cases I am just in awe and I want to keep the memories of such experiences forever. I once watched a masquerade spun in high speed many times touching the ground with only one leg, I was a kid and it was magical and the name of the masquerade was “NO BREAD”. I still remember that dance.

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03/03 REVOLVING ART INCUBATOR 12 - 1PM

IJODEE 1

What is the place of MOVEMENT as a philosophy in your works?

The place of movement in my work goes beyond physical. It is extremely deeper than what can be seen or touched. It is part of my work that I do not like to explain too much because it is very personal and spiritual. If I may say, it is that thin line or point of connection between my dance and my audience. It is highly scared.

2

What is Dance in your own words?

For me I will say Dance is a living being that can only be seen through body language. Dance is the beginning and end of every being, dance is immeasurable and dance is life.

3

Is art hope or solace, mirroring reality or reinventing a better world ?

In reality I will say art is a combination of solace, mirroring reality and reinventing. This is art,

4

What is beauty, and what’s it’s role in your creations ?

Beauty is the quality present in a thing or person that gives intense pleasure or deep satisfaction to the mind.

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Beauty in my works is not physical if I may say, The beauty in my creations is the joy and staisfsction I get, the one my audience gets after watching my work and also the pleasure of being able to create my mind through unseen imagination.

1996 and Europe tour in 1997.

5

Tell us of a defining MOMENT in your career.

When my choreography took the first place in Africa 2003. When I was awarded the UN ambassador of peace in 2013, and also when I was nominated for teh Gold category of teh world productive achiever of teh year in Paris, 2013.

What will you consider to be the mother of all arts and why?

For sure dance is the mother of all arts. We all know that without movement(motion) all other aspect/forms of art can never be actualised.

6

What happens when you see a good performance and tell us of your most memorable ?

Due to my experience and exposure I’m hardly impressed, but when I see a good performance it sticks into my being, it takes me to a place I cannot explain with words. Actually I will be part of the performance while watching it, If possible after the show it will inspire me to create another wonderful piece. Generally if a piece is not highly inspirational I will not be moved for a second.

My most memorable was my first dance scholarship to France in 1994 and my first performance in Europe in 1995, African tour in MO[VE]MENTS

7

Solitude or Gatherings?

I will say that I like both. Depending on my state of mind or mood at a point in time.

8

03/03 REVOLVING ART INCUBATOR 12 -1PM

EFE PAUL 1

What is the place of MOVEMENT as a philosophy in your works?

2

What is Dance in your own words?

Dance is an intricate part of the human experience. It’s at once a voluntary and involuntary response to music and sound, an act of praise and defiance, one of the most enduring of human freedoms.

3

Is art hope or solace, mirroring reality or reinventing a better world ?

Art is a subjective phenomenon, a portal of escaping to alternate realities for one, a means of interpreting reality for another, a way to makes sense of the world for the one, a tool to change the world with for another. It is as much hope, solace, a mirror of reality and a way of reinventing a better world for me, because it is too complex to be one thing and we need it to be all of these things at different points in our life.

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4

What is beauty, and what’s it’s role in your creations ?

Beauty is a way of seeing. The aesthetics of every work I’m involved in is a primary commitment for me. I choose to have a social commitment as an artist, but never at the expense of beauty. Art also has a responsibility to promote and preserve beauty.

Solitude Solitude.

or

Gatherings?

8

Tell us of a defining MOMENT in your career.

Starting the Lagos International Poetry Festival in 2015

5

What will you consider to be the mother of all arts and why?

Sorry , I’ll Pass

6

What happens when you see a good performance and tell us of your most memorable ?

I’m effusive with praise. I shout. I give a standing ovation. My entire being responds involuntarily.

It’s hard to pin down the most memorable performance I’ve seen. Maybe Akeem Lasisi’s performance at Anthill many years ago. I can’t remember a complete sentence from that poem, but I’ll never forget how it made me feel, how it wrapped the entire audience in its magic and how we all got up screaming, clapping, laughing and crying at the end of it.

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03/03 REVOLVING ART INCUBATOR 1PM - 2PM

HORACIO MACUACUA 1

What is the place of MOVEMENT as a philosophy in your works?

Rather than describing movement in my works conceptually, I would define it as very intense and visceral. I work with images that come from emotional or sensual stimulations that the life and the world that surrounds us offer.

2

What is Dance in your own words?

Dance is the brush that colours my world with all its concerns and pleasures, it paints my demons and my angels. It is my way to channel life experience and to unravel the layers that are wrapped around beingness.

3

Is art hope or solace, mirroring reality or reinventing a better world ?

Art offers a space for accepting, sharing and celebrating our individuality with each other. It has the potential to be what we wish it to be.

I can only say that each day I am surprised by this world and in my work I look for harmony, for hell and for paradise -similarities, contrasts and polarities.

5

What will you consider to be the mother of all arts and why?

It would be complicated for me to think of one art form as the mother of all arts. I love art in all its manifestations, for me there is no separation, as art is inherent to the human being.

6

What happens when you see a good performance and tell us of your most memorable ?

There are so many aspects in every performance and I like to appreciate ideas, interpretations, movements etc.. There is always something that casts my attention or surprises me in one way or another.

7

Solitude or Gatherings.

Gatherings?

4

What is beauty, and what’s it’s role in your creations ?

I have no reference for or definition of beauty, it depends on how we decide to look at things.

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8

Tell us of a defining MOMENT in your career.

All moments are precious and important to me, as I feel that I am dedicating my life and carreer to something I really love to do. One thing leads to another.

03/03 REVOLVING ART INCUBATOR 1PM - 2PM

JUMOKE SANWO 1

What is the place of MOVEMENT as a philosophy in your works?

Movement represents a fluidity in ideology and discourse which compounds the thinker to evaluate and represent occurrences based on context. Motion generated from this premise can begin from an ideology and end in another thereby giving room for middle ground.

2

What is Dance in your own words?

Dance is the physical movement of the body to a rhythm which is not necessarily derived from sound but from an equilibrium generated by a feeling of unison between the senses

3

Is art hope or solace, mirroring reality or reinventing a better world ?

Art is a means to balance out the disconnect in the physical world.

It Mirrors reality it may serve as a means to proffer possible solutions to reinvent the world. But art in itself can also be viewed as a elitist approach to channel ideas which may not add any real value in the everyday. Perhaps we cannot really define art!.

4

What is beauty, and what’s it’s role in your creations ?

Beauty as a quality is identifying certain characteristics in a person or an object that appeals to the senses, I abstain from focusing on this in my work because by definition this is limiting. I find qualities in each person or object which may not necessarily fall under the aesthetics of what is regarded as beautiful but which appeals to my senses nonetheless..

5

What will you consider to be the mother of all arts and why?

Performance is the mother of all arts because this was where it began, gatherings… oral tradition informed all other methods of engagement , within this there are elements of poetry, sound and dance which when put together constitutes our cultural and historical means of expression.

into other spaces allowing your thoughts to infuse with that of the performer, The Sufi Festival in Khartoum Sudan was a memorable performance, It brought me to a space of tranquility even though there was a lot of gyration and chants. I found stillness amidst all of this

7

Solitude or Gatherings?

I subscribe to both in equal degree, man is a social being and cannot survive entirely in isolation.

8

Tell us of a defining MOMENT in your career.

I am yet to attain a defining moment, perhaps if I look back in 10 years maybe I would have a different opinion but I believe definitions is a continuum in hindsight it might be viewed differently.

6

What happens when you see a good performance and tell us of your most memorable ?

A good performance takes you to a place that arouses your senses, sometimes generating an emotive response which takes you MO[VE]MENTS

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04/03 OMENKA GALLERY 12 - 1PM

SEIFEDDINE MANAI 1

What is the place of MOVEMENT as a philosophy in your works?

My work is based by the desire to find personal meaning and that affects my dance.

2

What is Dance in your own words?

The body move with the reflections we build in our mind and in our souls in many states.

3

Is art hope or solace, mirroring reality or reinventing a better world ?

I always get inspiration for my pieces from real life, I try to bring that in different applications, and the stage can be the mirror of hope, and for other artists it can be the issue of freedom to defend his ideas.

4

What is beauty, and what’s it’s role in your creations ?

Beauty is important for me, it is the genesis of my works, to discover a magic world, to invent extraordinary things and surprise myself to see the influence in new bodies and how they change with work.

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5

What will you consider to be the mother of all arts and why?

For me, Life is the word, the more arts get closer to life and more real to be affected in the world they live, art attain its full meaning with Life, for each day, each moment give new birth new creativity.

6

What happens when you see a good performance and tell us of your most memorable ?

First, since 5 years ago I stopped to watch dance pieces, unlike when I was kid, it was great growing up, I had chance to travel, my best piece was ‘Quick Silver’ from my master of Butoh who taught me “Ko Murobushi” may his soul rest In peace, i prefer to watch less pieces, because my inspiration always, I think, start from something not related to dance but in the same time, I stay in the actuality of the world.

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8

Tell us of a defining MOMENT in your career.

The day I was in 24 years old and I decide to stop all my contracts with famous companies, and I decided to come back to my land, and create my own works, no one trust me only my self and those around me.

04/03 OMENKA GALLERY 12 - 1PM

MAKINDE ADENIRAN 1

What is the place of MOVEMENT as a philosophy in your works?

Movement is all! Without movement, there’s no arts. No arts form is alive except there’s movement.

So as a philosophy, movement is ALL in my arts.

What is Dance in your own words?

Dance is the Movement in the subconscious.

3

Is art hope or solace, mirroring reality or reinventing a better world ?

My arts is seeing into the future, recreating a new order.

4

What is beauty, and what’s it’s role in your creations ?

Dance and other stage appurtenances are the beauty needed to make meaning for any arts form, and I convoke them to give my arts meaning while reinventing a new order for a new future.

5

What will you consider to be the mother of all arts and why?

The mother of all arts is peace.

The reason is, to create, you require peace of mind. Therefore, you need first to dislodge disorder in your mind to get peace... not many people in the world today know how to, except the truthful artists and God.

8

Tell us of a defining MOMENT in your career.

My defining moment was creating a dance piece titled KHAKI-A-GOGO in 1999 when I returned from exile ahead of Prof. Wole Soyinka.

6

What happens when you see a good performance and tell us of your most memorable ?

When I see good performance, I’m transported out of the ordinary space. Most memorable is KING LEAR performance in West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, U.K.

7

Solitude Both.

or

Gatherings?

Solitude or Gatherings?

I’m more of solitude, maybe to stay more focused and not because I don’t recognize others, but I believe Gatherings are also great ways to connect and find good exchange.

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04/03 OMENKA GALLERY 1PM - 2PM

1

What is the place of MOVEMENT as a philosophy in your works?

Movement for me is constant, both physically, psychologically, mentally and spiritually, for me, all are in relation to change. To act is to move position, the act of thinking is equally an act of moving to separate oneself from the former self. So aside the obvious fact that dance is embedded in ones ability to shape the body movements into rhythmic forms, it is equally the means through which I’ve come to understand life and the spaces in between.

2

What is Dance in your own words?

As cliché as it may sound, dance is everything for me, it is through this non verbal mode of communication, that I’ve come to fall in love with all others forms of art, it is through its understanding that I’ve built a much larger understanding, and a vehicle through which I navigate my way in the perpetual life journey.

3

Is art hope or solace, mirroring reality or reinventing a better world ?

At different periods of my life, art had mean different things to me, 42

it had served different purposes, it has been a refuge in times of exile, dancing has been a comforting solace in times when I’m close to depression, and in my work I like to vaguely mirror reality, but most importantly I’m deeply interested in creating new worlds, where all is well, where there is peace everywhere, where human corruption and the human mind cannot reach. It is only within the art that I’m able to travel beyond time, travel beyond the human form. Yes, it has such powers and yet it is very real for me and those who get to engage and fully witness my works.

4

What is beauty, and what’s it’s role in your creations ?

I have a feeling that this a major preoccupation for mine; to question notions of beauty and re-evaluate it’s forms. Beauty is in the cosmetic forms, yes, it is in outward appearance, but more importantly, beauty is in the character, it’s in our attentiveness to what is natural and harmonious, what is devoid of the human touch, what is primal and reminds us of our dependence of something that goes beyond form. And really, this is all I try as much as possible to repossess in my work, because without it, there’ll always be chaos MO[VE]MENTS

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QUDUS ONIKEKU

What will you consider to be the mother of all arts and why?

I think it’s dance, and by so, I’m not even referring to art itself, but as a form of communication, the first language we all spoke was movement, right from our mother’s womb.

6

What happens when you see a good performance and tell us of your most memorable ?

When I see a good performance time stops, I literally stop breathing, I’m as exhausted as the performer, I’m transfixed and I don’t want to say a word hours after it, i don’t want anything to ruin such experience. One of such was my experience of Fatoumata Bagayoko’s piece that I saw at Bobo Dioulasso.

7

Solitude or Gatherings?

Naturally I am a solo person, but I’m good with gatherings as well.

8

Tell us of a defining MOMENT in your career.

That moment after schooling in France, and I made the move to relocate to Lagos in 2009, this led to the realisation that a place of childhood memories isn’t necessarily the place to call home.

04/03 OMENKA GALLERY 1PM - 2PM

TITILOPE SONUGA 1

What is the place of MOVEMENT as a philosophy in your works?

Much of my work is centered in the body. It interogates how we move through the world, how we move through grief and love and joy and suffering. The physical and emotional changes we experience. Even on the page, this idea of transformation, moving from one emotional or physical state of being to the next or even resisting that change, comes through. In the delivery of the work, there’s an emotional call and response that takes place between poet and audience. As a poet, I am energetically aware of these tiny movements, a change in metaphoric and even physical position that the work produces.

2

What is Dance in your own words?

Dance is the body’s response to a spiritual calling. It is the way in which we attempt to translate what the soul already knows, what music reminds us of, this pure and essential truth that is only made known to us in a place of surrender.

3

Is art hope or solace, mirroring reality or reinventing a better world ?

All of it. The full range of the human experience, both lived and reimagined.

4

What is beauty, and what’s it’s role in your creations ?

My ideas around beauty are constantly changing. What is consistently beautiful to me in the work is the truth, no matter how jagged and scarred, no matter how jarring and uncomfortable.

I’m always searching for the tenderness in a piece of work, the beating heart of a thing, how we conceal what is most precious and vulnerable in us. How we respond when our shells come undone. That is beautiful to me, pulling the covering away.

5

What will you consider to be the mother of all arts and why?

I don’t know that there is one. I believe all art is connected in a way, like we are all telling one story in the different languages that we know how to speak most fluently.

6

What happens when you see a good performance and tell us of your most memorable ?

I’m a big cry baby, so my first response is a pretty emotional one.

I once saw the poet D’bi Young do a 45 minute long poem/per MO[VE]MENTS

formance that was so potent and so full of truth and courage, that being in the room felt like I was having a panic attack. It was intense and incredibly beautiful.

I just knew I wanted to create like that and I wasn’t even really performing poetry at that time.

Many years later I had an opportunity to be in a residency with D’bi in Capetown and that experience and her mentorship fundamentally changed my ideas around truth telling and performance.

7

Solitude or Gatherings?

Solitude is my default, gatherings in moderation.

8

Tell us of a defining MOMENT in your career.

I’m not sure that I can pin this down to one particular moment, there have been many along the way that have informed the way I do my work and live my life. II remember one of my earlier performances, the first time I invited my parents to see me perform after about a year of sneaking to shows. I was performing a poem call Sacrifice, that I had written about them. After the first few lines my father started to cry, then my mother, then me, then the entire room.

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05/03 JAZZHOLE 2PM - 3PM

ONYE OZUZU 1

What is the place of MOVEMENT as a philosophy in your works?

If LIFE was a BODY, movement would be its BREATH. Movement literally stimulates the fetus’ brain to develop through its phases.

The matter of which my body and your body and our houses and this planet are all made of EXPLODED out of a star (so the scientific origin myth goes) that TOSSED itself out into a celestial composition that we now call solar system and that is doing this dance we call HOME. We, in our LANDING places are also never still. Even at the atomic and sub-atomic level we VIBRATE continuously.

So in my work movement is that with which I participate in the PROCESS of EXISTENCE. I can do so with movement forms that have come to me from teachers, cultures and I can also do so with movement that springs out of my body and appears new to me.

In my work the place of MOVEMENT is ELEMENTAL.

2

What is Dance in your own words?

Dance is movement performed, 44

sometimes coordinated, that is effective. Humans tend to label movement that has had an effect “dance”.

In many ways I believe (culturally speaking) that dance is what we call it

3

Is art hope or solace, mirroring reality or reinventing a better world ?

I think that art is an ecosystem.

The more diverse and complex… often the better chance for life to thrive, and species to survive a changing environment. So I believe that art is both, hope and solace; mirror and reinvention.

And art is more. Like any good ecosystem it both nurtures and protects in some contexts and it destroys and attacks in others. It is all needed.

4

What is beauty, and what’s it’s role in your creations ?

I find beauty in those moments where the quality of attention of the performers allows you to see the invisible sparks of electricity that they share amongst them. The shapes and qualities of the bodies’ movement in moments like this is like a shadow of the dance that is being shared in the energies.

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5

What will you consider to be the mother of all arts and why?

The natural world, the elements around us, water, fire, earth, metal, air and all their many manifestations, relationships, narratives, evolutions, and cycles.

6

What happens when you see a good performance and tell us of your most memorable ?

I see a lot of dance performances.

I think the ones that stand out as “good” are those whose images linger with me. Sometimes I do not particularly “like” them for one reason or another. But if I can still see them - moments, images, interactions as time passes, then I count them as “good”.

The dance that comes to mind is one that I saw at the National Theatre in Dakar in 2003. It was a part of the Kaay Fecc festival that year. It was a dance performed by a group from Morocco. They had stretched a piece of fabric across a layer of sand on the stage. The cast entered in procession following a group of traditional musicians playing a traditional ceremonial song. I remember the sound of a soloist’s body playing the floor which was mic’d. I remember a tall magnifi-

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IFEOMA FAFUNWA cent black man in a wedding dress. I remember a dance with a small beanbag, tossed and caught by a dancer’s body. I remember remembering the story of Othello as abstractions of and references to it floated to me from the images on stage. I remember performances from the artists on stage that were clearly thoughtful, in the moment, it seemed as if in many instances the performers had to consider before moving. It was not choreography. It was a living thing.

I remember thinking about my own life, and the world around it. I remember feeling that it (the dance) was over too soon. I wanted to stay in its world a little longer.

7

Solitude or Gatherings?

Both. I think I have become much of who I am in solitude.

But I have learned who that is in gatherings

8

Tell us of a defining MOMENT in your career.

I do not think of dance, or art making, or performing, or teaching dance…I do not think of any of those things as a career.

1

What is the place of MOVEMENT as a philosophy in your works?

In my work, Movement is a way of communicating or sharing information with an audience without using words.

2

What is Dance in your own words?

Dance is movement. It is a form of expression like a language or series of thoughts or feelings.

3

Is art hope or solace, mirroring reality or reinventing a better world ?

Art is all of the above and more.

4

6

What happens when you see a good performance and tell us of your most memorable ?

Too many to count but when I see a good performance, my existence is validated and I feel a spiritual connection.

7

Solitude or Gatherings?

All good... depends on to what purpose.

8

Tell us of a defining MOMENT in your career.

I realized that I am unaware of the passing of time while I work on a show.

What is beauty, and what’s it’s role in your creations ?

Beauty is when the form, appearance or expression of anything makes someone feel fulfilled, good or pleasant.

5

What will you consider to be the mother of all arts and why?

No art is the mother of all arts but I think fine art of painting is incredible.

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05/03 JAZZHOLE 3PM - 4PM

SEGUN ADEFILA 1

What is the place of MOVEMENT as a philosophy in your works?

The place of movement as a philosophy in my works is part of a whole. ‘Movement’ serves as a vehicle-to convey my intention but I never and do not like to see it as an exclusive item or genre but as part of a whole

2

What is Dance in your own words?

Rhythmic movement within space

3

Is art hope or solace, mirroring reality or reinventing a better world ?

For me art is a special space of refuge. Art is a cloak, it’s also a dagger. Art stirs pots of misery too.

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4

What is beauty, and what’s it’s role in your creations ?

Beauty is achieved when the intent is met.

5

What will you consider to be the mother of all arts and why?

Dance for me is the mother of all arts because it’s the first and universal means of expression

6

What happens when you see a good performance and tell us of your most memorable ?

Good performances are rare around here. the last one was given by the doyen of Nigerian theatre, Hubert Ogunde in his famous Yoruba Ronu, it elicited a reaction

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7

Solitude or Gatherings?

I’m a bit of this and that

8

Tell us of a defining MOMENT in your career.

I don’t know - yet

05/03 JAZZHOLE 3PM - 4PM

KEZIAH JONES 1

What is the place of MOVEMENT as a philosophy in your works?

2

What your

is Dance in own words?

3

Is art hope or solace, mirroring reality or reinventing a better world ?

6

What happens when you see a good performance and tell us of your most memorable ?

7

Solitude

or

Gatherings?

8

Tell us of a defining MOMENT in your career.

4

What is beauty, and what’s it’s role in your creations ?

5

What will you consider to be the mother of all arts and why?

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CORKS AND MEMORIES FAUSTIN LINYEKULA

My dance will be an attempt to remember my name. I must have lost it somewhere along the dark alleys of Memory. I’ve been wandering ever since… * * * 1974, just a minute after I was born, lines from a conversation with my fathers.

My fathers: Here is a name for you, here’s your home.

I: (repeating after my fathers) my name is Linyekula, son of Mobutu, with pride I embrace thy glory, oh Zaire, immortal Land of my Ancestors.

Thus I was born in a land called Zaire, the most caring hand I could ever find under the sunlight. I grew up believing in this, until …

1997, lines from a conversation with History.

Zaire was but a lie invented by Mobutu, a dead exiled land. Perhaps my name is Kabila; perhaps I’m a bastard son of King Leopold II and the Independent State of Congo. I’m a kid soldier scavenging through a heap of lies, raped virgins and cholera. Democratic Republic of Congo was my real 48

name, rectified my fathers… My glorious legacy… * * * Where’s the truth? Is there a stone or owl or river or sorcerer out there to teach. “how to walk to myself to my People when my blood is on fire and my history in ruins”? (Adonis) One possible answer: land of exile or native land, perhaps everywhere is but exile; perhaps my only true country is my body. I’ll thus survive like a song that’s never been written…

Another possible answer: now that we’ve met in this space, comrade, let’s’ stop for a while and sit side by side. I’ll tell you my name and sing my National Anthem or whatever I remember of it and you’ll tell me yours; then we’ll go our separate ways, leaving behind a fragile scent, our presences like shadows in dust…

Is this Art? Is this Dance? Is this Contemporary African Dance?

How will I know if this is art? Do you call Art one’s attempt to resist to the cycle of destruction by plant

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ing seeds of beauty/ seeds of dreams in a hopeless context? What then when this resistance is written in one’s body? The body as the last shield for freedom. Freedom to die of hunger and diseases…

Now I’m going round and round the same circles, I feel confused and lost, I guess I have to shut up now, enough of this futility, Contemporary African Art, my foot!… In any case I don’t give a damn about Africa. Whenever I write, it’s strictly “for myself, for a few friends and to appease the course of time”(Jorge Luis Borges). My time… Why the hell should I care about Africa? My portion of Africa doesn’t care about me. Years of war, raped women, epidemics, millions killed… That’s my legacy from my fathers; at best I’m left with some energy to survive on my heap of ruins… Independent State of Congo… Democratic Republic of Congo… Republic of Zaire… King Leopold II… Lumumba… Mobutu… * * * Going on stage: an attempt to remember my name. Trying to show a body that refuses to die.

Scavenging through the ruins of what I thought was a house in search of clues: a poem by Rimbaud, Banyua rituals my grand-mother took me through, Ndombolo dance steps from a music video by Papa Wemba, Latin classes with Father Pierre Lommel…

Whatever I find will be useful… Aesthetics of survival… Bundling together whatever comes my way to build a temporary shelter… I improvise…

Improvisation here is not an aesthetic luxury, but a state of living, surviving: in such a hostile context, where one never really knows what tomorrow will be made of (another war? An epidemics?), one needs to know how to improvise to remain alive…

Fine if Africa doesn’t give a damn. All that matters is whether my grand-mother cares. For I know how strange an animal contemporary creation is. The question is: how can I create a sense of identification with such a weird medium? Could she ever say after seeing my dance: “Well… I don’t understand anything… yet I recognise it”? * * * My dance will be an attempt to cork up spaces of encounters… I must have lost my name somewhere in the dark alleys of History… And I’ve been wandering ever since… 1974… Kabako… King Leopold II… Legacy… 1997… Songs… Exiles… Adonis…

Ah, soleil! *

*

* MO[VE]MENTS

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QUDUS ONIKEKU

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STILLNESS IN MOTION STILLNESS IN MOTION NYANCHO NWANRI “Art is the absence of fear”- Erykah Badu.

Therefore, to express art through movement an artist must come to a place of complete fearlessness, and to be fearless is to be totally still within. This project captures that stillness that exists within the expressions of dance, exposing the artist in moments of absolute openness, acceptance, vulnerability and calm, otherwise unseen by the naked eye

NYANCHO NWANRI 1

What is the place of MOVEMENT as a philosophy in your works?

My work is centered aroun African culture, history, traditions, spirituality; which is basically African life. First of all, let me state that life is movement aand movement is life. Every thing on earth and beyond, seen and unseen, animate and inanimate is in constant motion. Without this motion there will be no life. Even our emotions are rooted in motion; vibrations at varying frequencies that manifest to us as feelings. Without movement there would be no life for e to capture let alone exist. I recognise movement as a powerful vessel and I am currently working on a few projects that explore movement as a means of communication capabe of efficiently conveying information without the use of words or dialouge.

2

What is Dance in your own words?

Well, dance is expression through movement. As I slated earlier, movement is a powerful tool of communication, which is basically what dance does; it conveys messages and communicates, feelings, emotions and stories through movement.

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3

Is art hope or solace, mirroring reality or reinventing a better world ?

Art is anything you want it to be.

Art is everything. It is the having and the lack, the present and the absent, the positive and the negative. It can mirror reality and at the same time expose a different face of this same reality. However, reality is relative and art stands to portray the present reality or a projection of the reality of its creator.

4

What is beauty, and what’s it’s role in your creations ?

There is no singular definition for beauty, beauty is omnipresent.

Beauty is of many forms. There is beauty in war, there is beauty in sunshine and this omnipresence of beauty is a drivign force in creating the works that i do. It’s like seekind and recognising beauty in it’s various manisfestations.

5

What will you consider to be the mother of all arts and why?

I don’t believe that there is one single “ mother of all arts “

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6

What happens when you see a good performance and tell us of your most memorable ?

I ask myself why I’m not dancing or wy I never tried being a dancer .There is something so liberating about dance At a place called Club One in Gambia, there was a Senegalese dancer called Momodou Khouma. He danced every nigt at the club from the first beat of the drum till the last, Drowniing in his own sweat Momodou would dance so voraciously, never showing tiredness and never dropping his smile.

7

Solitude or Gatherings?

A healthy balance of both.

8

Tell us of a defining MOMENT in your career.

Realising that I didnt’t have to compete with anyone, prove anythin gto anyone, do anything in particular or follow any so-called rules, conventions or consensus to be professionally recognised and accepted in my field

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HOW TO ADD DANCE PERFORMANCE TO A COLLECTOR’S ITEM Qudus Onikeku

At the ongoing ART X Lagos, I attended a panel discussion, titled “the African collector,” the panel bothers itself with the rise of African collectors now collecting African artists, and decides to ask few questions, of how influential these collectors are in global art market, and most especially, how do we nurture a new generation of collectors locally and increase art appreciation. While the panel was ongoing, it occurred to me that, since we are talking about creating new perceptions, I thought I should slide in my thoughts on how the collection of a dance performance, might be a revolutionary idea within this landscape.

and performing arts. The masquerade as an urban dance artist, is what may be identified as the precursor of most African art forms, it is therefore necessary to come to a robust understanding of the masquerade, in order to understand what is there to “collect” from the expressions of contemporary “masquerades”, here referred to as performers, that maintain their integrity and carry a message, and equally brings pleasure to the collector.

It is a general knowledge, that a dance performance itself cannot be collected, because, as life, it can never be truly contained. The ephemerality of a performance can never be taken away regardAs a contemporary dance artiste, i have always beless of any attempt to commodify it. What can be lieved that most aspect of African art can always collected, however, are what I refer to as “memenbe traced back to the entire dramaturgy and the tos” of the original event. Just as we now strip the multi forms of African masquerades, from visual masquerades of their mask to exhibit or their cosart to fashion, from poetry to music, performance tumes for installation, or perhaps in the way that MO[VE]MENTS 54

people collect memorabilia from daily life, we can collect these elements from live performance. So photos, videos, scenography, costumes, poems, music, installations, props, or a description of what happened from the artist or a witness, and other remnants of the performance can be collected.

Beyond and above the personal joy of collecting, a collector should be totally involved in the art market, in designing trends and directing the focus, it is therefore, important that the African collector have a general artistic knowledge and wider interest in African art history and trends. The person who is likely to buy a performance, or the ephemera from a performance, must no doubt, be inspired by what the “matter” represents, the cultural references, and other associations of the work.

By collecting or re-producing a performance, we are trying to make its ephemerality immortal and timeless in a sense — we are fighting against the very nature of what it is. But to try to do this is utterly human, and driven by the nostalgic need to hold on to the wondrously fleeting moments of life.

All art is essentially a document of an event or its succession, whether it is done in private or for an audience, and in that respect, even a finished painting is a documentation of life and its event.

In any case, these documents extracted from a performance, which took place within a particular space and time, operate as triggers to memory and further imagination. Each rethinking and retelling of the experience reconstructs it; the meaning changes over time, as the work is considered within different contexts. These mementos are not the same as the “work”, they are another form in beauty, a replica that will never be the same as the original. But that doesn’t diminish its value. The African collector — at this stage of the art market — should have no intention of selling these works, but simply investing in the memory that an object holds in time, to perhaps give it a second life, especially if presented alongside the stories and emotional attachment to the original event.

other step of the creative process. Of course other performance artists still decides to stay focused only on the ephemeral and don’t want to keep a memory, so it will change from case-to-case. But I guess nonetheless there’s still value and reason for African collectors to learn about this type of works and to make their own intellectual acts of trying to take from it what they can, even if it’s not the full original work. As it is now, aside the traditional avenues, performance artists have few means to make money from their art. So I ask, is it then possible to collect the moment itself? For collectors to commission a performance and then determine when or if it is ever presented again?

Qudus Onikeku, Artistic Director, QDanceCenter,Lagos YKProjects,Paris

In conclusion, I will say that in the face of the ongoing debate, as to what is collectable and what isn’t, performance artists have a responsibility to remain creative; in the way they treat what’s left after their performance. They should also put the same degree of creativity into assembling documentation and the creative process of their works.

Producing mementos that are beautiful is just an MO[VE]MENTS

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IDAN “MAGIC” IDAN “MAGIC” ADEREMI ADEGBITE One fascinating thing about dance, is that it doesn’t offer itself to a clear literal interpretation.

Efforts could be made to construct a dramaturgy from its codes, forms and symbols, but innately, the body of the dancer in action, is in itself a fossilized message, a single instance that is representative of other instance, other spaces and times. As a storehouse, it is a repository of ancient and current knowledge, which makes the language of dance cryptic and its message diverse. With these works, I am interested in making this fascination visible.

ADEREMI ADEGBITE 1

What is the place of MOVEMENT as a philosophy in your works?

Hmm ... in the recent times, movement has become something I consider to be an integral part of my work. The idea of movement can be big and confusing because at one point it displaces you from your usual space of comfort and leaves you to find yourself within a cultural landscape that is completely new. And this in turn influence the creation of new works, that’s what makes movement interesting to me. However, physical movement is less interesting to the mental and cultural navigation through spaces.

2

What is Dance in your own words?

The movement of the body as directed by mental intuition or sequence of choreographed steps

3

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Is art hope or solace, mirroring reality or reinventing a better world ?

This is a complicated question, but I think that art is what keeps the world sane and for that, I think it’s more of solace than hope. The truth is, art has a way of giving both the creator [the artist] and the spectator hope about the

present and the future.

Art portrays reality and sometimes it engages the mind in abstraction. It creates confusion and illusion with an emotion that could be either false or real. Art is in the middle of everything, humanity, technology and science, without which the world clock would have stop ticking.

4

What is beauty, and what’s it’s role in your creations ?

Well, I am of the opinion that I don’t create beautiful art. My concern in my work is the message and the discourse I could instigate with my creation. I am an artist that believes in the relativity of beauty

5

What will you consider to be the mother of all arts and why?

If it is agreed upon that there is rhythm to everything both physical and metaphysical, then poetry may be said to be the mother of all arts.

There is rhythm in all art forms

but splitting image that are stored in your memory bank forever. In 2014, at the WorldWideME Theatre festival in Mannheim [Germany], I saw a long distance performance between Germany and India by Amitesh Glover, an Indian theatre artist.

The use of new media and infusion of social media platform that synced without a hitch was refreshing.

7

Solitude or Gatherings?

It is weird to be in the state of solitude for more than necessary, and to spend a long time in gatherings is also absurd.

8

Tell us of a defining MOMENT in your career.

No defining moment yet, I am a beginner. I am still learning the ropes.

6

What happens when you see a good performance and tell us of your most memorable ?

A good performance does not only leave with you memories, MO[VE]MENTS

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ticed in recent times?

AFRICAN DANCE IN TRANSITION INTERVIEW WITH ARNOLD UDOKA Emmanuel Samu Dandaura

Arnold Udoka is one of Africa’s foremost dance artists, choreographer, scholar and Director of dance, the National Troupe of Nigeria. Here, Udoka speaks with Festival Director, President of International Association of Theatre Critic, Nigeria, and Dance Professor at the Nassarawa State University, Keffi, Emmanuel DanDaura, on the status of Nigerian traditional dances, currently ignored in comparison to contemporary, how traditional dances can be saved, and of the emerging home video dances genre, set to revolutionize dance in our society in the years ahead.

stage into the video medium, in order to reach a wider audience in the ever-evolving, sophisticated and competitive visual space and culture.

One cannot lose sight of the fact that it is an investment gulping millions of Nigerian naira to produce a strictly dance video phenomenon. In terms of quality, it may be lacking in some critical and technical areas, but it has opened a new vista to entrepreneurs to collaborate with the creative crew of choreographers and others and emerge with products that have dance at their core.

What is new in Nigerian contemporary dance and what drives that “newness” – is it a result of an inner need, artistic creativity or motivated by market forces?

What is the nature of the cross-cultural interaction between indigenous and modern dance today?.

I think it has risen to meet social, economic, and environmental challenges in a post-modern Nigeria. There’s a mixture of traditional and contemporary movement patterns and styles, as well as creative approaches to meet the needs of contemporary Nigeria – which include entertainment, education, information – in innovative ways. These are addressed through dance theatre, dance reality shows, musicals and carnivals. These enhance the commercial value of modern Nigerian dance. Only recently, there emerged this concept of dance home video within the Nollywood industry. I am not sure how much of a commercial success that was, but it was a fresh opening.

Can you explain the nature, aim and state of development of the dance home video you referred to?

In the northern part of Nigeria, there are Arabic contacts which date back to the 7th-century AD. Some seminal influences might have been precipitated over centuries of contacts and trade with the Christian missionaries. Then there is the influence of the slaves who returned to the Lagos area from Brazil and Sierra Leone from the 16th-century, which did not manifest itself fully until the late 19th-century. These had influences on the costumes and accessories used by performers in various modern and indigenous dances, but there was no overt transplanting or ideological support for these elements of dance until the late 19th-century. One can say that the culmination of all this is the conscious acknowledgement of cross cultural interaction between indigenous and modern dance in the late 20th-century, which has changed the character of dance in Nigeria. It has been beneficial to the development of dance in the areas of domestic cross-cultural experiments, scholarship, creative and new dance narratives as well as international collaborations like the one with the French Cultural Centre in the late 1990s.

As recent as 2012, there has been an attempt at dance home video in the Nollywood industry, an instance is a home video entitled I’ll Take My Chances. It explored the psychosocial dilemHow about dance and politics, ethnicity, migrama that the 21st-century Nigerian generation is tion, gender, trans-gendering, gender identity, faced with. . Its aim, in my opinion, is principally subject-position etc. What influences have you no to deepen dramaturgy and move dance from the MO[VE]MENTS 58

With migrations into cosmopolitan settings, dance has become the symbol of ethnic identification. A new trend of gender-switching in dance vocabulary has been noticed among the youth. Dance scholarship is gaining significance in Nigeria’s educational programmes and curriculums at the tertiary level of education, with a national troupe enhancing creativity in dance.

While gender identity is still very much reflected within the indigenous forms, trans-gendering is not accepted as an issue, so it hardly finds any artistic expression in Nigerian dances.

What is the nature of the emerging gender switching in Nigerian dance vocabulary you talked about?

The switching is more in terms of the movements traditionally performed by, for example, the male dancer, now taught to a female dancer. I experimented with this in 1988 and found that the female dancers were as strong as the male dancers, especially during their teenage years. Of course, dancehall moves and modern dance generally do not seem to segregate between genders in some aspects, unless the dance is character/gender based. A lot of choreographers’ tilt towards teaching their vocabularies to both male and female dancers at the same time. Here, one cannot differentiate what particular steps are for which gender.

You also talked about dance becoming a symbol of ethnic identification. Were you talking about the migration drift from rural to urban areas in most African countries?

Exactly. The new cities that have emerged after colonialism have pulled rural dwellers into these concrete jungles and created an identity factor. Aware that they must keep in touch with their roots, these groups have formed themselves into development unions. Within such unions, the local dances peculiar to such cultures are performed periodically to forge their common identity even in faraway cities.

As the director of dance in the national troupe, can you cite specific dance projects that you have worked on in terms of Nigeria’s use of dance as a cultural diplomatic tool? How successful have these been?

Yes, I can easily point to Fire of Peace for Organisation for African Unity (1992) and Water Basket, which was Nigeria’s entry at the World Expo 2000 in Lisbon. Also Rite (Rights) of Passage for II OPEC Summit in Venezuela (2000); Nigeriana at Hannover World Expo 2000; India-Africa Summit dance performances in New Delhi, India (2008) and Nigeria at 53 in Athens, Greece (2013). These are just a few of the occasions in which I deployed dance as a cultural diplomatic tool. These have offered the opportunity to redeem both bilateral and multilateral diplomatic pacts between Nigeria and other nations. These moments have exposed Nigerian dance arts to the world. Difficulties that are always encountered are of a cultural nature in the West. Aware that Nigerian, and indeed African dances are perceived as exotic, it is a challenge to persuade audiences to abandon such mindsets and enjoy the dances as works of art.

How commercially successful has modern Nigerian Dance been?

Who are its major patrons? While the youth bracket constitutes the majority of dance audiences, it is safer to say that generally, the audiences are mixed: individuals, government as well as corporate bodies. Has dance been ‘selling’? I will say not as much as Nigerian music, but certainly better than live theatre. For musical videos, dance is indeed the selling point and today there are thousands of artists making their living from dance in Nigeria; but it could be better.

So, how do we make dance sell better in Nigeria?

Dance will sell better by leveraging on the conventional and social media, to break out to a wider audience. For this to occur, the dancers themselves must become more professional than they are now if they are to attract investors or entrepreneurs. There must also exist a corps of seasoned dance critics who, at the moment, are nowhere to be found. Critics would bridge the gulf between dance, its audience and the marketplace. That, to my mind, is one sure way to open the market for dance in Nigeria.

Who is the major employer of dance in Nigeria compared to other African countries?

The professional dancer in Nigeria earns a living through, freelancing, membership of a private

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dance troupe, or as a member of staff of a government owned Arts Council. I am using the word professional with caution here because, while all earn a living from dance, adherence to the ethics of the profession is lacking in some. However, the government is the largest employer of dancers in Nigeria and their appointments are pensionable.

Others, who are freelance dancers, hop from one musician to the other, whilst those in the private troupes have more stable sources of income. In all, those appointed by State governments stand the best chance of sustaining themselves for a long time and remaining in the profession. The same would be the case for the majority of the countries in the continent. I know of a large government dance troupe in Rwanda, as well as similar troupes in Ghana and Senegal to mention a few.

What is new in terms of the shift from classic to modern, adaptations, training, etc.?

The classics, and in our case, traditional dances are quite vibrant, but the younger generation is migrating towards excessive contemporariness.

However, domestic hip-hop music artists are generating new sounds, which are complemented with new moves.

What is driving the transition from the classical to the modern? Is it commercial considerations or the taste of the audience?

The ideological swings after independence were more focused on how to regain control of the cultural and political psyches while, at the same time, aping the West with its infectious lifestyle. Therefore, besotted by the West, a generation of men and women were attempting the impossible. That is, maintaining tradition and coping with modernity. It can be said without any equivocation that commercial considerations dictate the sway towards modern dance in any form. And, since the audience taste has gained western aesthetic ‘gustatory habits’, the transition is real and concrete, led by a corps of young choreographers and dancers. However, the classics are more secured and protected by government policies.

I see, from our discussion so far, that dance in Nigeria is an art in transition. As a dancer, what are the technical demands of transiting from traditional to modern dance?

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Essentially, there is the cultural barrier, which only recognizes dance as a communal product, and to break down this cultural infrastructure requires a good dose of genius to earn acceptance. The technical demands of transiting from traditional to modern dance, therefore, are both psychological and physical. Psychological in the sense that it is a new orientation in movement training to adapt to, and physically, in that the body learns new movement vocabulary that explores other possibilities for communication than the standardized classical ones. This break away from established dance canons initially befuddles many a dancer and could spell the end of the attempt at modern dance. The improvisational approach in modern dance, and the search for movement to communicate meaning, with an existentialist bent, can be equated to attempting to invent a new language of your own and to which you expect others to comprehend.

For would be professional dancers in Nigeria, what is the training landscape like?

There is limited effort at training dancers in specific techniques and styles. Free-styling is the order of the day in the absence of canons (rules or general principles), as hobbyists and amateurs dominate and outnumber careerists in the dance space. Traditional dances still serve as the chief source for training most career dancers and choreographers.

A few dancers have transformed to ‘choreographers’ without formal training. This constipates both theory and practice. So far, there is no specific establishment for the training of dancers and choreographers. A few choreographers exist with modern dance techniques backgrounds. The technical demands swing between the ordinary and virtuosic.

Do you see any unique performance style coming out of the dance space in Nigeria or any emerging or dominant style?

The synthesis of forms and styles has encouraged amalgams of techniques and thrown up innovations. Dominated by avant-garde approaches, the dance pieces are yet committed to allegory no matter how abstract or absurd the materials in both presentational and representational modes.

Again, there is no strict adherence to conventional theatre dictates, and experimentation seems to be uppermost on the minds of the dance creators.

Majorly, training is limited to the vocabulary of the

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choreographers, who most often depend heavily on gymnastic capabilities to focus on how lithe the dancers are, while losing the focus on the imagery of indigenous dance sources. Foreign dance and musical videos are spreading salsa and other dance forms, and the influx of visual media have influenced what are deployed as tools for training and creating dances. In terms of style, there is no gainsaying that athleticism is replacing grace in contemporary dance in Nigeria. That said, our dances still desire to tell the stories of the human condition.

What should the world expect to see from Nigeria, and Africa, in terms of dance in the nearest future?

With the blossoming interest in dance through practice, scholarship, the support of governments, the diversification of the economic base, and the instrumentality of pervading media, I foresee a humble dance revolution from Nigeria and Africa in which existing traditional canons would be adapted and distilled and new canons crystallized.

These new canons would again make dance an integral part of our existence; a cultural activity in which the body and spirit shall share the stories of our human condition to make the world a safer, happier, more conducive, joyous and habitable place for all.

Emmanuel Samu Dandaura is a Festival Director and Professor of Participatory Communication and Performance Aesthetics with the NAsarawa State University, Keffi, Nigeria. He is President of the Nigerian section of the International Association of Theatre Critics and member of the International Executive Committee of the IATC. Dandaura has over 86 published articles in highly rated international academic journals and currently serves as editor of Nzeh Magazine, Nigeria’s flagship magazine dedicated to exposing Africa’s Culture and Tourism destinations.

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SUBLIMITY SUBLIMITY YUNUSA ABDULLAHI

When we dance, we float, we fly and we are in a trance and we are transported. Photography is on standby to freeze such movement intermittently in an artistic form. The freezing and de-freezing of such movement is what creates the sublime in the images photography captures.

My narrative on the relationship between Dance and Photography is to show how the sequence of the performance, the music, the rhythm and the lights create an atmosphere of suspense – it is this suspense my photography captures in its sublime form

YUNUSA ABDULLAHI 1

What is the place of MOVEMENT as a philosophy in your works?

I have always loved to see blur movement in my photos. It is an intentional camera movement involving using a long exposure.

For me the blur movement in my photographic philosophy is to create an abstract impressions on my photos . It also helps me to create a sense of beauty which only that technique could bring out. Since dance involves rhythms, the movement as captured by my photography helps create that artistic elevation of the performance from the ordinary to the sublime, making the images Inspiring and animated. it makes things visible, it makes the intangible tangible , the mundane becomes magical. That is the effect of movement in my photography

2

What is Dance in your own words?

I define dance as a process and representation of emotions of a people, culture event or even d understanding of problem through a choreographed movement aided by sound and music.

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Is art hope or solace, mirroring reality or reinventing a better

world ?

Well it is a subjective genre so the definition of art will depend on the individual. It could be both and it could be none of the above. I believe art is more of a mirror of oneself and the society at large. It cannot reinvent the world can rather re-emphasize its beauty and process.

4

What is beauty, and what’s it’s role in your creations ?

This is another word that can only be defined by what an individual assume is beauty in his or her eyes. However I see beauty as something sublime, something extraordinary something you marvel. In my creations I hope to see a situation where am asked ‘wow! You shot this image?’ ‘how did you achieve this?’ when I’m asked that I will be fulfilled that I have created something transcendental and beautiful. That is how I see beauty in my work.

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What happens when you see a good performance and tell us of your most memorable ?

I have goosebumps and become highly emotional. My most memorable certainly should be ‘We will Rock You’ by the Queen.

Watched it at Dominion Theatre Tottenham Court Road in London November 2012

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Solitude or Gatherings?

Both! Depending on the mood.

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Tell us of a defining MOMENT in your career.

Traveling 7hrs by speed boat on River Benue to do a photo story on Life of the fishing communities.

5

What will you consider to be the mother of all arts and why?

Simply creativity and aesthetics for me does it. When you can feel and touch a piece of work in a symbolic way, that is mother of arts in my opinion.

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AFRICAN DANCES AND THE STRUGGLE FOR IDENTITY JEMIMA ANGULU

There’s a growing need among dancers of today tradition? to connect or study western dance cultures, techOne would argue that dance has evolved and is niques and trends, that It seems African (traditionconstantly evolving but what is the influence beal and modern) dance have taken a back seat to hind this evolution? Do we even have a choice in western dance. People are quick to observe that this evolution? the opportunities to pursue a successful dance career reside outside the continent, hence dancers’ Furthermore, why are most schools in Africa teachpreference for a career in western dance styles. Yet ing their ethnic dances as an option to Jazz, Conothers blame our supposedly western influenced temporary or Ballet, instead of the basis of their media for preconditioning Africans to desire the curriculum? Why would a 54-nation continent of alien to the familiar and local. There may be more rich, diverse and unplumbed cultures and dances to this practice than meets the eye. Nevertheless, need the nod of another continent to validate our our dancers are being remoulded and remodeled culture and its evolution? to lose touch with their inherent African identity.

Dance is an art that describes the very essence of In the contemporary scene, we see African dancers a people, compromising such an art compromisdoing contemporary pieces that showcase their es the identity of the people it represents. Just like struggle to connect to their roots. But what truly other artist(e)s, dance artistes have an important forms the basis for their dance? part to play in regaining our cultural heritage and Is it the loss of connection to their roots and the image. need to re-connect, or is it the adoption of another The importance of the growth of the African Dance MO[VE]MENTS 64

scene cannot be over emphasised. However, the right questions must be asked for the right answers to be given. Questions like, “Why are African dancers not studying our ethnic dances?” or “Why are we not connecting with Africa?” or “What will happen to the next generation of dancers springing up from the continent?” At the 10th edition of the Dance Africa Dance, in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, which witnessed a gathering network of dancers and choreographers, the efforts a good number of dancers are making to push their countries traditional dances in the limelight, was inspiringly obvious. However, it also revealed that the best is yet to come. Despite a reasonable growth, there remains a deep struggle between art and identity; a struggle between a fulfilling career choice and artistic responsibilities.

This begs the question; How do we connect Africans to Africa? Are we afraid that our dances will be commercialized or lose its essence before the media? Are we afraid our ethnic dances do not reflect our present political and social realities or that they lack the depth to carry the depth of our expression. In our childhood days, we participated in schools’ cultural dance troupe, a limited experience and more often an obligatory one. This practice remains, with the added disadvantage that many private and non-special education schools have made ballet dance an option to traditional ethnic dances.

Therefore, opportunities of experiencing culture and dance from our heritage point of view are constantly being lost. There are advantages to acquiring language or skill. Of what use is that to a Nigerian child in Nigeria who lacks efficiency and knowledgeable skills of his own culture? Apply the same question to African dancers who have no healthy knowledge of their ethnic root as a basis for other creative discoveries and evolution, and the answer is the same. If we don’t fight to project African dances and narratives to the world, the way we want them to be told and seen, the present stereotypes of Africa will persist.

. our creations as dancers and choreographers. The work has begun, but there is still much to do entice the world to the African performance stage, and revealing the glory and depth of the African dances. This is not about the unidentified energetic movement termed “African dance” portrayed on “So You Think You Can Dance” or taught in most of the studios or schools in Europe or America. Our dances have names and bear histories that speak of the nature of its people.

If the dream of most established African dancers is to transcend native boundaries, then they must carry much more than an origin stamp from Gabon, Senegal, Nigeria, Madagascar e.t.c; they must imprint our culture in other cultures just as much as they imbibe other cultures. On a final note, we must establish a true African influence by re-connecting ourselves to the African brand and, creating more platforms for Africans, within Africa and

by Africans. We need creative platforms that will challenge the norm and mediocrity. We need creative spaces in Africa that teach not just contemporary dance dances from the different parts the continent as a foundation of dance.

A good place to start is by rising to the challenge to educate and to push our content and narratives through local and international media, and stimulate our governments and cultural agencies to comprehend the essence of supporting our culture and art forms within and outside Africa.

We cannot and should not wait for other continents to spear head the growth of our culture.

On a dancer’s voyage to expand his/her knowledge and experience, they are advised to explore depths, variations and genres of dance. This is because no matter how much dance transcends cultures and backgrounds, a foreknowledge of one’s dance culture and heritage, enriches the dancer’s artistic skills and persona. Therefore, it is important that we preserve our African roots as the basis for MO[VE]MENTS

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WITNESS WITNESS ADEYINKA YUSUF In the review of “We Almost Forgot”, Didi Cheeka wrote “..From the opening of the performance, the audience sense that they are about to witness a rare moment of dance and performance, something they have not seen before – beautiful and disturbing – the danger, the pain, and ultimately, relief.” With WITNESS I want to make an attempt to both position photography as witness through my presence in the moment, witnessing and recording beauty, both on stage and in the faces of the audience.

ADEYINKA YUSUF 1

What is the place of MOVEMENT as a philosophy in your works?

Movement is an action which I strive really hard to convey in my works because as a documentary photographer, I have to present images as realistic as possible.

2

What is Dance in your own words?

Dance is the art of using body movements to convey innermost feelings in an outer-worldly manner.

3

Is art hope or solace, mirroring reality or reinventing a better world ?

I think art is these and much more. Art serves different intents and purposes. Art is a pact between its creator and its receiver.

5

What will you consider to be the mother of all arts and why?

I don’t think one singular form of art can be considered to be the mother of all arts. Different forms of art invokes different forms of satisfaction in people.

6

What happens when you see a good performance and tell us of your most memorable ?

A good performance is one that every witness agrees that it was pure beauty. And of course the most memorable for me is “We Almost Forgot”.

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Solitude Both

or

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Tell us of a defining MOMENT in your career.

A few days after I got my first camera, I took a picture of a man sitting in the middle of the highway seemingly oblivious of the fast-paced world around him. I used motion blur to create the movement of the world around him while he remained motionless. That picture remains one of my best to date. To be able to visualise and create such a fantastic picture early in my career made me realise that I was meant to do this.

Gatherings?

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What is beauty, and what’s it’s role in your creations ?

Beauty is acquiescence and that is what I hope to inspire in the people that receive my work.

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TRENDING POP DANCE MOVES IN NIGERIA PROFESSOR RASAKI BAKARE, CASMIR ONYEMUCHARA In Africa, more so Nigeria, Dance is an intricate part of the people and communities’ existence. In their research study of The Development of Dance Art Within Nigeria’s Popular Culture: A Study of Selected Trending Dance Moves In Nigeria, Professor Rasaki Bakare, and Casmir Onyemuchara notes that prior to the arrival of the colonials, and the introduction of foreign dance forms to the continent, dance played two major roles in the African societies, religious or ritual, and social or ceremonial purposes. Dances performed at the latter were less serious in content and form, as those found in naming ceremonies, receptions for dignitaries, marriages; while the former is associated with initiations into age grades, performed by initiates of a particular god paying obeisance or reverence to that god.

With the advent of post-colonial rule, westerners introduced foreign dances which not only diffused the peoples dance styles and culture but its purpose, as it shifted dance from its original religious and social purposes to take the role of entertainment and into an art cultivated in choreographs.

Following this period, early Nigerian highlife musicians like Victor Olaiya, Bobby Benson, Roy Chicago among others, took the task of blending western instrumentals in their acts. by the 60s more western styles of music like the funk, disco and soul rock were introduced into the society. It was only a matter of time before such diffusion of music and dance, began to borrow from other cultures around and beyond the continent.

Thus, in the 21stcentury Africa, when traditional dances easily made way for contemporary popular dances, popularized by African music artistes, Nigeria music artistes included.

Culled from University of Ado Ekiti scholars Bakare and Onyemuchara’s abovementioned paper, the following are some of the modern pop dance styles trending in Nigeria within the last two and a half decades.

MAKOSA The late 20th to the current 21st century Nigeria has witnessed a tremendous growth in the area of dance 68

and music art orchestrated by pop culture. Awilo Logomba and later Kofi Olomide brought Makosa style rocking the air waves, television screens via the home videos and the television stations. It is quite obvious that both Awilo and Kofi are not Nigerians but their music and dance steps were highly appreciated within the pop culture community made up of the youths. Makosa became so popular to the point that even teens became addicted to the point that many of them, in executing makosa movement, raised up their cloths, whether wearing under wears or not. Makosa was not popular among the elites who quarreled with its sexual and or erotic content both in movement and costume.

Makosa dance which is actually based on the Congolese ‘Soukous’ relies on the wriggling of the waist region and less foot work and hand gestures apart from the continuous undulation and shuffling of the leg in a stationary or backward manner on a bent knee with a kick of legs, one after the other that take one (dancer) forward. The hand placement is usually curved inwards on the opposite direction and the shoulder raised in a cocky shape. The neck is bent towards one side of the already raised shoulder. The dance (Makosa) is associated with most Francophone countries in Africa, especially Congo Brazzaville, Benin Republic, Togo, Gabon and Cameroun. Other dance moves that emerged during this period and which we shall discuss later include (in the other of emergence): GALALA Galala is a type of contemporary Nigerian dance that rocked the Nigerian dance scene in the 1990s.

The dance is credited to Daddy Showkey as the originator or inventor. Although there have been confusion, argument and counter argument to this claim . For instance, Veteran Nigerian musician, Innocent Michael Onyemuwa, popularly referred to as Daddy Fresh, has opened up on the controversial topic ofwho invented the famous Galala dance that Nigerians rocked in the mid 90’s. Daddy Fresh claimed,

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“Galala dance was actually invented by our friend called Echo who is now late. In the early 90s, we used to attend a club called Raja Dub Chapel. It was there many artists came to showcase their talents.

Then, we also used Sunrise Hotel which we used to call Second Dancehall. That was where we discovered Echo, who later became a dancer for Showkey.

So, Echo invented the Galala dance.” Galala dance captures the general scenario of the ghetto life in Ajegunle, a town or suburban city in Lagos State of Nigeria. The movements and gestures of Galala dance cut across fighting, pick pocketing, poverty, malnutrition, scavenging and other of such mannerisms that can be seen in the ghettos. The different movements and gestures also contribute to the various styles that can be identified in Galala dance. The most popular of them all is associated with bent knees while the buttocks thrusts backward; The fists held in a boxing position while the face looks directly at the audience as if inviting them for a fight; the legs are in constant back and front shuffle to the beat of the music. Galala did not stay too long before it was replaced by another dance.

Some have attributed this to the decline of the Ajegunle brand of music associated with the likes of African China, Baba Fryo and a few others that were prominent during this period under review.

YAHOOZEE As one of the trending Nigerian contemporary pop dance moves, the dance has continued to get the nod of the youths that make up the popular culture in Nigeria and other African countries even though the lyrics has remained unacceptable to a wide spectrum of the educated elites. Yahoozee as a song and dance style in contemporary Nigerian is derived from the word ‘Yahoo’ one of the popular search engines of the internet. The music talks about the exploits of the internet scammers and/ or fraudsters popularly known as ‘yahoo boys’, their method or mode of enjoyment after successfully defrauding a victim. The dance is attributed to Olu Maintain as the originator in the early 2000. Yahoozee dance does not require much energy. The dance move requires a lot of hand movement which is very well stylized, pointing to the sky and different directions. It is an abstraction from the natural movement of the hands and fingers when counting or ‘spraying’ money. The feet are rarely moved as they remain glued to the floor or a mere tapping of one foot on the floor.

SUO The reign of Makosa was brought to a halt in Nigeria by the Suo dance introduced in the contemporary Nigerian dance scene by the Danfo Drivers (Mad Melon and Mountain Black) and Marvelous Benji. Again, Suo came at a time when Galala was already struggling for prominence. As part of Ghetto revolution in the music and dance scene, Suo replaced Galala because of its soft and somewhat erotic nature. Suo like Galala reflects ghettohood as the originators are also from Ajegunle; a society that has produced most of the dance and music trends in Nigeria today. The dance emphasizes the use of hands and leg movements.

The hands roll in a continuous grinding position while the legs are in continuous open and close position. At some point the hands draw to stretch like in a tying gesture making the hands to remain at a shooting (gun) position. Suo like Galala does not utilize loco motor hence the execution of movements (dance moves) is done in place.

ALANTA Also popular among the youth can be safely classified as a comic dance. Alanta became a house hold name in the dance moves trend in Nigeria around 2007/8. Credited to ArtQuake, the dance arouses laughter whenever it is performed because of its movements, body positioning and gestures. Like Galala, the dance fits into any kind of music. The dancers contour their faces in a comic manner; crying, squeezing, winking and any such funny facial look. The legs are raised interchangeably while the hands (fingers) tap the stomach standing, lying, bending or anyway the dancer chooses to execute the movement. In a nutshell, the dance movement is more of a caricature of an imbecile. This has resulted to opinions suggesting that the dance must have originated as an imitation of imbeciles while they are dancing. The dance is stationary apart from the body which navigates in space. This makes the execution of the movements easier.

SKELEWU In Davido’s hit single Skelewu, the dance took the youths in Nigeria by storm following the release of his musical video. Till date, the dance movement is ascribed to him as the originator.

The dance performance follows the following sequence; the dance performer stretches his/ her right hand out, allowing the palm to turn outwardly as if telling someone to stop. The left hand holds his/her waist while the body

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swings from left to right in a continuous manner.

This movement can be alternated depending on who is carrying out the dance movement. The movement technique can be likened to the Makosa dance and few other contemporary Nigerian dances trending today in the country. It does not require much locomotors, as the movement is designed to show off the body’s kinetic capabilities.

ETIGI As one of the latest in the trending dance moves in Nigeria, Inyanya caught the attention of Nigerians in his hit song ‘Kukere’ which went viral because of its unique style. It is a blend of tradition and hip culture. Here, Inyanya maneuver’s a movement that can be identified with his native Akwa Ibom State of Nigeria. The dance movement involves the locking of the knees and raising of the hip bones region in alternate manner so much so that the sides of the hips help the buttocks to jerk as one leg is raised after another. The legs are also in continuous one/two movement as each is raised after the other to propel the hip movement. The hand placement help the side by side body positioning; the left move to the front while the right is balanced at the side of or beside the right leg.

The legs while tapping/matching the floor can be locomotive or stationary. In the locomotor movement, the legs move forward, while in the stationary, the legs tap side by side. The dance movement can fit into any kind of music. As recorded in Buzznigeria.com, Etigi can be performed/or mixed with Azonto as the hands and legs/hips steps suspended movement. While Etigi concentrates on the hip, the hands are busy with Azonto which is characterized with hand movements/gestures.

AZONTO Originated in Ghana by Fuse ODG with his song Azonto featuring Tiffany, and was made popular in Nigeria by Wizkid. Azonto became so popular that some companies like GoTV Africa, Ekiti State Television and CHISCO Transport to name a few used it as advert materials for their products and services. The movement involves leg and hand movements. One leg steps out either side or front and the other meets it in a 4/2 beat while the hands move in diverse direction depending on who is involved in the execution of the movement and the dancer’s creative sense and /or ingenuity. At times, one of the legs shuffles, pointing/ steadying the toes to the ground while the raised heel moves in a tick tack motion continually until 70

the dancer changes onto another move. Till date, Azonto has remained popular across West Africa.

SHOKI Since 2014, this new dance style has been part of the Nigerian pop culture. It is synonymous with parties because of its popularity, unique, and somewhat simple movement execution. It remains one of the latest modern Nigeria’s dance moves and loved by all even the elderly. Although its source has continued to draw controversies within the pop community, Naij.com stated “Shoki will be remembered as one of Nigeria’s most controversial dance steps because about three musical bands claimed to be its originator; Dre, Lil Kesh and Orezi”. Shoki movement and techniques are similar to that of Makosa as introduced by the influx of Francophone music stars as mentioned earlier in our discussion on Makosa. The shuffling of the legs and the movement of the hip region in Makosa is applied in Shoki. The slight difference between the two is the continuous undulation of the upper body and none presence of wriggling of the waist in an erotic manner which is common to the former, and less visible in the later. The uniqueness of Shoki lies in its style of execution. The dancers drop low and uses one hand or at times both hands to fetch or pack imaginary thing(s) from the ground. The dance movement in most cases is performed with the full body frame facing the side. The neck is dropped on one of the shoulders (either left or right) and facing the direction of the hand. While the body goes down, it rises at the same pace to enable the hand drop or throw the picked imaginary object. With the palms open while coming up, it(they) end(s) up either covering the eye, holding the waist, throwing an imaginary basketball, showing off, winkings or any act that fits into the movement as devised by the dancer (s). Shoki allows for individual creativity just like other modern Nigerian dance moves

chest and the other one on the waist and drives and / or shuffles sideways in a locomotor manner.

The dance performer(s) follow MC Galaxy’s instruction in his lyrics; ‘one hand or your chest, one hand on your waist, oya Sekem’. At this time, the dancer stretches his left leg sideways while his/her weight rests on the right leg which is standing flat on the floor. He drags the left leg which is seating on the toes to the flat-footed leg that shuffles to the right side in a continuous locomotor as the body tilts to the right. This can also be alternated as continuous usage of one side alone will result to monotony..

chest and the other one on the waist and drives and / or shuffles sideways in a locomotor manner.

The dance performer(s) follow MC Galaxy’s instruction in his lyrics; ‘one hand or your chest, one hand on your waist, oya Sekem’. At this time, the dancer stretches his left leg sideways while his/her weight rests on the right leg which is standing flat on the floor. He drags the left leg which is seating on the toes to the flat-footed leg that shuffles to the right side in a continuous locomotor as the body tilts to the right. This can also be alternated as continuous usage of one side alone will result to monotony..

SHAKITI BOBO As Olamide’s Shakiti Bobo music raved all over the country and was followed with the now famous dance move Shakiti Bobo, it was received in Nigeria with open arms among the youths and has become a part of mass culture today because of its unique medium of execution. It has even penetrated the church as it has become one of the popular dance moves among the worshipers. Shakiti Bobo involves a simultaneous jerking and / or twitching of the shoulder. This shuddering combines intermittently with the raising of legs (that is), when the left shoulder jerks, the left leg is raised and then the reverse. The hand does not have any particular placement as it is busy with different postures and gesticulations. The tilting of the body from one side to the other is also a part of its aesthetics.

SHAKITI BOBO As Olamide’s Shakiti Bobo music raved all over the country and was followed with the now famous dance move Shakiti Bobo, it was received in Nigeria with open arms among the youths and has become a part of mass culture today because of its unique medium of execution. It has even penetrated the church as it has become one of the popular dance moves among the worshipers. Shakiti Bobo involves a simultaneous jerking and / or twitching of the shoulder. This shuddering combines intermittently with the raising of legs (that is), when the left shoulder jerks, the left leg is raised and then the reverse. The hand does not have any particular placement as it is busy with different postures and gesticulations. The tilting of the body from one side to the other is also a part of its aesthetics.

SEKEM Created by MC Galaxy in one of his hit albums, Sekem became viral in the pop/hip-hop dance culture all over the nation and added to the number of the many other contemporary Nigerian dances.

As recorded in www.naij.com, “Sekem dancers are lovely to watch. The jolly sideways, back and forth moves is the beauty of the dance step created by MC Galaxy”. The execution of Sekem dance is not different from other trending dance moves in Nigeria as it also follows a sequence of movement application. The dancer holds one hand on the

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TRAVELLING TRAVELLING AYO AKINWADE This is an on-going photographic series that explores the identity of the black male body, its objectification and desconstrusting myths about sexuality. This title takes its cue from the game of basketball, where the word “travelling” signifies a foul, while life is a journey that demands perpetual motion, I.e. Travelling, Appropriating this word is to highlight the constant struggle which the black male faces in his quest for identity and power.

AYO AKINWADE 1

What is the place of MOVEMENT as a philosophy in your works?

My work flow has always been about fluidity, the integration of ideas with the reality I am faced with at any given time. As my mind is constantly in motion, I get to move across different themes why seeking or/and creating new realities.

2

What is Dance in your own words?

Dance to me is meditation in motion. The transfer of energy as one attempts to either communicate with nature or be aligned with all of one’s inner being.

3

Is art hope or solace, mirroring reality or reinventing a better world ?

Art is a lot of things to different people, to me is about creating a new world for me to inhabit while engaging with reality.

ating

a

beautiful

outcome

5

What will you consider to be the mother of all arts and why?

I don’t see any medium as the mother of all of arts.

6

What happens when you see a good performance and tell us of your most memorable ?

What is good and bad is always about taste of the viewer/audience, its solely a function of one’s orientation/belief system. I have been greatly influenced by the performances of Jelili Atiku.

I particularly find his project title “Agbo rago” very edgy and interesting.

7

Solitude Both

or

8

Tell us of a defining MOMENT in your career.

For me, a defining moment is the creation of my project titled “Boju-Boju” I began focusing more the importance of Process in my thought and workflow. I also did extensive documentation (photo and video) of both the making of the work, and the staging of the exhibition itself”

Gatherings?

4

What is beauty, and what’s it’s role in your creations ?

As an Artist, I recognize that beauty is in the hands of the creator.

My creations don’t primarily focus on beauty from the aesthetics point of view but the issues I engage with all bring about cre 72

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Elesin’s suicide.

CHOREOGRAPHING DEATH IN THEATRIC PRODUCTIONS QUDUS ONIKEKU

“It is the death of war that kills the valiant, Death of water is how the swimmer goes.

It is the death of markets that kills the trader And death of indecision takes the idle away.

The trade of the cutlass blunts its edge And the beautiful die the death of beauty.

It takes an Elesin to die the death of death.

Only Elesin dies the unknowable death... gracefully, gracefully does the horseman regain the stable at the end of the day, gracefully.”

Choreographically speaking, the above reads like the purgatory dance of death, the will to attain grace in the face of the mysterious hereafter. How about a strictly dance adaptation of Death and the King’s Horseman? What better response is there to how directors oftentimes un(use) dance in Soyinka’s literature? What better way does one explain to them, that their use of movement exhumes a great lack of dance understanding that diminishes so much, the power of telling

2016 marked the 40th anniversary of the emblematic play, Death and the King’s Horseman. On the 20th of November of the same year, the National Troupe staged the play in celebration of the man of theater, and Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka. This review is not so much about this particular production directed by Mike Anyanwu, but a cross examination of the role of dance in theatre, using Death in the play, as an entry point.

“Then I began to travel on Death’s road, and I spent about eight hours to reach there, [...] When i reached his (Death’s) house, [...] i met a small rolling drum in his verandah, then I beat it to Death as a sign of salutation. When he heard the sound, he said thus: “Is that man still alive or dead? - Excerpt from ‘The Palmwine Drinkard’ by Amos Tutuola”

In the drama, the King had died, and Elesin (his horseman) is expected by law and custom to commit suicide, in order to accompany his ruler to heaven, but the honorable burial process would be interrupted by the colonial administrators.

Toyin Oshinaike played Elesin in this particular production. He was simply exceptional, and led me to reflect on the role of dance in this absurd duet between death and the king’s horseman.

In the first attempt to dying, the praise singer proclaims - “How shall I tell what my eyes have seen?”

Toyin Osinaike’s attempt at expressing the unsayable and the use of pure dance as a way of story-telling, proved the most captivating parts for the choreographer in me, not the (approximately) 20 other extras used as dancers in the production. However, due to the lack of an intelligible use of dance, and For those not entirely familiar with the plot of the impatience of the director, proper justice was Death and the King’s Horseman, it is a classic tale not done in reaching the height Soyinka thrust the of tragic decisions in a traditional African culture. play. This was mostly felt in the two parts of MO[VE]MENTS 74

How can we rush through the ritual of dying like a flash, when it took Tutuola eight hours to get there, and Soyinka pages of sublime poetry to word it?

That fact, is the real tragic decision of this production, it is mere cruelty. Staging such death scenes should be a reminiscent of the terror we experience in love making, or the tragedy of childbirth.

There must be a process, a given time to stop time, emotion and a feeling that should be respected; an emotion that ensures the audience feel the slow passing of time transiting into nothingness, the oozing of life that once was and still is. The audience must feel this deep in their souls, much as I as a member of the audience felt robbed of. It is the making or loss of life we are talking about here, no matter how desirable or honorable, or even graceful it feels to Elesin, for the living, for the audience, it must be an experience.

Dance for me exists within those spaces where there are no words, were words fail us, where meanings, word-texts, and poetry reaches their paroxysm, till the actor, as in a trance, through its prodding heartbeat begins to sparkle and swerve rhythmically, matching the speed, the irregularity and the rhythm of all our heartbeats, both the actors, director, technicians and the ensemble of audience alike, establishing a mood in the theatrical space, an unexplainable state with a godlike aura. At that height of ecstasy and rapture, nothing abridges and captures the terror in the human spirit than dance, but in most plays and stagings of such literature, dance is reduced to a mere ‘filler’ and what ‘the mob’ and ‘the unknown’, ‘the unnamed’ and the ‘invisible stage characters’ are good at. We make them simply move their backsides, while they sing choruses and smile excessively from ear-to-ear.

Elesin’s last word in Death and the King’s Horseman reads thusI cannot approach. Take off the clothes.

I shall speak my message from heart to heart of silence.

What more is there to say? What more reflection is there to choreographing death before the eventual passage and abandonment of the dancer unto suicide. In fact, I’m perplexed, completely baffled and determined that with the amount of classic literature unchoreographed, and mystical moments in them undanced in this country, the terrain is simply vast and virginal for the choreographers willing to rise up to the challenge.

“Elesin Oba, can you hear me at all?.

Your eyelids are glazed like a courtesan’s, Is it that you see the dark groom and master of life?

And will you see my father?

Will you tell him that I stayed with you to the last?

Will my voice ring in your ears awhile, will you remember Olohun iyo?

Even if the music on the other side surpasses his mortal craft?”

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DREAM CATCHERS DREAM CATCHERS BIMPE KAYODE

BIMPE KAYODE 1

What is the place of MOVEMENT as a philosophy in your works?

Dance is performative, movement shows the ability to distinguish between the living & inanimate. My work shows the connection between form (which is dance) and movement. Combining the two to create an interpretation of the dancers mind.

2

What is Dance in your own words?

Soulful rhythm.

It’s music played with the body for the pleasure of the dancer.

3

Is art hope or solace, mirroring reality or reinventing a better world ?

Art is hope. It’s mirroring reality as well as reinventing a better world.

4

5

What will you consider to be the mother of all arts and why?

Music It births the most emotions, from a place of rushed adrenaline to a place of calmness. Interpreting it into different forms also makes it the mother of all.

8

Tell us of a defining MOMENT in your career.

Not yet gotten.

6

What happens when you see a good performance and tell us of your most memorable ?

I get so pumped Get into the reverie the dancer is taking me to...

It creates a tone of imagination in me as I try to interprete every move. My favourite performance will be We Almost forgot by Qudus Onikeku.

7

Solitude Solitude

or

Gatherings?

What is beauty, and what’s it’s role in your creations ?

Beauty in my work basically shows from the emotions/message my viewers get from my work.

Beauty is relative.

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Because return you must, to the short years of this, your travailed existence We all return to dust, just as our sun returns to its highest point each day.

POETRY

I’d tremble at the wonder of what might I hear if I willed this beating heart to stop “stop, this beating heart.” Only to be deafened by the silence in between.

Look to the east and see yourself, Like a grain of sand amongst a shimmering multitude crystals, like you, each in thier own solitude open your ribs to this lasting prayer of gratitude: See that islands are made of sand.

ZENA EDWARDS

BE/LONGING EXILED

Where are you? In your head?

You’ve focus too long on being alone.

Do you feel Loved there where you are?

Does your alone equate to a kind of Love you can tolerate?

Its been a while. How do you tolerate yourself?

A kinder Love this alone must be this soliloquised call with no response No expectations, no disappointments: phantom pregnancies That will grow up to be grumpy, sharp tongued, clenched fisted, starved isms In your exile you cannot lose but neither can you win No, no, no, Alone is a safer home. Safer. A backspace in existence but write what you want in your exile, just as long as you resist the pinch of pity Causing bad blood blisters that purple and poison the self In your head. Remember Life, my friend, out here, out here where it hurts and mends Remember life, my friend, with a warriors face.

Where there is life there is fire and rain, mud and wind.

Where there is life there is solitude and tribe Where there is life there is infection and cure And the pure, violent Love, Love will divide oneself against oneself And mercilessly will heal the subsequent rift.

But you cannot know love until you have tasted blood from the bitten lip of silencing your aching heart in your exile If this is as good as it gets my friend Let it be good

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It is all very well, knowing something you do not know Being the professor of your own unwritten future The limping expert of your past Did you glimpse the now though? This right now?

This loud, clouded and loud now though?

Out here you think its crazy?

But what is this world in your head?

There is only so long you can breathe alone; You have to let go now A broken past has no currency But the effort to mend it does, You have to let go now, move on How long will you spend fixing what’s gone?

You have to move on, let go How much of this alone is bad alone?

You have to let go now, move on

BODY AND MEMORY

A war veteran returns home, exiled from himself He has survived the horrors of flailing body parts, He covers his ears to the blood and bruises from the flames of screaming mouths and swollen fists, Ghost faces of youths and women tattooed on his knuckles.

And you, you crusade a lonely war with yourself When your body is not a war zone, Is not electric fenced from its soul’s reservoir it does not need to house this state of empty occupation.

You have walked a safe distance within earshot of return

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Children, palms still sapling tender, Are challenged to love unconditionally.

Taught that dancing on the edge of limitlessly loving is just shy of wrong, Even chancing the harmony through sharing, too risky Must lose a few notes in its song.

Though it is through giving the throng bonds And all kids want to do is belong Feel the long hug of one on one or many to many connection But they learn to unlove by exclusion, by ommission. “better grow a thicker skin hm?”, The roughest struggle for the answer ensues And she chews on the flesh of that question Till it locks her jaw, behind the door You hear her crack a tooth biting on an unnerving truth, a hard seed in the cherry of life: - born alone, die alone.

The time in between is for your own populating

SILENCE

I used to sit in trees and listen Not so much to the birds, or the the sounds of my family in their daily doings More to the spaces between.

When I’d retreat to the branches I would pick fruit with my toes Taste their sweetness through the soles of my feet And pretend I was in a library, reading the book of life in the braille of the breeze And I’d hear nuanced breeds of silence What were those profound soundless sighs in time?

Why did these pauses pull me to peculiarly polar parts of my mind?

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SEGUN ADEFILA AT 44 : A PEEP INTO THE FUTURE OF BARIGA

On November 14, 2016, Segun Adefila, who is also known as the BARIGA BOY turned 44, he is no longer a boy. This single article is meant to simply glorify, both the Man and the Bariga. It is a general knowledge that Bariga is one of the most notorious areas for cult clashes and gangland conflicts in Lagos, fact, but Bariga is also a treasure land for all sorts of talents and creative expressions. Located in the heart of Lagos Mainland, Bariga is arguably one of the most interesting parts of the state that anyone who claims to be in Lagos, must visit, fact. Aside the obvious Olamide Baddo, who’s presently shaking the pop music landscape to its bones, in order to properly understand how to capture Bariga in its interestingness, it is important to honor the pioneer of this present talent boom in Bariga.

For those of us who came into the arts in Lagos, in the year 1999 and beyond, most will agree with me that a lot of remarkable works abound in that period, Segun Adefila and his Crown Troupe of Africa’s signatory pieces, however, stood out; the playfulness and the innocence they brought to the fore was most contagious. This was the beginning of Nigeria’s forth republic, and Crown Troupe of Africa for me, was THE theater company of the forth republic, unsophisticatedly positioning itself as its entertainment, its conscience, and its journal. Through pieces like “Eda 1997,” Osusu Owo 1998,“ “Aluta 2001,” “Exodus 2003,” “Digbolugi 2003,” “Kaleidoscope 2003,” “Monkey Post 2005,” “Oga Malo Wan Piss 2007,” and countless others, together they recorded time and the instability of daily life, like no other, they spoke the heart of what is generally referred to as the masses, Adefila in his modesty, would say “I create the way I do, simply because I was lazy, all I do was look onto the streets of Bariga, and the stories and aesthetics required to tell them were offered on a platter of gold, all I did was to position myself as a vessel, and a direct mirroring of such reality”.

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theatre-arts found in Segun Adefila’s works, a natural solace, both in the sincerity, the creativity and his creative processes, his aesthetics and effortless beauty, his social and community engagement, in the dreams he sold to the youth of Bariga and many other young artistes of that time, in the way he comically addresses political reality of the time, and in the way he aptly raises consciousness. For many years I studied his works For many years I studied his works like past questions, attended his rehearsals in Bariga, even relocated to Bariga, discussed my fears and worries and the path of my own self-realisation with him.

I found so much interest in the manner at which, he attacks the leadership, but was harder on the followership; he speaks truth to both the power and cowardice that lives in all individuals that makes up his audience, anywhere, anytime. When I moved to France for my studies, I would often time call him up, and for hours we will dream together, critique the rotten system which doesn’t allow art to thrive, and end the rather long conversation with “let’s all keep working on different grounds, we can’t fall out of this world.”

Indeed Segun Adefila never fell out, even though that in itself, is nothing devoid of wonder, especially how he continued to be so creatively fertile and productive, with shows almost every weekend on the island, Theatre at Terra Kulture was built on the back of his tireless efforts, to tirelessly produce and show.

Freedom Park was no exception, he it was who made us discovered the most unimagined theatre spaces in town; he will tour the world and yet return to Bariga, the world would come into Lagos and go straight Bariga, yet he resisted all temptations till he managed to put Bariga on the big stages of this world. The multiple awards winning documentary film BARIGA BOY, by Femi Odugbemi became the first cinematic attempt to capture both the man and the Bariga on a big screen. Even though I was at no time a member of Crown Troupe, nor have I ever worked under his direction, but as a distant mentor turned colleague, Segun Adefila is in some ways responsible for the man I have become. So naturally, I was happy to celebrate him at his 45th birthday on November 14th 2016.

Myself and a group of like minds in Bariga, decided to throw a surprise party for Segun Adefila, but like everything in Bariga, nothing get expressed aside through the excessive flow of talents and creative energies brewing in this area. From a simple idea of celebrating the one man responsible for an explosion of talents in Bariga, a makeshift Monday afternoon event became a feast of cultural and creative expressions, imbued in the creative energy of this jaw-dropping neighborhood. In a spree of what was like a never ending succession of performances, we moved from a site specific contemporary dance performance by the notorious FOD GANG, to circus (mono cycle), free dance jam, to performance art, mock rituals and offering profane sacrifices to the orisha himself, through traditional dance performances, music concert and drums ensemble, which ended with an improvised open air cinema where BARIGA BOY was screened to all the fresh talents who already have great reverence for him. Then an after party.

What else can be said of art and its meaning beyond what I have had the privilege of witnessing in Bariga for more than a decade, in this vicinity, I have witnessed art becomes effortless, and I dare say inexistent, as it often times naturally becomes a direct part of life and daily living. As I watched amazing talents grow and bloom, all of them still young and with a lot of future, and this very event of November 14 made it the more clearer. I knew something was happening, and this something is the future unfolding in our very eyes, it was an unwavering claim and an announcement of what we’ve always referred to as “the future”, it made it all too obvious that my own religious devotion to redefining the “Now” had gotten to a stale point, where what all that must matter now is the future, because I have seen in it in the hunger and in the faces of those young and very young talents, and the sooner we put our differences aside, and dive into the mix, the sooner we might create a channel whereby these talents may be properly nurtured, bloom and become a great asset for this city, this nation, this continent and ultimately this world in the future, which itself is NOW.

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ONE ONE LOGOR OLUMUYIWA STAY WITH ME – That’s what the lone dancer seems to say as he springs out of the collective, as you follow –getting lost and found each time the limbs shapeshift so fast – you didn’t see it coming, then I click – Whoa! I screamed!

Searching the faces of nearby audience as if saying “Did you see that?!” I only want to be an observer when I shoot, objectively seeking detachment and familiarity with each frame, only realizing that with dance it’s different,.

These moments I stop, is for all of us, complete participation, a space where we all become ONE.

LOGOR OLUMUYIWA 1

What is the place of MOVEMENT as a philosophy in your works?

As a street photographer, the literal need to MOVE around is the primary action that determines the success in my work

2

What is Dance in your own words?

In Dance everything becomes One, the dancer, the sound and the audience all agrees to fast changing vibrations that culminate into one energy. It is always a beautiful experience.

3

Is art hope or solace, mirroring reality or reinventing a better world ?

Personally I think art is a mirror, it reflects back to us the world the way we never thought was possible and that’s where the magic is. The reflections and expressions will instigate fresh dialogues, questions and curiosities which are the basic recipes that push the human expression and thus enrich our experience of the multifaceted life and living as we know it. That could be hopeful for the world but definitely the mirroring comes before the solace.

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4

What is beauty, and what’s it’s role in your creations ?

Beauty is sought – it never asks to be seen. See diamond, see sunset. It is there in the banal, overlooked and ignored, that’s how I seek beauty in my work. To train the mind, eye and equipment to be a shrewd observer that spots these amidst the flurry of human carnival and activities around us.

5

What will you consider to be the mother of all arts and why?

Writing. The phrase “the secret of the world are in the pages of books is very correct”.

6

What happens when you see a good performance and tell us of your most memorable ?

A good performance leaves you with questions. You almost never find closure, you’ve enjoyed what you saw and you’ve participated somewhat unknowingly, jerked your body alongside the dancers, goose pimples have risen and fallen – still you find yourself musing in the lines of “Did that really happen?” what inspired the premise? Wow – such dedication.

Did you see that routine? Questions, questions. Then eventually MO[VE]MENTS

you conclude that – that was a good one, then seek it again. Circle repeats.

Qudus Onkikeku’s Before We Forget is one of the most impactful for me! Hard to choose really. I enjoyed the FOD gang in Bariga a lot too!

7

Solitude or Gatherings?

Seek both, practise solitude more and that’s even possible in a gathering.

8

Tell us of a defining MOMENT in your career.

Cliché as it may sound, every day I wake up and realize what I do is still my job and I haven’t compromised or given up. It inspires me like crazy to know I have another day and it means I can keep doing what I love. It’s a defining blessing.

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MY ONLY TRUE COUNTRY IS MY BODY : FAUSTIN LINYEKULA DAVID VAN REYBROUCK

_____ Clad in a sheet of newspaper, this is how I first saw him dance. I was watching a dvd of his choreography Spectacularly empty. A faint lightbulb left the stage in a state of penumbra. Faustin Linyekula moved across the stage, his body sinewy and sinuous as that of a contortionist. His movements were gracile like a bird. He was naked, but for a loincloth of newspaper. This mixture of physical vulnerability and the fine-print language of power provided an unsettling imagery that has stayed with me.

It made me think of an essay written by Marianne Van Kerkhoven, a cardinal dramaturgist and intellectual in the Flemish theatre scene in Belgium.

Her words were originally written to reflect on the high-voltage tension in Flanders between the political theatre of the 1970s (with its clear social statements) and the postmodern experiments of the 1980s (with its not-so-clear ideological deconstructions and its eulogy of art’s sovereignty). She wrote: “Searching for an organic merging of political commitment and artistic autonomy seems to me of crucial importance. Politics are personal and the personal is political: a process of truly interiorising the social options is for the ‘political artist’ probably the most important artistic deed.”

Her creed was a forceful, programmatic statement, yet honesty compels us to admit it was only rarely realized on the stages of Ghent, Brussels and Antwerp. In Kinshasa, however, Faustin Linyekula walked across the stage, almost naked, clad in a sheet of newspaper. The body every inch political, and politics overtly physical. _____ The physicality of politics must have been frustratingly obvious to anyone born in Kisangani, the city in eastern Congo where in a previous century Belgian colonizers and Arab slave-traders forged a painful coalition to suppress local African groups.

They were also frustratingly clear to someonne like Faustin who fled his native Kisangani to seek refuge in Nairobi, Kenya, where he lived as a clandestine migrant before he got kicked out of the country. Power made itself felt in Rwanda again where, six months 84

after the genocide, he tried to set up a Hamlet-production with the American staff of the International Court of Justice. Once more he got kicked out of an African country.

Yet Faustin danced, he danced in Kenya and Angola, in South Africa and Slovenia, in Austria and America, in Belgium and in France. He was well on his way to become one of these international dancers, one of those people for whom the globe has become a second home, albeit a home mostly filled with international festivals, hotel rooms, and waiting areas at airports. He chose not to. He went back to Congo, to Kinshasa, if only to tell his grandmother: “I have been on the road for such a long time. My only true country is my body. I tried to survive like some music that was never written.” _____ The body can be tattooed, tortured, kicked out and kissed. Yet the body is also a site of revolt, of refusal, of rebellion. The body is a country, not a secret garden, it’s a republic of contest and comfort. Faustin says: “I am a dancer. I am an African. Yet I am not an African dancer.”

A contortionist, indeed. _____ There is something deeply urban about the work of Faustin Linyekula. The received idea that the third world is predominantly the universe of emerald rainforests and ochre savannahs, sparsely dotted with cosy mud houses, is readily surpassed by today’s figures of the radical urbanization taking place in South East Asia, South-America and sub-saharan Africa. . Happening at a speed and a scale unseen in the West before, in Africa it results in bustling, humongous cities like Lagos, Cairo, Gauteng (the agglomeration of Johannesburg and Pretoria) and Kinshasa. This urban condition surfaces in the material culture of Faustin’s stage.

Among his favourite props are the neon light and the sheets of corrugated iron, reminiscent of the shantytowns of Africa’s brutal urban sprawl. In his Festival des mensonges, three dancers performed what looked like a courtship display with the bleak, bluish light of a pair of city lanterns. Kinshasa is, among many things, the thin and slig-

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htly depressing glow of its suburban neon lights.

As if they were not there to cast the dark away, but simply to dot the night.

Yet his vision on African-style urbanization is not pitiful or naïve. He accepts the urban condition as a given. His attitude is in line with what Vincent Lombume, Kinshasa’s most exciting novelist, has recently written: “One shouldn’t spit on the city. The city is a womb. My city has produced me. From its clouds of dust I was born. One should take the city as it is.” And he added: “There are cities and cities.

There are cities which you kill in silence, cities that you love and cities that you give birth to every day.

There is the city which you carry within, there is the city that you dream of, there are imaginary cities that clash in the imaginary world.” _____ Faustin opted for Kinshasa. He based his private dance company Studios Kabako in Kinshasa. He once took me to his rehearsal area. It was quite a ride in a jeep through the dusty neighbourhoods of Kinshasa where chickens fluttered away as we passed by. During the shaky ride, Faustin told us he was rehearsing a choreograpy that was soon going to be performed in Paris and Berlin. In front of a concrete wall and an iron gate, the vehicle halted.

“Here we are”, he said as we entered. Two young men stood on a lawn without grass. A sandpit without kids, eight meters by eight. They switched on the cassette player. There was no light, no stage, no mirror, no bar, nothing. Not even a strip of shade.

Only dust. And yet, here it is, I realized, that a passionate choreographer traces his artistic urge by developing shows that are going to be performed in the lofty theatre halls of the European capitals. _____ If Kinshasa is the city where Faustin Linyekula modelled his Studios Kabako, Kisangani is the city which he carries within. Much smaller and less vibrant than Kin, the place now licks its wounds after four years of civil war and human atrocities that defy the imagination. For the New Crowned Hope Festival in Vienna, Faustin decided to go back to his native Kisangani, fully realizing that the city he carries within has become a city he can only dream of.

The once magnificent Hotel Zaire Palace where he and his friends phantasized about as kids, is now the home of innumerable squatters. On the first floor rooms are still for rent, not per night, but per month. The tariff is twenty dollars. Faustin re-enters his native town and wonders what has become haunted: Kisangani or his body. His town no longer exists, his group of friends

friends has fallen apart. What has been left of Kisangani once the friends are gone? Perhaps their words.

Kabako, the one after whom the dance company was named, died close the Ugandese border of a disease that seemed to have become historical: the bubonic plague. Some of his writings occur in the new production. Kabako died in a small village without cemetery, as normally everyone gets buried on his or her plot of land. A villager who had lost all his sibs and peers took care of the young and unknown body: Kabako was buried under a coffee tree. The body, even the corpse, is a locus of pity and oblivion. Yet for his friends, his far-away tomb is an uneasy thought. Faustin’s other friend, Vumi (Antoine Vumilia Muhindo), is one of the thirty citizens that has been sentenced to death for their presumed part in the killing of president Laurent-Désiré Kabila. The process that condemned him was said to be a show trial. He was a poet, he still is a poet, but a poet that was seen as a spy. His text, Un monologue du chien (A dog’s soliloquy), forms the literary backbone of Faustin’s new performance. If the poet has long been considered as the king’s jester, the spy is most certainly the king’s dog. _____ Seven people are on stage, four dancers, one actor, one countertenor and one technician. They start from the dreams held by the inhabitants of Kisangani. And they end with Dinozord, the young Congolese breakdancer whose nickname is French phonetic for ‘dinosaure’. An appropriate nom de plume for he considers himself to be last man of his race for whom the body, even when mutilated and fallen to disease, is still sacred. His final solo is essentially a duet with Serge Kakudji, equally young, but remarkably mature opera-singer from Lubumbashi. For the last word, says Faustin Linyekula, should be given to the youngest members of the group.

The choreography is not a nostalgic return of a now established dancer to his roots, not a predictable trip down memory lane by someone who has succeeded.It is an exploration of a city that grieves and a hope that might be rekindled. “For me,” says Faustin, “it is a matter of coming home before setting off again, a matter of turning this page, while starting a new one. It is as if Mozart would have written his Requiem before his Magic Flute.”

David Van Reybrouck is a Flemish author and playwright who is based in Brussels.

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COLOURS AND LINES COLOURS AND LINES UZ0CHUKWU ONWUMERE Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still. This makes a moment remain fresh in our memory. Both photography and dance have a lot to do with time. Dance which is expressed through time and space, and photography, an art of creating images by recording light sensitive surface during a timed exposure.

Colour in this work denotes emotions, passion, fierceness, warmth, danger etc. The body of the dancer however expresses lines. It completes the story telling sequence of a dancer. Lines and forms are the words of a dancer.

UZOCHUKWU ONWUMERE 1

What is the place of MOVEMENT as a philosophy in your works?

The objective is to capture moments from the dancers movement. The place of movement is seen in the dancers bodily postures and expression. Movements are symbols of primary action and they lead to dance.

Movements in jumping, hand expressions etc.

2

What is Dance in your own words?

Dance is freedom. Its an artistic expression as one moves with a certain rhythm or against it, depending on how the dancers feels or emotion leads. It is a certain way of expression.

3

Is art hope or solace, mirroring reality or reinventing a better world ?

Art is could be based on perception. Its about what the artist feels. Its freedom, its a personal interpretation. Some believe art as an entertainment value, solace or art for its sake while some that art should make a conscious effort to correct the society. For me, if art is not hope, or does not have the ability to educate people especially in our current soci 86

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ety. Then what exactly is its place.

4

What is beauty, and what’s it’s role in your creations ?

Beauty is aesthetics and it means adding to your skeletal framework; and in this case dance.

I tried to play with colour and light to highlight the beautiful bodily movement of the dancers.

5

What will you consider to be the mother of all arts and why?

Poetry. Poetry has been there for several thousand years ago.

As long as people could speak.

Most of them could be dated back as 800 BC. The earliest poetry is believed to have been recited or sung, employed as a way of remembering oral history, genealogy, and law. Poetry is often closely related to musical traditions, and the earliest poetry exists in the form of hymns (such as the work of Sumerian priestess Enheduanna). Many of the poems surviving from the ancient world are recorded prayers, or stories about religious subject matter, but they also include historical accounts, instructions for everyday activities, love songs and fiction. Through it, some other forms of art started.

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What happens when you see a good performance and tell us of your most memorable ?

If I see a good performance, I will definitely crave more of it.

My most memorable was a performance during dançe meet dance 2009. There was a particular performance that made use different artistic elements and the story was a great one. I can’t remember the title.

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Solitude Solitude

or

Gatherings?

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Tell us of a defining MOMENT in your career.

The defining moment in my career was when I learnt to believe and trust in my abilities.

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THERE WILL BE NO DANCE REVOLUTION:CHOREOGRAPHING BARIGA Dotun Ayobade

I had seven minutes before my Yoruba History and Culture class at University of Texas, Austin. I spent them on Facebook out of habit. Top on my timeline was a live video feed from Qudus Onikeku, a Lagos-based choreographer. My Facebook friends routinely seize live videos to broadcast unsolicited opinions. So, I had cultivated a skepticism for this Facebook feature. However, Onikeku’s was a different kind of live video feed.

The video was a live choreography by the Fly or Die (FOD) Gang, a nascent all-male dance group. The dance unfolded in the middle of a street in Bariga, a section of Lagos populated by students, struggling artists and the working class. To be specific, a small pond of muddied water was the performance space.

Bad roads conspired with a deficient drainage system to produce knee-deep ponds in Bariga streets. The “realistic” scene in which FOD Gang staged their work might very easily be collected rain water, overflown gutters or a combination of both. The choreography, to my understanding, is unnamed. Its commentary on the Nigerian condition was, nonetheless, brutal and scathing.

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The last ten years have produced some of Nigeria’s most volatile episodes since the Biafra War. Boko Haram’s sporadic bombings put the nation on the world map as a hotspot for terrorism. The scale of government corruption in this period has been incredible, even by Nigerian standards.

At present, the nation is neck-deep in an economic recession, on a scale unseen in its history.

The decade also saw moments of hope, however.

In 2015, Nigeria witnessed a significant political transition when former Nigerian President, Goodluck Jonathan, then an incumbent president, lost his bid for re-election. The transition indicated a maturing of Nigeria’s democracy. The dialectic of malaise and promise that the nation embodies are themes that permeate the everyday existence.

Yet, neither theatre nor mainstream performance idioms such as hip hop and Nollywood have found a vocabulary for articulating these pressing realities. (Visual artists do not suffer the same dilemma).

There are a few prominent exceptions. Segun Adefila’s Crown Troupe of Africa, for instance, has consistently produced politically-engaging theatre for two decades. Besides producing plays for the stage, Adefila contributes to the budding theatre movement in Bariga. The “Bariga Boy,” as he is popularly called, insists on his humble beginnings as a theatre student at the University of Lagos (UNILAG). While Adefila boasts one of the most impressive resumes in Nigerian theatre, his community effort in Bariga increasingly defines him as a cultural worker.

This piece, however, is not a commentary on Adefila’s work per se, but on Bariga, the space that Adefila himself, the FOD Gang and other dancers now call their artistic home. The Bariga Muse Although situated close to the University of Lagos, Bariga operates on its own logic. Its infrastructure (if we can describe its landscape as “structured”) is the very antithesis of the posher Victoria Island where the elite theatre spaces

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like Terra Culture and Muson Center are found.

While Bariga and Victoria Island are shores of the Atlantic Ocean, parts of the former struggle to stay afloat when it rains and its water level rises.

Some buildings remain partly submerged in the water; others open directly into artificial ponds.

Bariga is one of several havens to Lagos’s bustling working class population. It therefore bustles with creative energy. It hosts vegetable markets and shops along its roads. Street traders bleed into the roads just as the lagoon waters put pressure on its shores. St. Finbarr’s Road, what appears to be the single most coherent State infrastructure in the area, connects Bariga directly to the University of Lagos (UNILAG). St. Finbarr’s long vein provides sustenance to a restless cohort of traders and area boys, street rascals who govern the streets and, occasionally, the flow of traffic.

Bariga boasts the kind of creative energy over which working-class Lagosians claim a monopoly.

What is more important is that Bariga is fast becoming the cultural hub for the performing arts in Lagos. It’s proximity to the University guarantees more than perfunctory artistic exchanges between the community and the school. UNILAG theatre graduates have operated acting troupes with their classmates in Bariga. Proximity to campus guarantees access to additional rehearsal spaces, talent, mentorship with former professors and, importantly, an audience.

In the same vein, Bariga, populated largely by the unlettered, imposes a much-needed humility in theatre graduates who operate in the area.

Therefore, theatre in Bariga is self-conscious about aesthetic form, theme and language. Here, the performing arts organically meld the ethos of the underclass with the finesse of the schooled. The rule governing the producing performance is also relatively uncomplicated: you will suffer irrelevance (and even ridicule) if you fail to speak to both the experiences of everyday Barigans and the University-schooled. Whatever Bariga-based artists lack in luxury, they gain in what I will describe as “the Bariga muse,” the restless energy of the streets. The streets constitute rent-free rehearsal and performance spaces for artists. In FOD Gang’s piece, the streets become subject for political commentary.

The choreography easily blends an aesthetics of the poor with the analytical acumen of the schooled..

FOD Gang: Sites of Discourse FOD Gang’s street performance operate between structure and free play. Movements range from synchronized group sequences to individualized

freestyle routines. The choreography is carefree but structured when one least expects. Halfway through the dance, no dancer is recognizable.

Reddish brown mud conceals their identities.

They have become one with the Bariga landscape. Their attitude fascinated me more so than the dance. They sling mud at one another, fling themselves into the pond. One dancer playfully simulates swimming in the mud. They giggle with childish delight, ostensibly oblivious to the hazards to which they have exposed themselves. It was a troubling sight, but a beautiful piece. And, the spectacle of young men playing in mud alone did not make it beautiful. The dance routine followed a casual structure that both masks and lays bare the choreographers’ political intention.

I realized in horror that I had overstayed my time on Facebook. I was after all sitting in a virtual theatre. The performance haunted me as I disappeared into class. I could not wait to see the entire piece, where it led. My skin crawled each time I reconstructed the scene in my head. Perhaps, viscerality was the point of the work. Or, its defamiliarization of the Bariga landscape.

The piece makes at least two theoretical interventions: one, about site specific performance in Lagos, and, secondly, the place of the dancing body in postcolonial discourse.

First, the piece upends the notion of site-specific performance. A site-specific performance, Routledge Performance Archive suggests, is “produced in non-theatre sites, and aims to engage with the meaning and history or creative impetus of those sites, and reach audiences who might not come to the theatre.” For FOD Gang, the physical site is a muddy pond in the middle of a road in Bariga.

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The performance scene is a site produced not simply from neglect, but out of a principle of negation. Their choreography is made possible only through absence, the absence of tar in this case.

Or, to consider it differently, the presence of water in place of tar. Negation constitutes the site in and of itself. Therefore, the piece poses the question: What is a “site” that was never meant to exist? They stage a potent critique of the State by making a scene, literally, in a space of neglect.

This precisely is what makes this piece poignant.

Additionally, FOD Gang resituates site specificity in terms of what Tejumola Olaniyan has described as the postcolonial incredible in his publication, Arrest the Music: Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics, a gross infraction of normality in postcolonial life. In this way, FOD Gang embeds the dancing body within the realm of postcolonial discourse.

For the dancers, the fact of post-colonialism is not theorized as an abstraction, but as a breathing, living reality. They locate the body within the very material dimension of the everyday. For them, the postcolonial is where the road cracks, and where it collects rain water. It is how bodies navigate this impaired urban landscape. There are no binaries to debate. There are however, bodies in motion, bodies swimming and playing in a space whose existence signals a discourse of anomy.

Their work is not an isolated instance. Lagos-based choreographers have been creating innovative work for about two decades. The choreographies of Adedayo Liadi, Nneka Umeigbo, Victor Phullu, Toyin James, Steve James, Felix Emoruwa, Anthony Offiong, Baoku Moses, Victor Thompson, Victor Eze, to name a few, have engaged similar themes as famed Nigerian writers, playwrights, and scholars. Qudus Onikeku expands this pantheon with his recent We Almost Forgot (2016), a reflection on violence, trauma and cultural memory.

A certain level of immediacy, of felt-sensing, comes with the experience of a well-crafted choreography. Their works deconstruct the body, reanimate it with intentionality and finesse. The art could leave you troubled, confused or scared. But never indifferent. These choreographers have operated with a sophistication that is largely absent in the contemporary performing arts. An example is Dayo Liadi’s award-winning Ori on YouTube.)

The works of Nigerian choreographers’ have always embodied what constitutes the postcolonial, the neoliberal, the incredible. These works continue to be politically relevant even when we lack the vocabulary (or the courage) to interpret them.

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The choreographers mentioned above hardly produce work anymore. Nonetheless, their legacies endure in the art of younger dancers and choreographers. FOD Gang is indicative of a dance legacy in Nigeria.

One reviewer of FOD Gang’s performance concluded,“If art is about social change and there will be a future for dance and revolutionary theatre in Nigeria, there are no better ambassadors than the FOD gang.”

I dare say there is no dance revolution waiting to happen. The revolution is roughly two decades in the making. What is relatively recent is Bariga’s rise and recognition as a hub for the performing arts in Lagos.

All images by Logor Olumuyiwa -FOD GANG

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IS THERE A TECHNIQUE TO TEACHING AFRICAN CONTEMPORARY DANCE? AIMA AKHAZEMEA

of dance, regardless of the style of your routine.” As As a teacher, I am aware that what I should teach much as there is a general need for dancers to posmy students is the basic technique of any dance sess a strong technique, I believe each dance style style, and from there, they can freely create conalso has its own technique in order for it to be corstructs that fit or can be related to that style of rectly taught and transferred to the next generation. dance. We have a variety of dance schools that Lester Horton had a similar belief when he was build on this ideology and produce dancers who designing the Horton Technique. According to are versatile and can understand the basic difan article written by Diana Dinerman, the direcference between the different styles they are tor of the Horton Summit, rather than basing the taught. That way, one cannot mistake a Pin drop technique on his personal choreographic style in Beak Dancing for a Pirouette in Ballet. They like most of the Modern dance pioneers, Horton both have that uniqueness that defines them. conducted his research using his students and But when students are being trained, these diflooked at dance movements through different ferences are sometimes referred to as the “techbody types and various ranges and physical limits. nique” of that style. If this is the case, what then is Thereupon, he created six categories of movement the “technique” of African Contemporary Dance? he coined ‘studies’, which focused on endowing First, we have to ask the question...what is dancers with strength, extension, lyricism, fluiditechnique? We hear so much of Graham Techty and versatility so that any dancer can be ready nique, Horton Technique, Release Technique for any choreographer. The Horton Technique is etc., in association with Modern and Contemstill highly respected and sought-after, 60 years porary dance. These techniques are still taught prior to its creation, and I believe that over those today in many dance schools and are used as a years it has evolved and embraced the changing basic reference point of understanding the way face of contemporary dance training. Howeva choreographer can choose to make his or her er, contemporary dance training is still evolving. dancer move. There are even times when an auReturning to the Nigerian dance scene, one dition call is announced with a pre-requisite cannot really pinpoint a choreographer or dance training in one of these so called “techniques”. educator that has done the same thing with AfMost of these scenarios presented above are more rican Contemporary Dance. Different choreogprominent in places such as the United States and raphers have created dance techniques based Europe. Nevertheless, the tide is slowly turning as on their personal style of creativity, but none Nigerian dancers are desiring to understand these that addresses the need to help train profestechniques and, even aim to create their own... sional dancers to showcase the versatility of the some without prior knowledge of what a technique Nigerian or African dance landscape. The folis and why such people as Martha Graham and low-up question should be, what is African ConLester Horton needed to create these techniques. temporary dance or what should it look like?

The term ‘Dance Technique’ has had many deThe casual joke amongst dancers is that when bates regarding its description, but one of the most ‘Contemporary dance’ is added to another style, interesting description that helps set a baseline for for instance, contemporary Salsa, it is no longer this conversation is from Varsity.com which states, considered as pure. I’m still trying to process this “Technique is the basis of all fundamentals of way of thinking, but from a purist perspective, dance, from holding your body correctly while their frustration is appreciable. There doesn’t seem performing, to executing skills properly in a routo be a clear and straightforward training provided tine. Strong technique extends across all areas 91 MO[VE]MENTS

in the field of contemporary dance here in Nigeria so that distinct differences can be seen between Africa contemporary dance style and other styles.

Very few institutions start from Ballet, then, Modern dance, before working their way into the variations that different choreographers have brought to the face of contemporary dance. ‘Dance theory’ is not popularly taught as part of the foundation of the contemporary dancer in Nigeria, just the movement, and thus, a lack of understanding regarding what contemporary dance actually is.

I had the privilege to learn about the rebels of dance (also produced by the BBC) such as Isadora Duncan whose approach to dance affected Doris Batcheller Humphrey, (Humphrey’s most popular theory is ‘The Arch of Two Deaths’; and her book, ‘The Art of Making Dances’). Martha Graham (founder of the Graham Technique which looked at contraction), Merce Cunningham with his technique which dealt with his theory of random selection (using a sequence similar to music, ‘verse, chorus and coda’ and then rolling a dice to decide how the sequence will go, either ‘chorus, coda, verse’ or ‘verse, coda, chorus’ etc). The music is then separated from the creation of the dance piece (Cunningham’s dancers hardly ever heard the music for the dance until a day or two before their performance). Cunningham’s dancers went on to influence another radical set of choreographers, including a favourite of mine, Pina Bausch.

As an educator, I see these people and their different influences still radiating and inspiring dancers today, mainly because I have their knowledge as my dance study foundation. The landscape for can be termed African Contemporary Dance is just as colourful, but it’s just not as clearly communicated. By communication I mean, books, articles, video publications all pointing in the same direction of a step-by-step teaching of African Contemporary Dance, and possibly resources that can even be used in primary and secondary schools.

There are choreographers and teachers doing so by word of mouth, but that means it cannot get past our shores unless an instructor travels out, and when they do, only a limited number of people get to benefit from it. It is left to the learner’s interpretation of how it should be passed on, creating even more dilution of the original.

As a theory and point of further discussion, I believe that an African Contemporary Dance training course ahould include; Traditional African Dance Training: 92

If a dancer had to learn every traditional dance in Africa before attempting to further train in African contemporary, they will have to study for a similar number of years as doctors. African dances are many and varied. What I suggest is that the most popular dances from different African countries should be taught, for instance, Bata, Atilowgu and Koroso (Nigeria ‘WAZOBIA’), Zulu (South Africa), Chigodo (Mozambique), Saba (Senegal), Achabeko (Ghana) etc.

This is similar to the way Ballet is taught to dancers who want to eventually become contemporary dancers. Understanding the different quirks that belong to the various tribes can then allow a growing dancer to begin to understand how to be more creatively ‘authentic’ and true to the ideology (and identity) of African Contemporary Dance.

Exercises such as Body Isolation, Body Undulations and Storytelling could be daily exercises as these three can be seen as continuous threads through most Traditional African dances.

Contemporary Dance Training Contemporary dance training will comprise more of the things stated above about the ‘Rebels of Dance’, their inspirations and the techniques they created to mold their dancers, to do the dances we now know so well like Cafe Muller (Pina Bausch) and Rosas Danst Rosas (Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker).

Another focus of study would be on the impact of African dances on the evolution of Modern and Contemporary dances. One of the most popular dance pieces of all, Revelations by Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre is a fantastic example of this. We not only see elements of African dance traits, but see Africans dancing a beautiful combination of both flight and grounded movements. Now imagine a contemporary piece in which a choreographer can tell you which African tribe inspired the piece and which story from that tribe, and how he or she feels it relates to the global audience. That to me would not only connect to my love for the creative heart of Africa but also my intellect as an academic.

have from the variant environment we grew up in.

Not every African joke or life situation is publicized by international media. A story that may be understood by the international audience would be the stereotyped story of ‘strict’ African parent presently pervading the social media. Some may insist we would have to spoon-feed the audience if you want them to understand an African story. However, this can be left to the choreographer, such as Akram Khan who integrated traditional Indian Dance with Contemporary Dance, without having to spoon-feed the audience and yet able to send beautiful inspiration through his work.

In conclusion, African Contemporary Dance technique needs a clear and structured teaching system in order to educate our future professional dancers and empower them to not only share the African story, but also be amazed by it, before taking it to the world stage. This can happen when a real conversation (of the mind and body) happens between leading choreographers and dance educators in Africa, or to start with, here in Nigeria. For If we don’t rise up to teach them, who will?

Choreography The art of making dance has not changed much since a standard was thought up for it during the days of Doris Humphrey. All a creative person needs to remember is that the standardized outlines created by multiple people is just a guideline. The main difference for African Contemporary Dance would be to create ways of clearly communicating their stories to an audience that may not have the same subtle understandings that we

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UNTITLED UNTITLED MICHAEL OGA

MICHAEL OGA 1

What is the place of MOVEMENT as a philosophy in your works?

Movement -is an attempt to take a fresh look at how both photography and art tender each other more visible and understandable. That is, it brings two different professions together to make a good statement.

2

What is Dance in your own words?

Dance-is a movement and gesticulations through time and space to music- rhythmic or other wise.

3

4

What is beauty, and what’s it’s role in your creations ?

Beauty -they say is in the eyes of the beholder but in my opinion, I think beauty is having a good attitude, and is embodied in a person who does good things for people and also has great looks on the outside.

5

What will you consider to be the mother of all arts and why?

What i consider to be mother of all arts is DANCE and I reason it is a complete ART.

Is art hope or solace, mirroring reality or reinventing a better world ?

YES, Art is Hope, first what is Art: it is a medium of imagination as well as creative self expression.

Within all forms of Art : writing, painting, film making, sculpting, photographing and so on.

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6

What happens when you see a good performance and tell us of your most memorable ?

When i see a good performance i drop tears, the most memorable are MAAFA (Point of no return) and iwalewa. My Reason is that the stories are touching and I also got some good shots.

7

Solitude I like both.

or

Gatherings?

8

Tell us of a defining MOMENT in your career.

Moment in Career was went my Camera develop fault and i also lost flash light in an event i was about to cover.

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TECHNOLOGY OF THE CIRCLE BY ONYE OZUZU INTERVIEW WITH ARETHA AOKI

Onye Ozuzu’s drop-in class Technology of the Circle: Satellite-ing was two hours of subtle surprises unfolding through improvisatory moving, sounding, and storytelling, followed by group discussion with an analytical approach toward “what happened.” At times it felt as though Onye was turning on the fog machine and the bright lights, cueing the orchestra, and then pressing pause and asking, “Okay, what was that? Yes, it was dramatic; yes, you were transported. But physically, what happens to create this feeling? What are the mechanics of it?” Emotionally resonant physical prompts and structures, technical observation, and language converged in one space, perhaps allowing for a more capacious social body to emerge. I want to say that Onye in Technology of the Circle is programming the body to be more empathetic—to listen attentively, share space—and to be more courageous—to act, participate, and take space.

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Following SFDI, I reached out to Onye over email with a list of questions. Due to busy schedules, we met for but a brief hour on Skype to have a live exchange. The following combines some of my pre-crafted questions with in-the-moment responses and additional writing by Onye.

Researching and Conceptualizing the Circle For the last several years, I have been cultivating an artistic practice I’ve termed “The Technology of the Circle” (TOTC), which explores the circle as a structure for improvised group interaction: the circle of playground fights, of Brazilian Capoeira, of Jazz music, of B-boying/B-girling, of club culture cyphering and battling, of the swirling interaction of Aikido’s Uke and Tori, of a salsa couple, and of contact improvisation. The intended objective of the TOTC process is the crafting of layered, powerful, individual, and embodied collaborative action.

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by difference (as all groups are) to share a center in order to offer participants the opportunity to cultivate a group awareness. I use the TOTC process to offer disparate dance communities a method to learn and share experiences. . . .Through the process of building an improvisational container that they can share, participants are compelled to recognize the commonalities and differences inherent in their forms. Furthermore, participants have the opportunity to hone and shape that improvisational container into a “local” culture, one that moves beyond mere recognition of commonalities and differences; one that can support rich, detailed communication and action among them.

ARETHA: There are many diverse movement practices informing TOTC. Is this a process of delving into your personal archive and finding and forging connections between these forms, or are you actively researching and bringing more forms into the fold of TOTC—or both?

ONYE OZUZU: First and foremost, I would say, yes, I have been digging into my own archives, but then from the very beginning I was doing this work with other people; I was digging through my archives and setting frames, and once we had some scores to play with, the people who were in the circle with me, whichever time I was doing it, would over time bring information from their archives onto the table.

The other thing was this ongoing conversation that I was having with colleagues in academic institutions around diversified dance forms, and listening to the value-driven rationale for why certain forms were not being given the same kind of access as others. When people would get past the fear of having the conversation, I was listening to some of the real concerns of people who were sitting within a Western concert dance aesthetic. For instance, they would critique the students who were auditioning jazz and hip-hop choreography for a student dance concert, and they would say, “Well, their use of space is very sophomoric; it’s not very complex,” because the hip-hop and jazz dancers would arrange themselves in rows and face the judges and do their dance moves—do their “choreo,” their routine. At one level I would challenge them to look at the space they were focusing on—they were focusing on the space outside the body and all around the dancer, when these students’ dances are coming from cultures

where space and being in space is described differently. These dance aesthetics are coming from places where people are living in much more socially intimate, “relationshipped,” body-to-body spaces. And perhaps the space that I have that’s mine is actually the space that I am occupying as opposed to the space all around me. So you look at the multiunit use of the torso, and these dancers are actually negotiating the space inside their bodies in highly complex ways and not paying so much attention to the space outside their body.

Also, they’re facing you (my colleagues?) because the dances are coming from a culture in which the dancer would be in a circle facing an intended conversant. The forms are actually conversation, they’re more rhythmic in orientation, and you’re directing your discourse to someone who you’re sharing information with or competing with or in an argument with—in the West African context, you’re directly in communication with a drummer.

In the hip-hop context, you’re in direct communication with the person you are battling or maybe sharing or cyphering with. And so that directly facing–full frontal disposition that my modern dance colleagues saw from their cultural concerns as being unsophisticated was perhaps just totally a misreading. My colleagues’ observations sparked my curiosity, and I began to notice things while in the circle (in a club or West African dance circle); there is architecture of space. It doesn’t necessarily happen from the decision making of a single designer, as in a formalist context. Architecture of space in a club or in a circle is happening through the rolling out of a shared understanding of physical and energetic relationships between bodies and evolving narratives. The circle is a principality or is a common principle, but the circle is not always a literal circle—there’s also the people standing outside the circle, there’s the person that goes in the circle, there’s the way the circle moves around the space.

There’s the way the crowd sometimes crushes the circle, and there’s the way the circle opens back up and pushes the crowd back. There’s the dancer that comes into the circle and dances and then goes and gets a drink and talks to someone by the bar. All of those things are highly oriented toward a unified principle that you could recognize as having its own intelligence or purpose. I started thinking about that and then it just flowed, one thing from the next.

I started thinking about mathematics: a circle becomes a circle because you have a line that’s equi

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distant from the same single point, right? So the individual that goes into the center of the circle becomes a focal point that then gives the circle the opportunity to exist because everyone is focused on that one point and it becomes a circle. And then I said, well the concept of the circle could be animated by the focus, not necessarily by a line. If we are all equally focused in, then we could take distance out and we could be a circle because we have an equal focus on a single point, no matter where all of us are standing.

Then we started to play with various scores or game structures that would allow us to get into that space; the type of space cultivated in the dance circle that I was familiar with. I was curious: How do we know to make the choices that we make when we make them? I guess my hypothesis is that we know because we feel: we’re picking up physical sensations, minute physical sensations, in our bodies, and we’re getting information. And seeing is an important aspect of it. Seeing confirms and flags what we feel.

Satellite-ing and Focus Satellite-ing, a segment of Technology of the Circle, is a duet between a soloist and a circle of people.

What happens in the heated intensity of a breaking circle, in a community of family on a wedding reception dance floor, in a capoeira roda? What cultivates that heat? How is it composed? How does it change? What does the group allow in the one? What does the one allow in the group? This work engages the frameworks that support group improvisation with a shifting soloist as focal point.

Relationship manifests as geometry, as space, as form. Sensitivities are cultivated, communication deepened, and the processes of both collective and individual choice-making refined.

A: I found “satellite-ing”—moving in circular relationship to the soloist while maintaining focus on her/him/them—to be an interesting illustration of how mirror neurons work. By bringing the whole body to watching and listening, there is a natural inclination to copy and feel connection to the mover. Maintaining eye contact on the soloist was itself an interesting dance; I found myself so drawn in that the boundaries between self and other softened and I had to calibrate being in my body and also being with the body in focus. Can you talk about focus in relationship to 98

the development of the “satellite” score?

O: : When I was first coming up as a dancer, I was a model in a life drawing class for an artist named Ed Love. Ed was a sculptor and was teaching in the art department at Florida State University, and I was studying with his daughter, Nia Love. Nia was a great mentor of mine; Ed was a mentor of hers and all of us that were working together at the time.

Darrell Jones and Trebien Pollard and I all danced with Nia and were for a short period of time quite connected to her And so I used to work for him as a life drawing model, and he used to orient the class around me: he would put me on a platform, a circular platform in the middle of a circular room—I think of it as circular, but it might have been that the easels were in a circle around me. And he taught drawing, but he was also teaching philosophy. One of the things he talked about was vision and how it is that you see what you see when you look at it. He would encourage the artists to squint their eyes and recognize that when you look at the body you don’t see it because it has an outline around it—that’s two-dimensional. He would talk about the violence of the coloring book and how having been given coloring books when we were young impressed upon us this idea that a body is a body because it has an outline. But that’s not true; a body is obviously three-dimensional, and you see what you see because of the interplay of light and shadow. And so in teaching his students to draw the body he would get them to squint their eyes so they could see more clearly my body’s shadow and light, and where the light was coming from, and why certain parts were in shadow and what the shadow and the light tell you about the contours of the body, and what the contours tell you about the anatomy of the body within. And he would get them to stand up and squint and then to come forward and back—to come closer to me, or to my body, or to move farther away, and to also stand up from what they were drawing and back away from their own drawing. In order to get perspective, he would also get them to walk around the room and look at other people’s drawings to see my body from each person’s perspective, as well as physically—so you’re standing behind other artists and you’re getting to see their perspective through what they drew, as well as their perspective by standing where they are relative to the light.

At the time, I was working in kind of a Butoh aesthetic with his daughter. He would use my ability

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to move in very subtle ways over long, long periods of time, and I would essentially compose improvi sational performances that would be drawn, over the course of an hour or two, by students. I would take my breaks, and I would also walk around and get to see myself from their perspectives. And I think this whole experience had a lot to do with the development of the TOTC score I call “satellite.”

Languaging the Circle A: Why “technology” of the circle rather than, say, “form” or “technique” of the circle? Does it refer to an aspect of utility and efficacy in the work that allows it to be applied to the world outside the studio?

O: The “technology” is the circle being leveraged by users that understand how to leverage it. I wanted to use the word “technology” because I wanted to highlight that sense of efficacy absolutely, the sense that we are doing this for a purpose, that we are coming to get work done. Like, nowadays, the kids are using the phrase, “I got my life,”“I’m getting my life in this circle,” you know. I remember a friend of mine in Denver that would talk about “dancing for your freedom” in kind of a joking way, because inside of it there’s that reference to our African American idea of, “He was doing that for his freedom; he was running for his freedom!” Right? Like somebody who’s just going balls to the wall,

throwing themselves completely into something.

And then there are times when people say it in jest, “You’re kinda going overboard.” But that sense of doing something for a purpose that is absolutely crucial, right? That sense of, if you’re running for your freedom, you’re running for your life. I think that in the context of a society characterized by oppression for many, like the one that we live in now, there’s a subversive discourse in words like that because when you have young people saying that they’re going to a club dancing in a circle with friends at night, and that’s where they get their life, it begs the question, What’s happening the rest of the time? And why is that the place where life needs to be got?

Technology also for me refers to deeper, older, more classical research in the roots of Africanist engagement of the circle in traditional cultures where dance and drumming are absolutely seen as medicine, as social and political and civic tools of engagement, where there are much more complex ways in which they are leveraged as consciously curated cultural material that has the ability to effect transformative change. I still sometimes hear people refer to the advent of hip-hop culture in the Boogie Down Bronx in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the transition that happened when the leaders of gangs who had been fighting viciously with each other over gang territory called a summit and decided to declare peace. They had a

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peace summit and made a decision: we are going to transition from a time of war and an ethos of war into a time of peace. . Music and dance (B-boying/ B-girling and DJing and MCing) were technologies and methodologies that they consciously leveraged to bridge that intended transition. And people still refer to hip-hop as “just some kids having fun.” It was so much more than that. So I think that there’s something in my use of the word “technology” that is also aggressive and made to be taken seriously. I mean for the idea to be taken seriously that we are engaging these circles and their conscious references to the dances of people of color and people who have lived in multiple generations of oppression.

And then . . . there’s my people of color narrative, and there’s also my contemporary dancer/intentionally embodied human narrative that’s railing against the digitization of life and railing against the way that our tools and our technology seem to be moving further and further away from the idea that we need to engage our entire body. I’m reminding myself and everybody that our primary technology IS the body, actually, so there’s definitely that going on as well

ward a concretization of what’s happening in the body—bringing the attention and language back to what can be observed on an anatomical level. I found that I had to revise how I thought about my experience a bit to find these words. It was difficult at first because I’m more comfortable in the poetic, the metaphorical, and then it became very grounding to simply track and give words to changing physical states. How does language function in this practice?

O: I think language is something that’s become even more intentional as I practice with groups.

Because, how do I put it? This is maybe an inappropriate metaphor, but this is what is coming up for me: I remember when I first started making out with guys in high school, and the only reference I had for whatever that was supposed to be was coming from movies, right? And so I remember the moment when I realized, “Oh, I need to stop moving around so much!” Because I was making out and I was moving my body from the outside based on how I thought I was supposed to look, as opposed to just paying attention to how I felt.

I remember being years into thinking that I had a “sexuality” when I finally realized, “Oh, I’m not actually experiencing this” because I’m pretending; I’m doing a picture of it that I have from a movie somewhere.

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been looking at it from the outside see the dance as being very sensual and having a lot of movement in the hips. So what they will do when they’re first trying it is to start moving their hips a lot, and the feet will kind of follow the hips, when in actuality it’s the inverse: salsa comes from a family of forms wherein the simplicity of human stepping or walking is taken to virtuosic levels. Salsa is a dance about stepping and shifting your weight completely—in a very subtle way, but fully shifting your weight from one foot to the next in a particular rhythmic pattern. The focus is on the step, not the hips. The hips move naturally, just like when you walk down the street, and it doesn’t need to be any more than that. But it’s the rhythmic pattern of them that draws your eye to what’s happening in the hips because it becomes accentuated or altered from the natural “one two one.” You’re doing “dens dins, dens dins” and you’re stepping “bam bam bam, bam bam bam,” and it puts that little “bam” accent on the weight shift, which draws your eye to the hip, though it is not originating in the hip at all. So, sometimes what you see can deceive you. Or even the story that you tell about what you think you’re feeling can distract you from the awareness of the actual experience. I think that it’s the cultivated awareness of what the body is actually experiencing that can, the next time you go into the circle, take you deeper into the experience.

A: : Language was also embedded in the physical structures in your class and not just the verbal processing of them. There was a natural progression of talking through one’s day, to exploring rhythm through sounding, and then storytelling. In the final exercise, the group repeated the phrase, “When I . . . , I . . . . After that, I . . .” to hold the space while a soloist entered the circle to move and tell a story.

I’m interested in how the content of the story itself didn’t matter, only that it arose from the relationship of the sound of the group as one “instrument,” hitting the instrument of the solo body. So we were connecting and feedbacking through sound, story, and movement—adjusting tone, speed, volume, and spatial relationship in response to the whole changing organism of the circle.

O: : I had a version of the TOTC circle in which I worked with a group of ten dancers for about nine months. We got to the point of doing a lot of storytelling, and because we would come together iteratively, like two times a week for nine months, people started knowing each other’s stories and being

able to take each other back into their stories.

And then there would be times where someone would get into a kind of a Technology of the Circle storytelling thing. I remember there were a couple of dancers in particular who were—bless their hearts—just so romantic, who would get into the circle and start talking about the circle. They would go, “We are here! Listening to each other’s hearts and minds, and healing from the past,” and it would just kill it because it was just too corny. It was hippy shit. And I would say, “No, no, no.”

It’s funny, I had an African dance teacher once in the eighties or nineties talk about teaching African dance in the context of the classroom. I was thinking a lot at the time about pedagogy and West African dance, or in dance forms that were highly rhythmic and Western, like modern dance, and the way my modern dance teachers would always stop and demonstrate very specific placements of bones, for instance, and the African dance teachers would just keep going. And if you were going to get feedback from Yousouff Koumbassa or somebody, they would just come next to you and dance close to you, in your energy, and dance so you could feel their rhythm more clearly. But there was never a stopping, there was never making the person hyperaware of “you’re tapping too many times on your right foot.” I remember talking to an African dance teacher who said, “Oh, no, that’s intentional”. What we’re trying to do is so complex and so layered and needs the body to be so vulnerable that bringing too much conscious attention to the parts of it will only lock the person back up again. In TOTC I saw this happening when people would start to have narrative explanations for what they thought was happening. They would become overly attentive to an idea of “healing” or “supporting,” and the next time they went in the circle, I would see them trying to re-create those narratives as opposed to being available for what was happening or emerging in the moment.

So for me there’s something about saying, “My palms are hot.” Naming. It’s not really about what the person is saying. It’s about heightening the awareness of body so that the next time that person goes in the circle they can go to a deeper level of awareness than whatever they were able to verbally say. But if people go away from the body and start to plug what they’re feeling into a narrative, “It feels like we are doing blah blah blah,” then the next time they’ll go into their “me making out with

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my high school boyfriend” mode, where I try to audition for a movie. They’re trying to audition for some vision that they have of a utopian society where human beings communicate and heal one another and exorcise their demons together and they start acting it out, as opposed to just being available for whatever’s going to happen in that circle, because any given circle could go in multiple directions on any given day.

A: In another moment we were moving in satellite and singing “Yes” in soft, melodious unison while one of us entered the circle to both move and ask questions. The combination of the group giving total attention to the soloist while singing “Yes” and the vulnerability of the individual asking questions opened up the heart wide. I was surprised at how moving this experience was and ended up in tears. And I was relieved that immediately following this exercise, you led us through self-massage and sounding. So, it seems like there is careful timing and a balance between verbal articulation and processing, and allowing the body to experience and understand without the layer of words.

O: I think stuff like that is intuitive. I did my master’s degree thesis on dance and healing. I didn’t just focus on a particular culture or a particular time—I did sort of a cross-cultural, cross-section through time and culture. One of the sites that I did ethnographic research on was a healing ceremony on one of the South Sea islands off the coast of Georgia, curated by an organization for traditional medicine. They brought a family of ancient practitioners from the west coast of Africa together with a community of Native American healers to do an eight-day ceremony. One of the things in the interviews and in the various conversations that I had that always stuck with me was seeing someone that I had met there years later. I went up to this person and identified myself and where we had met, and this person kind of looked at me and said, “You know the thing about”—and she named what the ritual was—“you know the thing about that is that we don’t really talk about it when you’re not there.” And she just said that and then we went on to talk about whatever was happening in the moment—I think I was at a festival and she was a craftsperson selling jewelry, and we went on to talk about earrings. But when she said it, I felt in my body, “Oh, yeah. That’s true.” Like when a certain kind of technology is being leveraged and there’s this tenuous but sometimes very powerful hum of 102

shared embodied agreements in the context of those types of happenings that can reach a certain pitch or a certain state, where those that are in it share a collective transformation or alteration of experiencing, that if we orient to it afterwards—it’s almost like it can prick it. And that it’s something to just let be. It’s like pie crust. Do you ever make pie crust? The relationship of the butter and the flour can only be corrupted every time you touch it.

Now you have to knead it, right? In order to marry them My grandma was an award-winning pie maker, and I remember that was a thing, getting your hands as floured as possible: you don’t want to put too much flour in it, because that could make it leathery. You don’t want too much of the oils from your hands to get in it. You want to knead it with the fewest numbers of kneads possible in order to just marry it enough, and then roll it out as lightly as you possibly can and get it in that pan, because every time you touch it you kill it, you take the life out of it.

So the words in Technology of the Circle are not meant to name it. They are actually a part of the dance. They are just another tool like the focusing of the eye. Words are meant to be tools to focus individuals’ thinking on their sensation, their bodies.

And to get people to focus in, so people are giving more and more percentages of their attention, both mental attention and physical attention and visual—all of our faculties. I’m just trying to get people to give it up for the circle. Once that happens, we don’t really need to talk about it anymore.

“I have dedicated much of my work as a dance artist to cultivating space for diverse dance forms to exist in pluralist relationship to one another. . . . In my community of arts educators and practitioners, we are developing language and methodologies to forge sustainable structures for complex diversity to thrive in shared spaces. We are finding ways for these cultures—represented by richly juxtaposed styles, aesthetics, values and techniques—to co-exist not just for some romantic idealism of us all “getting along” but for the real potential from the WORK that it all takes.

Somewhere in the lessons derived when I strive to figure out what really matters, what is worth fighting for, what can be negotiated, or given up, I learn more about my potential and my intentional hybridity” - Onye Ozuzu

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Onye Ozuzu is a dance administrator, performing artist, choreographer, educator, and researcher currently serving as Chair of the Dance Department and interim Dean of the School of Fine and Performing Arts at Columbia College Chicago. Her administrative work is notable for a balance of visionary and deliberate progress in the arenas of curricular, artistic, and systemic diversity; cultural relativity; collaboration; and inter-disciplinarity. She has been actively presenting work since 1997. Her work has been seen nationally and internationally at Seattle Festival of Improvisational Dance, the Joyce SoHo (Manhattan, NY), Kaay Fecc Festival Des Tous les Danses (Dakar, Senegal), La Festival del Caribe (Santiago, Cuba), Lisner Auditorium (Washington, DC), McKenna Museum of African American Art (New Orleans, LA), as well as many anonymous site-specific locations. Only four years in Chicago, so far she has performed locally at Hamlin Park Summer Sampler, with Red Clay Dance in La Femme, and in the Afro-Latin@ Summer Dance Intensive at Columbia College Chicago. She has recently been Artist-in-Residence at Earthdance Workshop and Retreat Center, Bates Dance Festival, Chulitna Lodge and Wilderness Retreat, and Camp Merveilles. She continues to develop new work. She was most recently commissioned

by Links Hall Constellation to create a new work with composer Greg Ward based on Charles Mingus’s album The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. The new work premiered at the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, Chicago, as part of the Made in Chicago festival, August 13, 2015. Her group improvisational score, “The Technology of the Circle,” was a featured presentation in Chicago Artists Month

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THANK YOU! This maiden edition of danceGATHERING / Lagos Contemporary Dance Festival, has been made possible by the generous support from our funders and supporters, most especially Institut Francaise, the Africa contemporary art consortium in the USA and eeg cowels Foundation without whom it would have been impossible to achieve the goal of gathering dancers from various parts on Nigeria and the world. We equally recognise the cooperation of all the artistes involved, the generous contributors to the festival catalogue and the venues where our events were held. We would like to specifically thank the following individuals for their invaluable time, expertise and great contribution to the success of dG2017: Gov. Akinwunmi Ambode, Prof. Wole Soyinka, Prof. Bakare Ojo Rasaki, Chike Nwagbogu, Gbenga Fakoya, Jumoke Sanwo, Alfons Hug, Oliver Enwonwu, Jahman Anikulapo, Azu Nwagbogu, Regine Chopinot, Aude Urcun, John Okocha, Temitayo Oke, Cathy Zimmerman, Ken Foster, Lila Greene, Makinde Adeniran, Dotun Ayobade, Onye Ozuzu, Isioma Williams, Nkanta George Ufot, Peter Badejo, Abiodun Abe, Pelumi Lawal, Olalekan Rufai, Yadichinma Ukoha-Kalu, Chinelo Chikelu, Ema Edosio, Seun Adeleye, Kunle Oloruneso, Awele Dekpe, Olaoluwa Alabi, Abiodun Febiyi, Ayodeji Habeeb Awoko, Olatunde Obajeun, Oluwatosin Oyebisi, Esther Essien, Kunle and Tundun Tejouso, Segun Adefila, Koffivi Fabunmi, Seun Awobajo, Muka Africa, Aderemi Adegbite, Ife Adediran and all our amiable volunteers.

We look forward to a continued relationship for 2018 edition of danceGATHERING / Lagos COntemporary Dance Festival.

Qudus Onikeku - Creative Director QDanceCenter Hajarat Ali - Managing Director QDanceCenter.

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6PM-10PM

9AM-11AM

12AM-2PM

WORKSHOP

DANCING CITIES (IWAYA)

QDANCE SESSION (ROOFTOP)

- CHIBUZOR OKAFOR (COS SIA “AMEN”) - ILLUMINATE THEATRE (IN) - SEIFEDDINE MANAI (M.A.K.T.O.U.B.)

+DJ STARFAZE

CROSSINGS (REVOLVING ART INCUBATOR)

DANCING CITIES (AJILEYE FIELD - BARIGA)

DANCER’S HANGOUT (BOGOBIRI)

- Ijodee & Efe Paul - Horacio Macuacua & Jumoke Sanwo

- F.O.D GANG (UNTITLED) - TOSIN/ESTHER/ABIODUN (iSTAND) - BUSAYO/SIMI/JERE (PROJECT?)

+ DJ MARKISS & DURO IKJENYO

DANCING CITIES (REVOLVING ART INCUBATOR) ONYE OZUZU (HER WORDS MASQUERADES AS ME) (SILVERBIRD GALLERIA) - WISDOM OJIJE (FIGHT) - SANI IMONIKHE (THE GENESIS) - MICHAEL EJIKEONYE (VOICES) - ONYE OZUZU’S STUDENTS

INT. DANCE PLATFORM (NATIONAL THEATRE)

CDW Horacio Macuacua CrownTroupe Onye Ozuzu

WORKSHOP CDW Onye Ozuzu Crown Troupe Horacio Macuacua

WORKSHOP CDW Bakare Ojo Rasaki Crown Troupe Seifeddine Manai

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CDW Seifeddinne Manai Crown Troupe Bakare Ojo Rasaki

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3PM-5PM

AAF - Opening Party (by KONBINI) - Exhibition Opening - Invocation by Qudus Onikeku - Broken by Mima Angulu - QDANCE BAND

CROSSINGS (OMENKA) - Seifeddine Manai & Makinde Adeniran - Qudus Onikeku & Titilope Sonuga

2PM-4PM

4PM-6PM CLOSING COCKTAIL FOR VIP GUESTS AT NATIONAL THEATRE MO[VE]MENTS

- LIVE MUSIC - IMPROVISATION - COCKTAIL

- ICEE NWEKE & UKALINA (QUI) - SUNDAY OZEGBE (IJO AGBA)

- QUDUS ONIKEKU (NIGERIA) - FATOUMATA BAGAYOKO (MALI) - HORACIO MACUACUA (MOZAMBIQUE) Q&A CURATED BY JAHMAN ANIKULAPO CLOSING NIGHT NATIONAL THEATRE - QUDUS ONIKEKU & MAKINDE ADENIRAN (THE GATHERING) +ISIOMA WILLIAMS 109

MO[VE]MENTS 110 CATALOGUE____LAGOS CONTEMPORARY DANCE FESTIVAL___FIRST EDITION___1-5 MARCH 2017