JUA KALI PEDESTRIAN PROJECT IN KAMPALA
In August 2018 I choreographed the dance project ‘Jua Kali Pedestrian’ which was performed on the streets of Kampala during the KLA Art Festival. The project was inspired by my concept of ‘Jua kali’ which relates to the ways pedestrians consume and create the city through their walking. Now that a year has passed since Jua Kali Pedestrian occurred I offer some reflections on this project and its process, and in so doing I hope to broaden discussions on contemporary dance and choreography in Kenya and the region.
Background setting the scene of my trajectory towards choreographing ‘Jua Kali Pedestrian’ stems from my background as a contemporary artist whose focus is in dance and choreography, but also from my interest in how city space is a site in which lives are choreographed. It is these two areas I now briefly expand upon. Since late 1990s a generation of Kenyan dancers and choreographers have been creating significant work which explores the body and space through experimenting with various forms of dance and performance. Artists which fall into this category include: Opiyo Okach, Matthew Ondiege, Kebaya Muturi, Leila Masiga, James Mweu, Juliet Omollo, Kefa Oiro and Neema Bagamuhunda. The actions and initiatives of these artists inspired an entire generation which included myself to delve into dance and choreography.
It’s after watching Opiyo’s performance called Abila that I felt a spark that I couldn’t explain for it was my first encounter with contemporary dance performance yet I admired and wished myself among the performers. In 2010 and 2012, I worked under directions of African choreographers: Salia Sanou from France/Burkina Fasso, Seydou Boro from Burkina Fasso, Opiyo Okach from Kenya/France and Patrick Acogny from Senegal in a choreographic project called Chrysalides. I presented The Monitor, a choreography for five dancers that was performed at the GoDown Arts Centre in Nairobi, Kenya and at Centre de L’Termitier, in Ougadougou, Burkina Faso.
Since 2015, I have concentrated on making and to date, my own projects include: - Body In A Box, a multi-media performance which embodies body movements, songs, poetry and installations. It was presented in May 2016 at the Goethe Institut Nairobi and Jaridu, a solo dance I started working on at a residency in Vitlycke Performing Arts Centre in Sweden — exploring movement, space, representation and musicality.
Choreographing the city may reflect certain tropes of society and its social patterns. Society in turn may induce a cluster of mutations that feed and shape how the choreography is conceived and presented. Jua Kali Pedestrian project taps into this hypothesis – because its preliminary inspiration was the statement: - ‘Nairobi is a Walking nation’. Overly used in Kenya’s mainstream media between 2012 and 2015 to paint a bleak picture of exhausted Nairobians spending long hours walking to workplaces than the actual time they spend working. The idea morphed into investigating how this walking manifests itself: - in paths of footprints shaping landscape, traces left on urban structures with themes like mobility and implications of colonial architectural design of Nairobi city revealing later in the process. Jua Kali literally means hot sun. But there is a version that interesting most - its interpretation in the informal sector, thinking behind it and how it’s used on daily basis as a kind of Do It Anyway attitude expressing a readiness to make the most out of any situation.
In my mind, I had visualized a performance embodying sets of corporeal elements - series of physical interventions - body movements and gestures - executed in a manner that allows audience to see the space through actions of the performers. I thought of audience to include pedestrians, hawkers, boda riders and the street itself as the ever present witness. And this is important because theatre settings where performance is presented to orderly audience from the comfort of their seats don’t interest me much. I like my performances watched by random audience on transit, amidst chaos of life, on the thresholds of the street - on the periphery of issues of practical daily living.
Initial phase
The Jua Kali Pedestrian project was commissioned by the arts organisation 32°East, which organise the KLA arts festival. The festival’s focus on creating public art for non-traditional art audiences is aligned closely to my intention of working in urban space, and with the city’s daily users of the streets. In this project I was not dancing but choreographing Jua Kali for Kampala based dancers; Kumi Kuminabiri, George Eriya, Lule Denis, MozraYiga, Walusimbi Shafic, Nafi Umar, and a percussionist, story teller and rapper; Rap Oet,, all male artists in their twenties.
I began by holding dance workshops, which also served as an auditioning process for the project. In the first two weeks, I offered morning dance classes to groups; The Dancers Art and Spot Lite Crew but the climax was a full day workshop on the third week, attended by over thirty dancers with only one female dancer. It’s hard to speculate why only one girl because most dance performances I attended had a fair representation of female dancers. Call for participation was made via social media that granted free participation in the workshop held at Victory Church Wakaliga, about twenty minutes boda ride from Kampala city centre. The dance pieces were performed at Kyembe lane and Marvin’s alleyway on Kampala road.
In the workshops, I gave out tasks exploring body movements derived from the action of stepping, listening and then tracking the residual effect of the movements on the body. Which was not easy to interpret in the workshop given the nature of the concept which demands deeper engagement from participants, not possible with the big group in the limited time or perhaps I am not familiar with handling big groups. Using dance workshops as a questioning framework in which to explore an idea for everyone to discover his/her truth is unpopular in Kampala just as it’s in Nairobi because dance is largely a feel-good thing. In the afternoon sessions, I shared rhythmic contemporary dance movements danced accompanied by upbeat music to lighten up the workshops.
Performance 1: At Kyembe lane
The original plan was to use Nakasero market but it changed to Kyembe lane due to delays in licensing. The festival organizers; Teesa Bahana, Rasheeda Namulosi and Nikissi Sserumaga – selected the locations for the performances since they understand bureaucratic channels of the local authorities. Here, I choreographed a twenty minute duet for; Walisimbi Shafic and Nafi Umar, brothers from same family, same dance group called Dancers Art with wonderful energy as dancing partners. Which was useful since the duet employs a constant give-and-take relationship throughout its performance. The dance was accompanied by percussion music played by Rap Oet who joined the project a bit late after I had settled on the choreographic structure and what kind of music to use. I wanted live music so as to build a dialogue between the music and the dance which turned out fine in the performances. For costume, Shafic wore pink dungaree and Umar in blue one while Rap Oet, the percussionist was in a green apron.
We made three performances, each lasting twenty minutes with an hour interval in-between. First one started at eleven in the morning, second one at around twelve noon. The last one performed on the roof top of a building down Kyembe lane close to the Old taxi park at around three. These were peak business hours at Kyembe lane which is a busy street charged with commercial activities, retail shops and heavy traffics. In the performances, Rap Oet starts by calling drum-beats, quieting the chaos to draw attention to the performance. Umar steps from the crowd into the temporarily created space by the musician, starts to dance as the drums fades and echoes away. Shafic joins in, with a short solo dance but without music except the buzzing sounds of the settling street commotion and breath of the dancers. Fading drum-beats leaves a temporary spell of silence which foregrounds the dancers but almost immediately, Rap Oet joins with shakers and flutes that fills the air with some lightness.
And this goes on for a while getting even more playful with walking and running in paths trajectories, diffusing the dance into the public while retreating back to stillness. Arousing mixed feelings of excitement and curiosity in the crowd for what they see is a bizarre beauty of body movements they know not what to make of. I had expected the performance to be interrupted several times by the traffic flow or that the dancers would be confronted by members of the public but this didn’t happen. Instead, some members of the public helped to control the traffic by guiding the moving cars, boda-bodas and vendors easily between the dancers and standing audience without much interference.
I liked the brothers’ symbiotic energy which I explored further in the structured choreography. The floor pattern of the dance is a path which relates to how I see path as already a choreographed space. Paths are conscious re-patterning of movement repertoire that facilitates order and patterning of footprints. Though in busy street like Kyembe lane or any of Nairobi’s busy streets, paths are not definite and pedestrian movement easily dissolve into main roads used by locomotives. In these streets, pedestrians follow behind one another as a habit partly imposed by features of urban settings; - no trespass signs, and barriers. Making, some pedestrians to experience walking in busy streets as a punishment and a disciplining force. I wanted the duet’s choreography to mirror this way of looking at walking in crowded spaces - how those spaces, paths, limit and control movements of city walkers. A question which was more dramaturgical than logical was how the dancers could find their individual freedom in the structure of the choreography given its formal nature.
Performance 2: At Marvins Alleyway
Marvin’s alleyway is a straight, narrow corridor, packed with barber shops and small retail shops on Kampala road used primarily as a route connecting Kampala’s downtown and Kampala road. Too narrow for cars and boda-bodas but has a constant human traffic during week days. The alleyway is a squeezed stretch in-between Kampala’s closely knit commercial buildings. Here I choreographed for all the six dancers - I had intended to work with ten dancers, a slightly bigger group but for reasons of commitment and availability, I decide on the six.
Dancing on casual wear (mainly t-shirts and jeans trousers) with bright yellow or blue, red, green or white colors; I devised minimalist tasks like walking, standing, sitting or lying down, running and they could engage with the street’s architecture by mimicking their shapes. Unlike the duet, here I intended to foreground the everyday movements with a view that everything happening in the streets is performance - happening in their own timings.
Close to what Ana B. Scott describes in Ethnosphere, that we are a walking connotations. The way we ‘carry’ our bodies in the street communicate certain emotions, sense of belonging, cultural history and ethnic identity. That walking sets us apart and brings us together – the syntax of the everyday feeds back into our systems to mark us in a specific class, identity and religion. The stretched time of this performance allows it to last even whole day without spectacular climaxes, no special music except white noise and fluctuating ambience provided for by the streets. Suspending the present and somewhat stirring up discomfort in the audience which possibly, get them to reflect upon themselves, their urban surrounding unlike in normal days when they simply cross the alleyway without much thought on it.
I had planned to do a video and an installation of footprints on paper in the performance. But this aspect was not fully explored because of lack of time. However, I made a video with pedestrians’ footsteps in Kampala largely as raw footage looped and synchronized upon a rhythmic sound track. I managed to place the paper installation on the ground of Marvin’s alleyway and gathered foot prints from city walkers during performance. Dancers stepped on the paper scrolls with paint on their shoe soles leaving layers of footprints on the papers as a way of recovering traces while reproducing footprints.
It can be said that in the two versions, Jua Kali Pedestrian establishes a kind of relationship with people rather than a display of choreographic ingenuity. It bonds with the street in a way that render conventional notions of dance and spectatorship null and void. The traditional distance between performance and the public is minimised, even blurred to the point where the dancers and the public seem to coalesce into one social body. Thus representation becomes an unstable iconographic field - where choreography reveals and perplexes simultaneously. Jua Kali transforms choreography from a summation of certainties into accumulation of mysteries. The audience confronted with the brutal beauty yet complicated frustration of the living piece unfolding between them.
The project takes the city and its recurrent themes not as resource materials for attaining physical pleasure, aesthetic creativity or imagination but as a social contract. And my practice attests to this by working within an urban context to offer an alternative vision of the city. I play with the difficult ties between tension and intension, conditioning and physicality to provide a spatial imagery of the city.
Jua Kali takes the audience through parts of the city as though mapping, retrieving, and revealing memories of those places. It questions urban structures which normally restrict movement possibilities and affect behavioral patterns; it seeks to discover those conventions normally not publicly said, rules governing the coherence of fundamental social codes: walking in particular, how it shapes public spaces and is a means for mobility and mass configuration.