14 October 2003
One morning, at Ngong’ Karen, I am in a catholic church ordination ceremony. Songs and dances fill the congregation in a collective ecstasy as morning sun rays slices in through tinted windows, spreading heavenly splendor a cross the cathedral and over the altar where the mass was being conducted. The rays cut thin sharp shafts of gold.
Sitting close to the entrance, the view before me extended wide and far. Beyond the high pillars hoisting the vaulted ceiling, closing into a relatively smaller area with burning yellow candle flames. This vaulted roof and the fresco of the mother with the baby and angels evoked un-localized fears of an omnipresent God.
Beneath the altar is a man with belly to the white tiled-floor taking sacred oath, denouncing marriage to serve God. In my primary school years, celibacy was fancy among us, but not after high school. I think we were just naive or maybe not. This was my first time witnessing such deep confession made in public.
I was part of teenagers from Korogocho invited to witness the ordination of brother Yago from Peru, who alongside Fr. Alex Zernotelli, were doing some charity work in our community. Fr. Alex Zernotelli was Italian priest at St. John’s Catholic Church Korogocho[1]. He pegged his teachings on Ujamaa..
He creolized Ujamaa as a rendition for Christian gospel of love, solidarity, generosity, and care. But of course Ujamaa first came to famous with Nyerere’s Tanzania as a socialist principle of communal living and brotherhood focused on mutuality, labor and collective ownership of land. Fr. Alex further formed little communities he called Jumuia in every village of Korogocho with a vision that the Jumuias would empower the people to redeem themselves from the shackles of poverty, violence, and crime plaguing them. That through sharing and communing in love they would collectively overcome their misfortunes and marginalization.
In that ordination, the songs and dances aroused in me curiosity about what made them appealing and how they moved the congregation. From small groups to big ensembles, it felt like they supported the cathartic moments such that even tiny gesture was visible and could affect the delicate spiritual equilibrium.
Sunday, 27 November 2005
struck the most by the immensity of the songs and dances presented in that ordination ceremony. They embodied an aura with an aesthetics beyond description, a force beyond casual imagery. I had beautiful moments though and the sound of the organ enhanced the good feelings.
Friday, 18 May, 2007
Two years later, I scribble sentiments almost similar to those I wrote on Sunday, 27 November 2005 but keenly reflecting on the events. Submission, devoting ones life to the service of God is a performance in its own right. But the effect of songs and dances, how they moved the congregation stole my heart. I keep this as something I wish to revisit someday.
September 2012
I have found myself dancing. The dream sort of lived on in a strange way that is almost uncommon but one that must have been directed by forces beyond me. Today, I have fantasies I wish to conceive into performances.
Friday 7 August 2016
I am preparing a performance for this evening at the Goethe Institut, Nairobi. The performance is called Body In A Box. It starts with me standing in the middle of a wide open room, a spot light above my head like some despotic god exercising surveillance of the whole room in all directions. When the door will open and audience start streaming in one by one to sit on few benches in the room, some roaming about as silence set in, I will start. I will start by introducing myself: ’My names is WuodONYANGO K’ALOO. I stand before you as the dancer. Thank you for acknowledging me, and for coming to support my dance in the face of relentless ridicule and constant rejection. Tonight I welcome you to this performance, I hope I will not fail you.’
January 2013.
In my New Year Resolution I wrote; ‘I imagine me dancing in a fully lit white wide room, everything visible including shades of scars on my black body and fore head. Scars of the pains and wounds inflicted by people I know well, some very close. I am dancing nevertheless effortlessly, resembling an amorphous creature in constant deformation accompanied by faint Nyatiti tune in the background. I move my body rather slowly, making shapes and gestures in the air, creating illusions for my dancing’.
Wednesday 28, 2014
comparing a dance idea to activities in an African market. ‘The dance builds slowly to a flimsy climax then comes to disarray unexpectedly. In this dance, people walk around, like people in a market to buy things they desire. Different intersections of activities coexist, many factors at play that influence their decisions and their movements, from here to there. A village market functions in a polyvalent harmony between exchanges of cash, goods, people glances and conflictual movements.’
This is hilarious. Likening a dance to market is not the conventional way we would like to understand dance. Here, dance is notoriously bound to moral and social attributes which demands of it to be easy to watch. And entertaining as well. We, Kenyans want to feel good and so dance is tusked with the responsibility of making us happy.
February 2011, Johannesburg, South Africa
at the Dance Umbrella Festival, I wrote a small caption on a random magazine that, the dance I would wish to dance, few people might be able to follow. Majority will fumble, literally get lost. For me I will be satisfied. If a day after the performance they lament fiercely, I will not be embarrassed nor let myself drawn into their dissatisfactions. Instead I will take a deep breath in, and sigh.
July 2020 in Nairobi City.
I am no more than a Jua Kali nomad - my dancing panned out into a full-fledged Jua Kali practice (with repercussions of course). I see my dance as a free practice, a kind of game I enjoy having with myself, with cities, people, objects etc. Experimenting is core to it; either loose improvisation to reflect contingencies or structured to mirror patterns in everyday life - life in Nairobi is full of repetition.
These models to some degree define Jua Kali - freely improvised practices. Jua Kali / an anarchic principle that sees infinite potential in any situation. It defies conventions. For it methods are forms of control, Jua Kali ;to remove ways of control, to dissolve hierarchies embedded in hegemonic structures by privileging subversions. Jua Kali, like my dance practice, has become a way of getting through life for me.
2014, Brussels Belgium,
showing a short solo dance to a predominantly white audience when I received grievous and demeaning responses. All they saw was nature. Vague yet not surprising. My only worry was how possible that all of them saw nature given that every interpretation is individual? Only one girl said that she saw anthropology. The term nature in this case serves to blur the link between man and animal. If it meant anything, I think it was a sign of minoritization and confinement. None of them offered further explanation.
21 July 2018
Facebook post by Dr. Patrick Acogny, the director of Ecole des Sables, Senegal ‘the greatest challenge of an African dancer is to choose a contemporary identity that doesn't suffer from stereotypes, systemic and institutionalized prejudices.’
I wanted to ask what she meant by anthropology but stopped myself. V.Y Mudimbe writes in The Invention of Africa, ‘western anthropology only helps to confuse prospects for black significance. It has not respected the immanence of black experience. It has only organized methods and ways of ideological reduction where African culture and aesthetics are looked and interpreted from a biased racialized discourse.
In an essay published in 2006, E. Patrick Johnson suggests modalities in which to rethink blackness by forcing it to ground itself in praxis, especially within the context of a white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist, and homophobic society. Arguing that, ‘while black performance has been a sustaining and galvanizing force of black culture and a contributor to world culture at large, it has not always been recognized as a site of theorization in the academy.’
Then one of them in trying to neutralize the cruelty levelled against me, as if trying to appease me, said naively, ‘yeah but why would we see just that? I mean…’ He was about to say something more remorseful but caught himself and only said with a resigned, despairing calm ‘I mean why not see dance as dance? Why not see movements as dance and take dance for what it is?’ And I thought to myself, just how possible? regardless. The problem here was, seeing and perceiving are influenced by how we’ve been taught to look and understand other people's things.
What other cultures don’t seem to know is that, black performance is an act of survival - Jua Kali. It exists involuntarily as an act which comes out and is let out to free the spirit and free the individual. It’s not considered a privilege whatsoever – a fact that I am always conscious of. And I expected all their reactions even before sharing the solo for what happened is what always happens - white insularity.
White insularity seeks to reduce African body into singular identities.
In Black and blur, Fred Moten warns us not to consent to be single beings. Erin manning also reminds us that, all resolutions — as body, as individual, as object—are more-than the forms they inhabit. That a body is black because black is an irrefutable given that situate the body within the realm of a fixed form. For her, the question is not “how is the body not black?” but “how is the body more-than the classification this singular constellation foregrounds?” That the question here cannot be limited to the body “itself ” as though the body weren’t active in co-constituting the ecology at hand. If that ecology tunes to categories such as color or gender, these aspects of the field will continue to be foregrounded.
[1] Korogocho is a shantytown on the east side of Nairobi.