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A journey with GAO, my father...

A journey with GAO, my father...

...(excerpt) An image came to my mind. Not an image I constructed on my own, but that which gradually builds after an expanded moment of silence. It's the image of a path, not a straight path, but a set of dots that I'm trying to link, one to another.

Then I wrote to my father.

From far beyond eternity's borders

Where no god, or goddess, nor demon can go

Whence I summoned the unemotional voice:

It howled like a tempest through the star-spangled skies

Like thunder upon the plains

Re-echoing through the valleys and gorges

And shaking the great barren crags

Like trees in a gale.

Bolt after bolt of crashing lightening across the skies.

Of the Highest of the very High.

'Our father', I wrote.

'This is not a letter but a telegram,

what will you say if I invite you for a journey?

A journey to your Home; Abeokuta.

Just you and I, a long journey towards memory lane,

We shall leave far behind, that maddening noise of modern city jive,

And hurry home where tribal elders live;

Where you could perhaps tell me more about you,

About our name, about my ancestors,

About the remaining memory left with you -

There, beneath flat-topped iroko trees,

Where nestling birds with many tongues argue,

And flaming aloes bless the smiling breeze with heady scent.

There I shall sit before aging elders,

Who shall relate to me the tales of Yore,

There I shall kneel and hear legends of those-that-lived-before.

There I shall live in spirit,

Once again in those great days now gone forever more;

And see again upon the timeless plain,

The massed armies of so long ago!

The words of men long dead shall reach my soul,

From the dark depths of all-consuming Time.

Which like a medicine, shall inflame my whole -

And guide my life's canoe to shores sublime.

On This journey between the both us

- Us who are so different and so alike -

Clear with soul's time penetrating eye.

I shall see great empires rise, flourish and die.

I shall see deeds of courage or of shame,

Now carved forever on the drums of fame: 

A testament that I'll then put into form, to make a Dance'.

A dreadful silence fell upon my earth. And my troubled heavens were stilled, while my sea, which had been devouring, with its wavy vast areas of land, retreated to its coast, shamefully like a boy caught in an act of naughtiness.

This might smell like a move to moralize my own paranoia, which is made all too obvious by the states I often catch myself these days, the reasons for which are mostly obvious to me, and me alone perhaps; that of melancholy, of loneliness, isolation, voluntary exile… Not that these reasons worry me so much, since they are, after all of my own making.

This year, Our father turns 80 years of age, and just suddenly, I entered a state of tranquil acceptance that Our father is aging, and that he now lives with the eternal presence of death staring him in the face. That brought me to examine my relationship with him.

I know very little about Our father and his past, nor will he recount, but it is to be hoped. What I was hoping for was to set Our father's existence, viewed as the potentiality of my own being, to be able to capture a memory that I have long lost, and I also have the feeling that even Our father cannot remember, and have not bothered himself of the importance of such memory.

The reason known to me; being that Our father was born in a country under negotiation, but I was born in a free land. He however, did surprise me with a no less indiscreet reply by proposing to take me to Abeokuta.

An opportunity opens, to pry into the Onikeku lineage, the first scoop of the spade towards the much, much deeper trench that I still have to dig out, clod by clod, from one end to the other, for there to be something to swallow me up completely in my moralizing paranoia. Though maybe I am not digging in the ground, but rather in the air, because there, one is unconfined, there, one could appear more insane than radical, and could eventually be left alone without unnecessary attentions, after all, others had engaged in similar quest in the past, and have been left alone.

It is to be a continued digging of the grounds other sons of the soil like Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka or Fela Kuti had dug for me, but simply because they did not get to our family house in Ago Owu, then I considered their work unfinished.

Hastily and without a hint of diabolical mockery, just like that I grabbed the tool from them and now, in my hand, here, I am left alone, standing here now, to finish up from where they left it, and that should explain why I have so much déjà vu. All my flashes of recognition are merely recognitions leading towards their recognition, and whatever I do or manage to dig out, will only become, but a recognition within me, that will lead me back to my dotted path...

QADDISH premiers in July 2013. At Avignon festival.

Defending my own Name. 'Qaddish'

Defending my own Name. 'Qaddish'

In the face of the world, I'm undoubtedly a Black and an African man, but the question for me has never been in the realm of denying nor romanticizing, not worrying whether I'm black enough or being too African. We live under a construct which have placed more emphasis on defining and outlining who we are, so rather than just dancing and communicating ourselves in our own simple and naive manners, we now - through the obligation of the other - spend time imitating an idea of ourselves. For me, there will be no denying nor romanticizing, for this is usually the price to pay in acquiring that legitimacy that is offered to traveling artists outside their terrain, but rather I look at things more holistically and all inclusive. So it's always about how to communicate my own ideas of the world, how to defend my name without dissociating myself from and above misrepresentation? I don't require any validation for that. 

For clarity of motive, I begin by stating that my real given name is Adul-Quddus, an Arabic root name which translates to 'the servant of The Holy' but if simply called Quddus, it means Holy. in Aramaic language, Quddus transforms to Qaddish.

In 2009/2010 all my personal preoccupations were concerned mostly with question of exile and solitude, deconstructing the concept of home as static four walls, but gravely in search of aloneness and alienation, and seeking ways of gaining access to the deepest part of my inner self, a process that was so required when the rupturing divorce with Nigeria blatantly stares me strongly in the face, then I created 'My Exile is in my Head'. In 2011/2012, the quest moves further to trying to undo the myriad lies and errors in human history, denying the very existence of history and nation-states, but to argue that the sole motive that makes up a society, are different individuals, making selfish decisions to support their personal interests, and so I created STILL/life, wondering what it is that prop up the minds of men, that they set up ideas which they later think they can bow down and offer sacrifices to, and in the process transforms them into murderous monsters. 

Now again, the quest has led into newer byways. From recreation of the self, to the negation of history, and now to the quest for memory. As my dance practice intensifies, the perception becomes even clearer, my body protest that there are things to remember, things that I never knew that I know, body memory that is. When I dance I remember, when I stop dancing, my conscious memory becomes too short and perhaps too corrupted to go that far and clear. So my preoccupation lately have been to return - in a manner of speaking - to somewhere deep in the earth, to link the far past with the present, the living with the dead, the human with the divine and the present with the near future. I have began work on a new piece, QADDISH which is the last part of this existential trilogy of mine, in which I've initiated a journey with my 80 years old father, a journey we are starting from his hometown Abeokuta. 

Journeys in general term serves as trope for the Yoruba, in cognitive aesthetic terms. Its aesthetics development, even in everyday speech, serves as a primed prefix to any wise saying, rendered as Yorùbá bọ, that is, the "Yoruba retorts or returns", "Retorts" in this sense shares a verb and semantic equivalence with "returns". In other words, Knowledge and discovery are predicated on a temporal and spatio-spiritual journey. Qaddish will exhibit several dimensions of this spiritual journey in space and time. Time present, past and future dialogue will compete for attention. An aspect of this will be evident in the display of an interactive Wheelchair, whose presence in space will trigger a dialog with the past, and its auto movement in space compels us to acknowledge the present. 

Drawing from the Yoruba cosmogony and collaborating with modern day use of robotic technology, the Wheelchair will embody the metaphor of the space-time continuum as in most African masks. Breaking the words literally, we get 'wheel', usually used to pierce time and space, and 'chair' as a static designed object slowing down time and marking a static space, since time cannot be separated from space, we have 'time-space,' in other words, the undecoded 'wheel-chair' is fossilized message, a single instance that is representative of other instances, other spaces and times, it is a repository of the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spacial relationship, of a time past and of current knowledge such as myth, legend and the history such paradox exhibits. 

Through its evocation of several dimensions of time, realized in the congealed narratives of the figurative sculpture of condensed myths, current discourses, and a power to prognosticate, the wheelchair suggests a multimedia event, even in its static state, it compel a visual discourse. The chair will exercise an anarchic force upon perceptions, breaking down compartmentalizing categories by being able to move unaided by living beings and uninhibited between reality and magic, the referential and the semantic. 

In my approach to art, one thing is clear, this one thing however, might be seen as connection of many things that have simultaneously come to rest within my restless mind, and my body have created a precept and a refuge for these complexities. My personal need for comprehension, for finding answers to the many questions that surfaces on my mind on a daily basis, together with my own personal artistic preoccupation, with a dire need to heel and to advance art and humanity, and to be a bridge between aesthetics that has either been wrongly understood or dismissed as low art, and in all of that i have also find a space for my spirituality, in search of unity with the cosmos, with God and hoping to recover a certain verticality, to recover the authentic self that is neither subjugated to norms, history, the past nor thrown aback in his right to the assured presence. This meant for me tapping into age long Yoruba philosophies, which already neatly outlined the part of the self, of alterity, of the commune and of the divine, in its imagination and the role of aesthetic beauty and of art. With enough skills, talent, experience and knowledge, that i have been able to gather and exercise through my practice, i hope to take from this diverse sources aesthetic and transpose them into contemporary, and urban context. 

I am particularly animated by body memory, rather than history, by the will to reach out and communicate with the audience, above the will to express something of the self, and in so, I've constantly searched for ways to fuse poetic attitudes with a particularly traditional satirical and fictitious modes of story telling, as in the griot tradition, combining both social history, collective memory or collective amnesia with personal autobiography, as a critical lunching pad in the process of myth reading and communal rejuvenation. In most of my works - including group pieces - the dancer is always given the dramaturgic and choreographic liberty, to present himself as himself but pointing to something else, there is restricted level of show off, but a responsibility of an interpreter and the humility of a messenger. Through self exposure and auto derision, or self fortification and self proclamation, the dancer also weans his audience from any license of criticism they might have of both his art and the message thereon.

I have by no means felt at ease with the saying that "Dance is a language" or a 'form' of 'expression' and often outraged by audiences who want - by all means - to understand my performance, as one probably understands a piece of writing. Language can do less when dance is in view, and 'forms' denote something fixed. Body movement, or simply put, action has always been a superior mode of thought and of communication, therefore, the contextual meanings in my performances are neither eternal nor immutable, but mere signifiers in time and space. For me, a performance is simply an experience, not a cerebral one however, it is rather a brief shared moment of vitality, of healing, of social purification, where i sometimes make allusions to antisocial behaviors, but above all it is to mediate between the here and then and to make balance. 

My audience are invited to share communicative experience through many different sensory channels simultaneously; verbal, musical, choreographic and visual aesthetic dimensions, they all become part of the components of the total message, whereby there exist a personal alchemy between the 'performers' and every member of the audience, because in the Yoruba tradition, we believe that the eyes has got only two foods that feeds it, one is Iran, a magical spectacle or a choreographic display and the other is ewa, which is beauty. As beauty is relative, magical spectacle and choreographic display takes more of my attention, because it creates its own beauty in its own terms. 

This shows the importance the Yoruba attaches to intense and visceral body movements, artistic, acrobatic, or magical display, as a means of securing attention and thereby influencing both the human and the divine. Spectacle (Iran) in this sense denotes an happening that seldom occurs in everyday life, and hence a relish for the eyes. Conversely, Iran spanning from the root word iranti (remembering) is a memorable experience, lingering visually and aurally in the subconscious. In the visual art, an image or sculpture is called Aworan, a contraction of A-wo-ranti (a visual reminder) literally "what we look at to remember." Beyond and above the need to delight the senses alone by entertaining or educating it, a performance is also to establish a direct (active) body to (passive) body transmission, as well as a framework for regulating the social and cosmic orders. 

Tours and Calendar

Calendar 2012/2013.

3 - 12 January     - WIP La Villette (Creative residency STILL/life)
13 January          - WIP La Villette (Public Presentation STILL/life Work in Progress)
16 - 20 January   - CND Pantin (Creative residency STILL/life)
24 - 27 January   - Theatre de l'Agora. Evry (Creative residency STILL/life)
30/01 - 04/02      - CND Pantin (Creative residency STILL/life)
06 - 11 February - CND Pantin (Creative residency STILL/life)
14 - 16 February - L'Arc Scène Nationale Le Creusot. (Show My Exile is in my Head + Screening Do We need ColaCola to Dance?)

19 February       - The Performing Art Market - Yokohama (Show - STIll/life work-in-progress version)
20 February        - Institut Française Tokyo (Show - STILL/life work-in-progress version)
18/02 - 04/03      - Theatre Bretigny Val d'Orge (Creative residency STILL/life)
12 - 16 March     - Centre Culturel de Porte de l'Essonne Athis Mons (Creative residency STILL/life)
17 March            - Théâtre Arlequin de Morsang sur Orge (Show My Exile is in my Head)
19 - 21 March     - Festival International CDC Toulouse (Show My Exile is in my Head)
19 - 23 March     - Centre Culturel de Porte de l'Essonne Athis Mons (Creative residency STILL/life)
24 March            - Centre Culturel de Porte de l'Essonne Athis Mons (Premiere STILL/life)
25 March            - Theatre Bretigny Val d'Orge (Show 2 STILL/life)
30 March            - Théâtre des Ulis (Show 3 STILL/life)
31 March            - Théâtre de la vallée de l'Yerres. Brunoy (Show 4 STILL/life)

27 April - Speaking at the TEDxIfe conference in Ife, Osun state. Nigeria.
5 May - Festival La Voix est libre @Theatre Garrone. (Improvisation with Dieudonné Niangouna)
10 May - Festival La Voix est libre @Bouffes du Nord. (Improvisation with Dieudonné Niangouna)
17 - 29 May - ADC Geneva  (research residency)
29 May - 1 June - Modul Dance Festival. LUJBIJANA SLOVANIA (Show STILL/life)
18 June - Prize giving for PRIX SACD in Paris - Awarded the NEW CHOREOGRAPHIC TALENT
22 June - 1 July - Festival Platform Kinshasa (Show STILL/life)

1 July - 7 July - Lagos/Abeokuta (Research QADDISH - Creation 2013)
7 - 11 August - Dancing in Levée des conflits by Boris Charmatz Hamburg. Germany.

14 August - 24 August - Festival Correios em Movimento Rio De Janeiro (Show My Exile is in my Head)
My Exile is in my Head - MC theatre Amsterdam. 25 - 26 September
My Exile is in my Head - Parktheater Eindhoven. Netherlands. 27 September
My Exile is in my Head - Bijlmer Parktheater Amsterdam Zuidoost. 28 September
Modul-Dance conference - Tilburg Netherlands. 1 - 3 October
My Exile is in my Head - Albany Deptford. London. 4 October 
My Exile is in my Head - Dukes Theatre Lancaster. 6 October 
My Exile is in my Head - Lakeside Arts Centre Nottingham. 11 October
My Exile is in my Head - Drum Theatre Birmingham. 13 October
My Exile is in my Head - Contact Theatre Manchester. 16 October

My Exile is in my Head - The Courtyard Theatre, Hereford. 18 October 

My Exile is in my Head - Sherman Theatre, Cardiff. 20 October

QADDISH (Research residency) - CND - Pantin. France 2 - 12 November 
Africa initiative Group conference - Yamoussoukro Ivory Coast. 15 - 18 November
QADDISH (Research residency) - Rimbun Dahan. Kuala Lumpur 20 November - 15 December
QADDISH (work -in-progress) - Dancebox. Kuala Lumpur 22 November
QADDISH (work -in-progress) - IB Theatre Conference - TaPS. Kuala Lumpur 2 December
Do we need colacola to dance? (film screening) - Alliance Française de Kuala Lumpur 5 December
QADDISH (work -in-progress) - Nyoba Kan Festival. Kuala Lumpur 7 - 8 December

2013

Visiting professor + QADDISH Research residency - University of California. Davis. 6 Jan - 10 March 2013

FLASH (New creation with students) - University of California. Davis. 7 January - 6 March 2013

STILL/life - Festival Hors Saison - ARCADI. La Ferme du Buisson. Noisiel. 24 - 25 February 2013

QADDISH (work in progress) - University of California. Davis. 7 March 2013

FLASH (Premiere) - University of California. Davis. 7 - 10 March 2013

QADDISH (Research residency) - Yerba Buena Art Center. San Francisco.11 - 15 March 2013

STILL/life - Maison de la Danse. Lyon. 24 - 25 May 2013

Levée des conflits by Boris Charmatz - Montreal. 27 - 31 May 2013

QADDISH (work -in-progress) - ConnexionKin. Kinshasa 2 - 8 June 2013

QADDISH (creation residency) - WIP La Villette. 10 - 22 June 2013

QADDISH (Production residency) - Theatre Benoit XII. Avignon. 24 June - 5 July 2013

QADDISH - Premiere in Theatre Benoit XII. Avignon. 6 - 12 July 2013