Vicki Igbokwe: To Keep Me Sane

Vicki Igbokwe
(photo courtesy of the artist)

Vicki Igbokwe: To Keep Me Sane

 by Anita Gonzalez

I’m sitting with 32-year-old British choreographer Vicki Igbokwe in the café at The Place, a contemporary performance center in London that nourishes creative dance work. I’m thrilled to be in the company of a dancer who markets herself as a choreographer and an Olympic mass movement coordinator. 

Igbokwe’s “urban contemporary,” choreography melds house dance, waacking and modern concert dance. She’s just returning from the Sadler Wells Summer University, a think tank for dancers, artists, and creators. As I watch her eyes, Igbokwe’s mind tumbles over new thoughts and ideas. This artist, now well situated in her career, realizes that her early life experiences directly influenced how she created opportunities for herself and others. So how does a life story manifest into dance practice?

If I go back to come forward, the dance for me is all about a release. 

 

Personal history, her father’s passing and her mother’s illness, shaped Igbokwe’s 

spiritual passage as a dance artist. She speaks of dance as release, reflecting back 

upon personal challenges she faced as a burgeoning teenage artist. 

 

My dad was a barrister. He practiced here and in Nigeria, and my mom was a 

councilor for the Labor Party. We had always danced in my family. Coming from a traditional Nigerian home there is always music, Sunny Adé, Fela Kuti… music and dance was always in the house. She (my Mom) would go to these traditional weddings, or African women’s association meetings. They would bring the kids and, after the meeting, there would be the food and the music and the dancing.

Igbokwe’s mother passed away in 2009 following an extended illness. As a teenager, the choreographer grappled with challenges of taking care of her mother while developing her own independence.

 

My Mom became really ill, and I ended up becoming her caretaker from the age of 14 and looking after her and my three younger sisters. I was coming home from school and making sure that mom was OK and making sure that my sisters were OK, and it was a very tough time. I feel like a fifty-year-old woman in my mid-teens, and I need something that is just for me to do. And at school I was always choreographing on my friends. A teacher told me about a summer project that was happening here at The Place. She said, “this would be something just to do for you.” I would learn technique classes, and I absolutely loved this dance thing, this creative thing. And from there I got the bug. 

   

The bug of dancing helped Igbokwe to feel young, and most of all happy. Later she attended college. Choosing an art career over a law career disrupted family 

expectations. Although she first concealed her arts degree from her mother, she later confessed that she was pursuing her heart. 

 

I found the hobby was something that just kept me sane and made me a bit whole again.

Uchenna Dance in works by Vicki Igbokwe
(photos by Irven Lewis)

Igbokwe’s most recent work, Our Mighty Groove, draws from her early experiences of house club dancing. Zoe Anderson describes the September 2013 performance at Sadler's Wells' “Wild Card” series.

“A woman in an extravagant hat cuts through the crowd, clearing space by sheer force of personality. Delicately taking the hat off, she starts to dance, with rippling shoulders and slicing arms. The crowd presses in for a better view, and then falls back again to give her more room.” 

In the work, Igbokwe immerses audiences in a house dance environment and lets them observe multiple characters entering a 1970s club. The dance fully utilizes the personality of each of her dance artists. 

 

I’m doing what Mommy did and the ladies of the African women’s association.

 

Igbokwe attended primarily white universities that challenged her sense of self. The buns and tights she had to wear for classes felt, to her, like alien outfits. Outside of the university, she worked with Hakeem Onibudo of Impact Dance. He encouraged her to improve her teaching by becoming an exercise teacher at fitness studios. Before the exercise course, she was “really engaged but rough round the edges.” Hakeem advised her that, as an African girl, she should work on her smile and people skills. 

 

He was the key figure back then, a big brother, and he came from Nigeria as well. He understood that transition.

 

Even though she softened her classroom demeanor, Igbokwe held onto her cultural grounding, naming her company Uchenna Dance. Uchenna, the Nigerian first name given by her parents, means “God’s Will.” She honors her parents by choosing this as her company’s name. 

Igbokwe established the company in the middle of the recession. Her goal was to create a company that had an identity separate from Igbokwe as an individual choreographer. It was a precarious time. 

 

I thought, “give it a go” rather than “what if.” I wanted to create something bigger than me--or that will be bigger than me--that can add to the British dancing that we have here, right now. This thing of seeing myself within dance as a Black woman as an African woman, as being a woman, as someone that absolutely loves dance and ballet and also likes house dance and waacking and knows the history and the technique behind these styles.

Waacking and house dance are popular dances with poses, explosive kicks and fast arm movements performed to driving urban music. 

To promote social dance as contemporary choreography, Igbokwe started Cultural Explosion, an annual event showcasing artists working with urban vocabularies. Because of the “knock back” against her own work, she created a platform that is experimental, vibrant and infused by street, social, African and informal dance styles. Cultural Explosion invites choreographers from around the country to experiment with hybrid styles. 

 

For me this work is about finding the similarities in those forms, the get down, the essence. 

 

There have been three “cultural explosions,” each opening up networks for sharing ideas and practices. Open classes invite artists to exchange styles. The event aims to build artistic languages and bring the underground to the British Dance scene.

If we don’t do it, it won’t get done.

Igbokwe’s deeply imbedded ideals of fusion come from her heritage and from her experiences with training across disciplines. She wants to merge multiple dance styles. 

 

I know about each of them in their individual forms. But what excites me is when they come together. When you’ve got a dancer that has the aesthetic of a contemporary dancer but the essence of an African dancer and then the rhythm, that punch of an urban dancer, that’s what gets me going. That’s what really excites me. To find bodies, dancers, I’m excited. That’s what my passion of merging these styles together is. I love the use of the back and the spine. I love the groundedness, but at the same time I love the lines. If you can get your leg up there, I’m yours.

 

When I first met with Igbokwe, I wanted to know more about her involvement with sports. She was a Nike Athlete and UK Master Trainer as well being part of the creative team, at the 2012 Olympics, working on all four of the opening and closing ceremonies. Her title was Mass Movement Coordinator and her team worked with a cohort of choreographers, dance captains and creative directors. Each team developed their own choreographed movement and the vision for their segments. The Mass Movement team lead by Steve Boyd worked to make the choreography and vision a reality.

As we chat, I realize the woman in front of me sees the athleticism of training and the invention of dancing as similar processes. Whether she works with large-scale movement or with individual artists, she views the process of dancing as coordinated release. I consider her earlier statements. 

 

I found the hobby was something that just kept me sane and made me a bit whole again. When I’m dancing I feel young, I feel happy, I don’t think of the stress that I’ve got at home.

Igbokwe finds happiness through the physicality of dancing with others while 

bringing a unique aesthetic to the British dance scene. Her work encourages 

experimentation with styles, values precision in practice, and honors personal 

relationships.

BIO

Vicki Igbokwe is the Creative Director of Uchenna Dance, a company that delivers high quality, dynamic experiences in dance for all--be this as a participant, spectator or project partner.

Starting her career as a street dancer, she later trained at Middlesex University graduating with a BA in dance studies in 2004. In 2011 she graduated with a MA in cultural leadership from City University.

As an independent artist, Vicki wears multiple ‘hats’ that include choreographer, teacher, lecturer, manager and producer. She is also a founding member of the ADiaspora collective a creative collaboration with Alesandra Seutin of Vocab dance.

As a choreographer, she undergoes practice-based research, which sees her fusing Waacking, Vogueing, and House Dance (club dances) with West African and Contemporary dance.

Career highlights include being a sponsored Nike dance athlete and master trainer (2005-10) and a Mass Movement Coordinator (creative) on Opening and Closing Ceremonies for Olympic and Paralympic London Games (2011-12)

To learn more about Uchenna Dance, click here

Edisa Weeks’s Delirious Dance Acts

Edisa Weeks's Delirious Dance Acts

by Anita Gonzalez

At the Player’s Club near Manhattan’s Gramercy Park, Edisa Weeks mounts the stairs of a nineteenth century building and sits down at Mark Twain’s favorite poker table to chat about her projects and her passions.  A tall, thin dancer, sinuous and composed, she nevertheless commands space, resting at ease in her perceptions of art and art making.  We talk, and I learn about how Weeks turns contemporary dance into social commentary.

On her website, Weeks writes that her company Delirious Dances, “was founded on the belief that people of all economic and cultural backgrounds, ages and abilities are empowered by the immediacy of dancing.”  As a choreographer, Weeks heavily invests everything: body and finances, to create work in intimate spaces—spaces like swimming pools, store windows or living rooms—that create immediate and close encounters between dancers and audiences.  The innovative nature of her dance projects, combined with the sense of abandon within her choreography, make works like Liaisons (2006), presented in New York City and Berlin, feel delirious indeed.

Liaisons originates from a notion to bypass the bureaucracy of traditional dance production venues while directly engaging with small-scale audiences.  Using a quartet of dancers, Weeks stages choreography in living rooms.  Email lists and word-of-mouth help Weeks identify individuals who would like to offer their homes.  Once they agree to sponsor her performance, she sells tickets through Brown Paper Tickets, Ovation or other ticketing agencies.  On the night of the performance, a core group of dancers go to the sponsor’s home where they dance.  After each performance the dancers participate in a response session.

In one section of Liaisons, dancer Jenni Hong enters a circle of seated viewers and drops her underpants to the floor.  What type of liaison does discarded underwear bring to mind?  A few moments later, Hong finds underwear everywhere—in drawers and cabinets and underneath chairs—and she tosses all of them to the center of the floor.  Next she dances; flailing her legs and rolling with abandon across the floor, at times stopping to smile knowingly at an audience member.  Maybe they share her secret history of underwear encounters.  Later, other dancers execute lifts and turns that daringly occupy contained space.  Occasionally, they pause for eye contact or gentle handshakes.  The sudden breaks between dance and gesture draw a laughing, delirious response from the audience.

How does Weeks overcome the fear of approaching strangers to ask to enter their personal spaces?  “I practice,” she responds.  She stands on the street asking people if she can dance in their living room.  The best places are libraries because people are more relaxed.  Post offices and grocery stores almost always get a negative answer. Berlin, unlike New York, has no tradition of door-to-door salesmen, so odds were better over there.  While standing on public streets in Germany, Weeks asked eighty people if she could dance in their homes.  Three people said yes.

Although Weeks describes herself as lacking in the “gift for gab” that enables other choreographers to verbally sell their work to presenters, she is tenacious.  “I am really stubborn,” she says.  This artist is determined to keep making dance despite economic barriers.  Weeks aspires to provide consistent work for her dancers.  Instead of spending time networking with presenters, she produces the work within her means.  Often presenters schedule a dance work for a single run of three or six performances.  They rarely re-present a work, preferring to look for the next new event or hot item to include in their dance seasons.  By simplifying the production process and finding her own venues, Weeks’s dancers engage in a piece of choreography for at least a year.

One of her more recent projects, To Begin the World Over Again (2012), composed by Joseph C. Phillips Jr., features six dancers and an actor collaborating with an ensemble of thirteen musicians.  In a climate of reduced funding for the arts, Weeks decided to self-produce this work by collaborating with responsive venues, taking out loans, fundraising on Kickstarter, and using her teaching salary to augment the dancers’ rehearsal pay.  The interactive, evening-length, multi-disciplinary dance was performed at the Irondale Center in Brooklyn.  Based upon Thomas Paine’s statement that “We have the power to begin the world over again,” Weeks explored the notion of United States democracy and what it has meant.

The choreography of To Begin the World Over Again depicts an active expression of delirium.  With the audience seated on four sides of an arena-like space, performers leap, roll, fling and run, continuously propelling their bodies through space until they collapse to the ground.  This is an exhaustive call for democracy.  Later, with the assistance of a Master of Ceremonies, the audience collectively decides who will play the character of “Democracy.”  Once selected, this same character is beaten down, stripped to their underwear, and demoralized.  The dramatic actions demonstrate how a well-conceived and idealistic notion that originated in the seventeenth century can be reduced to mere rhetoric with the passage of time.  At the end of the work, the dance becomes gentler.  Some performers leave the arena to connect with a seated observer or to share a smile or an embrace.  Eventually, the entire audience joins in a collective spiral dance that literally democratizes the arena space.

Weeks’s current project, a commission from the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, opens in June as part of a gala celebration, and in response to the expansion of the native flora garden.  In this site-specific work, she will use dancers to explore the ecosystem of native plants in Brooklyn.  The Brooklyn Botanical Gardens is interested in profiling native plant life once prevalent within the borough.  Weeks researched pine barrens, prairie grass, oak forests and sphagnum bogs, all eco-systems that once existed in the vicinity of Brooklyn.  In her new work, performers represent each of these systems.  We talked at length in our interview about how sphagnum bogs have layers that preserve the past and how Native Americans once used sphagnum moss as an anti-bacterial or antifungal treatment for wounds.  Clearly, this artist is interested in the wider impact dance can make on society’s perspectives about the earth.

I asked Weeks about how research informs her approach to making dance.  “I had a really influential teacher,” she says, referring to George Houston Bass (1938-1990), a professor of Theatre Arts and African American Studies at Brown University, co-producer and story editor for the WGBH series “On Being Black.”  Bass founded the Rites and Reasons Theatre and was also the secretary and executor for Langston Hughes.  While studying in Providence, Weeks took a class with Bass that emphasized the importance of using detailed research to support art practice.  As a teacher, he inspired several other students who would later impact Black art in many ways: playwright Lynn Nottage, Producer Robe Imbriano, actor Erik Dellums, storyteller Vallerie Tutson, visual designer Garland Farwell, and, of course, choreographer Edisa Weeks.

At the Player’s Club, Weeks and I engaged in active conversation around the challenges of balancing life, career, and academic pursuits.  Because she is an artist who invests in her projects, most of her income goes back into her art and into supporting her family.  Her husband provides core emotional, psychological, and strategic support for the work that she undertakes. She says that instead of taking expensive trips, or going out to dinner, they take simple vacations, like touring Philadelphia by bicycle.  Sometimes they stay at Black-owned bed and breakfast establishments as a way of supporting the Black community.  Her current position as an Assistant Professor at Queens College allows her to have both roots and support as an artist and thinker.  She uses teaching to spur her creative work and to provide stability for her artistic endeavors: “After years of scrambling, it is bliss not to be hustling for the next job.”

Our interview ends with a tour through the Player’s Club and discussion of her upcoming residency in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she plans to work with University of Michigan students at the Museum of National History, developing a site-specific installation inspired by the structure of genes and DNA.  She looks forward to summer as a time to devote to developing new ideas.  I am curious to know what delirious movement projects will next emerge from the mind of this creative artist.  Whatever the ideas are, Weeks has the talent, training and gumption to make them a success.

BIO:
Edisa Weeks is the Director and Choreographer for DELIRIOUS DANCES, which seeks to create intimate environments where people can experience and interact with contemporary dance. Her choreography merges theater with dance to explore the beauty and complexity of life. Her work has been performed in a variety of venues including swimming pools, storefront windows, living rooms, senior centers, as well as at Chashama Theater, The Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts, The Guggenheim Museum, The Mermaid Parade, Summer Stages Dance Festival, and The Haus Kulturen Der Welt in Berlin, Germany. Edisa Weeks received a BA from Brown University and an MFA in dance from New York University’s TISCH School of the Arts where she was an Alberto Vilar Performing Arts Fellow. Weeks teaches technique and choreography at Queens College in New York.