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

Beth Gill: The Elusive "Why"

Beth Gill

Performance of Electric Midwife at The Chocolate Factory
(photo by Steven Schreiber)

Beth Gill: The Elusive “Why”

by Komal Thakkar

Bessie Award-winning choreographer Beth Gill came to dance at age 3 when, after sitting through an entire PBS broadcast featuring Baryshnikov, she informed her parents of her desire to take ballet class. She would go on to study ballet under Rose-Marie Menes--formerly of the Ballet Russe--at the Westchester Ballet Center in Yorktown Heights, New York and make her first dance when she was just thirteen.

“Rose-Marie was a traditionalist,” says Gill. “She was extremely proud of her own lineage inside the ballet world, but she also created an environment where we were exposed to other kinds of dance. I studied Bharatanatyam, tap and jazz in her school.”

Tami Horowitz, a dancer trained in Limon, introduced Gill to modern dance at age ten through her Limon-based classes for young students at the Westchester school. Gill credits Horowitz for integrating creative movement exercises into her classes.

In love with the idea of dancing and choreographing in New York City, Gill applied to college programs in dance. Each one rejected or waitlisted her, including the brand new Fordham/Ailey BFA program. But Gill insisted on attending Fordham, and they accepted her a few months later.

“[Ailey] was a hard fit for me. I was grateful to have a place to go, and I wanted to attach to those pure dance forms they were teaching, but in a way I was invisible,” she says. “At Westchester Ballet Center, I formed an identity of making things, but there weren’t many outlets for that at Ailey. I transferred to NYU.”

Gill’s experience at NYU proved to be formative.

“I was surrounded by a group of people who were, in our own small context, trying to be experimental, or radical,” she says. Although she doesn’t feel like they were making anything extraordinary, she certainly recalls their excitement at the time.

Reflecting on her adolescent years, she explains her fascination with avant-garde culture. 

“I tended to be much more safe in my own expression, but I was attracted to people and art that seemed to be living outside of the mainstream.”

After graduating from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, she felt a deep concern about continuing in the world of dance and choreography. It was what she had always done. Nevertheless, Gill seized the opportunity to make a work for the Movement Research Improvisation Festival, a small step that propelled her in a decisive and lasting direction.

Eight years after graduating from NYU, Gill received a 2011 Bessie Award for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer, and the first ever Juried Bessie Award. The jury panel, comprised of noted choreographers Elizabeth Streb, Ralph Lemon and David Gordon, stated that Gill’s work, Electric Midwife, “demonstrated rigor in its process and challenged its audience’s perceptions.” The panel commended her consideration of the specific ways an audience views a dance.

Scene from Electric Midwife
(photo by Beth Gill)

Electric Midwife consists of three duets mirroring each other with a movement vocabulary of rounded arms, lunges, slow turns, and simple poses. Phrases of movement interrupted by long pauses eventually transition into longer smoothed out, continually moving phrases. The duets symmetrically weave through each other at changing tempos and in various planes throughout the space. The dancers exhibit control and a lack of affectation. They have cultivated mature skills through years of performing.

Gill originally created this work for The Chocolate Factory, a performance venue in Long Island City with a narrow and short space. Electric Midwife frames that unusual space so that one’s focus becomes evenly split.

Roslyn Sulcas writes in The New York Times, “The sense of three-dimensionality is heightened, as is our sense of the space itself, its depth and width, its rough walls and its windows at the back, looking like large eyes. Even the women’s casual outfits--leggings and loose tops in orange, green, blue, red, black and gray--form blocks of color that are reminiscent of Mondrian paintings.”

Sulcas concludes by asking, “Which is the left brain, which the right? Are the movements in fact identical, or are they permeated by the tiny individual differences that each human body produces? Which side is real, which side the mirror?”

Scene from Electric Midwife
(photo by Beth Gill)

Some of the work’s spatial relationships and patterns can get lost in transplant to other venues, but this helps Gill think about her work differently for each setting. In a large black box theater in London, the work can take on an unexpected theatricality. The walls of the stage space are gray, and the floor is black with white Marley in the center. The resulting visual intersection of white, gray and black color fields and the audience on a steep rake far away from the dancers create a viewing situation where the audience looks in on the piece as opposed to being within the piece.

Gill expresses concern over the possibility that her audiences most relate to a possible gimmick in her work, focusing and responding solely on the symmetry of the piece. Dance performs a vanishing act, this choreographer believes; that’s part of its challenge--and its appeal.

“Putting your experience into language after seeing a show is very difficult,” Gill says. “So often, I feel like this medium is evasive to language.”

“What it provides you as a maker is the two-fold ability to become completely obsessed with how to construct a work and also the ability to see it as a transient form. You’re moving through it, and it is moving through your life. The ephemerality of the medium is one of the most beautiful, tragic and powerful elements that I experience.”

While showing Electric Midwife in London, Gill met a man who described himself as a professor of perception, an expert in peripheral vision. At that moment, she felt as though she had made this work specifically for him.

Gill's meeting with this man created an opportunity for her to speak with someone who possessed concrete, scientific knowledge of the process of sight and observation, which Gill does not.

“When you’re seeing peripherally, your gaze is receding,” she tells me. “It’s as if your eyes withdraw into your head. When you look into a narrow space, your gaze is more honed in to a specific point, and your eyes are right at the surface of your head. Thinking about how I physically see work makes me more conscious of my body.

“I am fixated on notions of space and perception and different forms of materiality affecting our experience of space.”

Gardening is her other favorite passion. She reveals that her fantasy job would be in landscape architecture. Gill recalls meeting an artist deeply engaged in architecture who told her that she often feels as though she is a choreographer stuck in another field.

This question raises a similar one for Gill. “Am I only exploring these notions through choreography because I’ve been a dancer since I was young?” Yet Gill remains engaged with the art of dance.

In an interview with Christine Jowers of The Dance Enthusiast, Gill, once again, queried her own motives.

“At the onset of every new work is a familiar battle to reconnect with why I keep making dances. The only way this continues to be a relevant language, medium and identity for me is if I am questioning its necessity at every juncture.”

Has she ever found the answer?

“At this point in my life, my perceptual experience of the world is deeply integrated in my physical being and the sense that I have of my body. The information I take in funnels through physical receptors, so it’s hard to imagine being in a different mode.”

As she continues to question, perhaps, one day, the way she answers herself and the content of that answer will change. Until that day arrives, Gill is very much what she has always been: a maker of dance.

See the trailer for Beth Gill's Electric Midwife here.

BIO

Beth Gill is a New York based artist, who makes contemporary dance and performance in New York City. She has accumulated a body of work that critically examines issues relating to the fields of contemporary dance and performance studies, through an ongoing exploration of aesthetics and perception. Gill is a 2012 Foundation for Contemporary Art Fellowship recipient, a New York City Center Choreography Fellow for 2012-2013 and an inaugural member of The Hatchery Project (2012-2015). In 2011 she was awarded two New York State Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer and the Juried Award: "for the choreographer exhibiting some of the most interesting and exciting ideas happening in dance in New York City today." She is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and has been a guest artist at Barnard College, Eugene Lang College the New School for Liberal Arts, Arizona State University and the New York State Summer School of the Arts. She is currently developing New Work for the Desert, which will be premiere at New York Live Arts March 19th-22nd 2014.

Body Stories: the choreography of FIVE DANCES

Reed Luplau (left) and Ryan Steele in FIVE DANCES

Body Stories:
the choreography of FIVE DANCES

by Melanie Greene

Limbs spiral around a quiet calm torso. Hands pierce the space like sharp blades. Movement is blanketed by silence…a silence that is suddenly broken by the vibrations of a cello. He moves. His eyes seem familiar. He does not appear to be dancing for someone. He is dancing for himself. He is comfortable in this movement. His long, straight leg follows an imaginary circle in space, rotating bone within sinew. The energy emitting from his toe sends his motion along a downward diagonal.

FIVE DANCES is a captivating tale of a young talented dancer and his journey into the contemporary dance world in New York City. Directed by Alan Brown and choreographed by Jonah Bokaer, this film stars Ryan Steele, Reed Luplau, Catherine Miller, Kimiye Corwin and Luke Murphy. While I could talk at length about the cohesion of this film in terms character development, location aesthetic, and overall story, my interest lies within the composition of Bokaer‘s choreography and its impact on the overall story.

Bokaer is an internationally known choreographer and media artist. Through his cross-disciplinary work and social enterprise, he has made a unique impression on the dance world and worked with many artists including Merce Cunningham, David Gordon, and Deborah Hay. As a young choreographer, his accomplishments are impressive and his artistic vision—inspiring.

Ryan Steele in FIVE DANCES

FIVE DANCES tackles a traditional tale of a young dancer, Chip, portrayed by Steele, and his transition as a professional dancer in New York. Tethered to events occurring in his home state of Kansas, Chip must weigh his responsibility to his family and his responsibility to his career. Joining a small company in the city, his talent and determination couple with his innocence to generate a series of firsts. You will fall instantly in love with this character through his innocence and drive. His work ethic radiates through his range and capacity as a mover. There is something familiar about his character, and his history and hardships genuinely radiate from his eyes and into the execution of his movement.

Brown shot most of the film in and around an intimate dance studio in Soho. As the story builds around Chip and his four cast mates, the film takes on a ritualistic nature as their relationships build around the routine of their rehearsals. Movement becomes a true narrative of this film. Conversations through movement reveal the smallest, yet sometimes most important details.

Every now and then, city life seeps into their world as sounds and conversations hint at subway stops and cross streets. And while we are invited into the dancers’ life outside the studio, we receive the most information inside the studio.

Light pours in from the studio windows, warming the space and casting shadows along the periphery. The repetition of choreography throughout the films creates space for the audience to admire the personal and professional chemistry of the quintet. Bokaer's choreography adds richness to the story that illustrates a true sense of awareness and consideration by the characters. The dancers, and particularly Chip, negotiate the complexities inherent to the contemporary dance world.

I was captivated by how the actors negotiate breath, fluidity, and control within their movement palette. A similar fluidity guides the tension and release of their personal connections. Steele performs Bokaer’s choreography beautifully. The choreography feels strongly rooted in ballet technique, but defiant limbs, articulated torsos, and bare feet make it reminiscent of Merce Cunningham’s aesthetic.

While the repetition the core movement throughout this film became tedious at times for me, it allowed the story to develop in a captivating way. It created space to reveal the possibilities of the movement through camera angels and timing.

Captivating in its minimalism, FIVE DANCES is an enjoyable story told through movement. Although it is a familiar story, its artistic composition requires the audience to approach this content with different considerations and engagement.