Year » 2023

Lagos

The Battery Dance team of eight conducted a jampacked 3-day program in Lagos, a city where the Company had taught and performed three times previously and where it had established a robust bilateral relationship with SPAN (Society for the Performing Arts of Nigeria). With the support of the U.S. Consulate General, Battery and SPAN devised a sequence of workshops that compressed the usual 5-day Dancing to Connect model of youth engagement into 3 days, packing as much information, training, and sharing as possible in the time allotted. In addition, Artistic Director Jonathan Hollander conducted tv, radio and print media interviews and an inspirational talk with the older dancers and teachers. The team found time to create a short video “art activation” in cooperation with Tiwani Contemporary, one of the world’s leading galleries of contemporary African and diaspora art.

16 hours of intensive workshop time was spread over two days with morning and afternoon shifts led by four Battery Dance teaching artists. 35 youth and young adults took part, demonstrating remarkable talent, attitude, and motivation, exceeding all challenges, cooperating seamlessly with each other and inspiring the New York team with their creativity.

In addition to the Dancing to Connect workshops with trained dancers, a large group of about 50 children, ages 8 – 12, were bussed in both days by Footprint of David Art Foundation, an NGO that serves the Bariga community.

Battery Dance Teaching Artist Razvan Stoian taught workshops on both days with the children who were bursting with enthusiasm and full of appetite for dancing and creating. On the final day, rehearsals and a performance were staged in the grand ballroom of the Eko Hotel. The two workshop groups performed their self-created choreography with much appreciation from the 300 audience members. A group of children from Bariga, a subset of those who took Razvan’s workshop, performed local drumming and dancing styles and a local brother and sister performed a classical ballet piece.

Battery Dance presented two dances from its repertoire at the beginning and end of the program, demonstrating to the workshop participants their artistry for the first time since they had only been known up until then as trainers.

Sarah Boulos commented, “It was incredible… very thought provoking and helped a lot of our dancers to dig deeper than just the commercial aspect of dance.”

One immediate follow on: SPAN veteran dancer and Bariga teacher Moses Olayinka Akintunde has received support from Battery Dance members who helped him purchase his flights to France where he is taking up a one-year fellowship at the ESPE Dance Conservatory.

Abuja

The Abuja portion of the program placed six Battery Dance Teaching Artists in five local dance studios (or adjunct spaces) for five days with 10 team heads, 100+ youth and young adult participants and a combined total of 100 hours of dance training. The culminating performance at the NUC hall in Maitama on the sixth day was a joyous affair in which each of the five groups of participants presented their completed choreographies, Krump Studios presented a trio choreographed by Jemima Angulu, and Battery Dance presented a duet and a group work from its repertoire. A massive thunderstorm contributed to the fact that the audience stayed in the auditorium for nearly 45 minutes after the show concluded, experiencing the afterglow of such an exhilarating experience. Cultural Attache Julie McKay represented the Embassy with a warm welcome to the audience and, along with Jonathan Hollander and members of the Battery Dance, Jemima and local studio heads, took part in televised interviews after the show.

For the first time in Battery Dance’s 17-year history of conducting Dancing to Connect projects around the world, a locally driven “phase two” occurred immediately after the American company’s program concluded. With support from the U.S. Embassy, Krump Studios carried on a program they called Dance for Impact over several weeks. Jemima, Thomas Moses and the team leaders went into five communities outside Abuja, rural places where such big-hearted training and resources would be extremely rare (and much needed.)

Battery Dance completed the second year of its Dancing for Trust initiative in Germany in the Fall of 2023, with workshops and performances centered around the city of Halle in the Federal State of Sachsen-Anhalt, and a refresher for teachers in Bremen where DfT had been launched in 2022.

One week of training was provided for 20 German school teachers, comprising 20 hours of theoretical and practical sessions devoted to introducing the methodology Battery Dance has used in schools across Germany, in the U.S. and countries around the world. Once the teachers were familiarized with the educational/creative process, they joined with the Battery Dance teaching artists in bringing it into their schools. This happened in two cohorts – with five secondary schools in the week following the teacher training sessions; and with five gymnasia in the two weeks afterwards. There was a gap of time due to a long weekend that included German Reunification Day which took place this year on a Tuesday, necessitating an extended time frame.

The final two days of the project were taken up with rehearsals and performances at the Volkspark, a multi-venue theater and community center with historical importance for the City. On Wednesday, October 11th, each of the secondary school groups rehearsed on stage in the afternoon and performed their completed choreographies in the evening. The audience comprised approximately 400 audience of families, teachers, peers and members of the general public and dignitaries who spoke at the beginning of the performance including Heike Piornak-Sommerweiss of the Landesinstitut fur Schulqualitat und Lehrerbildung Sachsen-Anhalt and Norbert Ryl of the Landeschulamt Sachsen-Anhalt and David Paned, Counselor for Public Affairs, U.S. Consulate General Leipzig introduced the program.

The following night, Thursday, October 12th, the five gymnasia followed the same pattern. This time, John Crosby, Consul General from the U.S. Consulate General Leipzig spoke in place of Mr. Paned. Syrian-German choreographer Saeed Hani introduced “The Wind in the Olive Grove”, as well as “A Certain Mood” by Taiwanese choreographer Tsai-Hsi Hung, both of which were created for Battery Dance on commission by the Renate, Hans and Marie Hofmann Trust.

Through the support of the Consulate General in Leipzig, the Company added an interactive event at the Grassi Museum in Leipzig, bringing audiences into the outdoor porch and indoor galleries that display Benin Bronzes and other relics from countries around the world. This event extended the Company’s reach into the Federal State of Sachsen and helped to spread awareness of the Dancing for Trust performances and workshops taking place in Halle.

Entrance and exit questionnaires were distributed to the student groups. An indication of the success of the program came the day after it was concluded when a teacher from a school in Sachsen-Anhalt wrote to inquire whether the Company would be returning and whether it would be possible for her school to join. The school offices in Magdeburg and Dessau, where earlier Dancing to Connect projects had taken place, contacted Frau Piornak-Sommerweiss with similar inquiries. Two teachers from a “gifted and talented” school in Halle took part in the teacher training sessions in week one of Dancing for Trust, despite the fact that an earlier-scheduled school trip precluded their students from taking part this year. There is hope that Battery Dance could send teaching artists in 2024 following the program it is scheduled to conduct in the Federal State of Brandenburg, to serve this and other schools in Sachsen-Anhalt.