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.)