By Mike
Collett-White | Reuters
LONDON (Reuters) -
Two Ethiopians who take to the London stage on Monday evening are living proof
that dance really can change lives.
Addisu Demissie, 30,
and Junaid Jemal Sendi, 28, will perform in "A Holding
Space", a dance collaboration which explores their extraordinary
journey from the streets of Addis Ababa to some of the
biggest arts venues in Europe.
In the film
"Billy Elliot", the son of a tough northern English miner breaks
taboos and challenges a community's prejudices by ditching boxing to take up
ballet.
In the real world,
Demissie was in his early teens and out shining shoes to make extra cash for
his family when a stranger turned up at the door offering the chance of free
education.
He and hundreds of
other children turned up the following day, and quickly realized that the
education they were to receive was not blackboards and books but movement and
exercise.
In just 17 days, at a
time when there were no known contemporary dancers in Ethiopia, some 120 children
from the streets were dancing in a performance of Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana".
Andrew Coggins, chief
executive of the Dance United charity which organized the project in
the mid-1990s, recalled the transformation he saw in the children.
"You saw kids on
the street who were rather supplicant suddenly standing on the stage and taking
their full space in the world," he told Reuters at The Place, the London
dance venue where A Holding Space is being performed.
"It was a
tremendous metaphor for what then followed."
Demissie and Sendi
were among 18 boys who were then enrolled on a five-year dance course that
earned them a qualification from Middlesex University.
Since 2002, they have
performed at venues including Sadler's Wells, Britain's most famous dance
stage, won a choreography award and helped develop a charity in Ethiopia that
uses the arts to reach disadvantaged people.
"The main thing
is we're not dancing for the sake of dancing, we're just using dance as a tool
for changing people's behavior, changing people's lives," said Sendi,
speaking in near-perfect English.
"BETTER LIFE,
BETTER CHANCES"
As well as taking in
children from the streets, the Adugna Community Dance Theatre Company which
they lead has begun to work with prisoners and young people with physical
disabilities in the first such initiative in Ethiopia.
Others in Demissie's
and Sendi's place may have been tempted to leave Ethiopia and pursue the bright
lights of a high-profile career in the West.
"Of course there
is a better life here, there are better chances," explained Demissie.
"I can live
better and I can eat better, but that's not the important part for me. These
people (Dance United) have spent a lot of money on us ... and we have this
responsibility.
"I'm not going
to be a dancer here because there are millions of dancers. I'm not avoiding
competition but as Junaid says, we have more of a role in Ethiopia."
Of the original 18
who trained on the course, about half have left dance altogether, but the point
of Adugna's work was not to create dancers.
"The rest, they
chose to be someone else, but probably the training helped them to see what
they wanted and that's what we are trying to do - give people the chance to see
the world from a different direction," Demissie told Reuters.
The pair aim to
continue their work with Adugna and to open their own studio in Addis Ababa if
they can raise the funds, as well as expand dance teaching into festivals that
will attract visitors from abroad.
(Reporting by Mike Collett-White, editing by Paul Casciato)
No comments:
Post a Comment