Emmanuel Ndefo is a dancer, artist and choreographer, originally from Nigeria, currently living between Lagos and Toulouse. TaikaBox had the pleasure of spending a week with Emmanuel in the studios of CINETic during the first Bucharest Dance Hack.
Tanja: Tell us a bit about yourself…
I like movement. I like the body. I like to ask myself what can the body do and what can the body say? And what are interesting ways of using the body to say something that sometimes words cannot communicate. This is what I’m searching for in both my work and in life.
You have an incredibly interesting, multilayered, multicultural background – can you tell more about how you became a dance artist?
I think that where I grew up is related to my perception of how my body inhabits space, even within a global context. I grew up in a town called Sabon Gari in the northern part of Nigeria. Sabon Gari (‘New Town’ in the Hausa language) is a part of a historical city in the north of Nigeria called Kano, the second largest city in Nigeria, after Lagos. Basically, Nigeria is a former British colony which happens to be an amalgamation of very different ethnic groups, almost like different nations with their different histories and languages – all mashed together to form this umbrella country called Nigeria. And when, in 1960, Nigeria became an independent country, people were encouraged to visit different parts of the country in order to have an awareness of what their neighbours are like.
Nigeria has a population of about 230 million people, from about 370 ethnic groups with over 500 different languages, hence varieties of customs and traditions. And as people moved from different parts of the country to Sabon-Gari, Kano, this town became a sort of crossroad of different foreign communities. My father moved there, and it was into this melting pot that I was born. It was an interesting place to grow up. These days people talk about cultural diversity in many contexts, but this was real cultural diversity. I didn’t have to leave this small town to learn four languages. My parents are from the East, so I speak Igbo. The language of the space where we moved to was Hausa majority speaking, so I speak Hausa also. In schools, we were forced to speak English, which was the national language, supposed to be the unifying language. And then, within my friends, I spoke Pidgin English – an outlawed hybrid of English mixed with the local context, developed into a new kind of vocabulary.
Learning how to communicate simultaneously in all of these different languages and with different people and communities was a large part of my upbringing. And it’s interesting that this has become the source of my creativity. Places of intersections are where you find strong tensions, and you have to understand how to resolve these tensions, but without compromising what is important and interesting. These inter-human relationships are complicated – you are rarely seeing eye to eye with people with whom you don’t share the same language, you don’t share the same culture, but finding ways to connect beyond all of this social construct has been a really strong point from which I draw my creativity, these intersections of cultures.
And it shaped my interest in language. Now I also speak French and German. I was raised a Catholic, but also I’m interested in so many other religions like Buddhism. I practice street dance styles like hip hop and house and I’m also interested in ritual and traditional dances from Africa. The postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha has written about this concept which he calls third spaces. And it’s kind of an interesting part of the postcolonial experience, this place where you have to deal with tension, but also embracing this chaos in order to find ways to transcend it. And I think for me, I have spent my time creatively navigating the world with the benefit of the experience of just living in Sabon Gari.
So what was your journey from Sabon Gari to here? How do you end up working in dance?
That’s an interesting question.
I think dance has always been part of my environment growing up in Nigeria. Even in the Catholic Church there was always a mixture of music and dance, the way that Africans appropriated the Catholic mass by mixing it with traditional rituals which often involved a mixture of music and movement. And also within weddings, and when people are buried, you gather, you mourn, but you also dance.
Interestingly, when I was growing up, dance was not something that I saw as a profession. It’s something that you do as a community, a way of exchanging, of binding together, of sharing common experience. And so growing up, I never had any kind of professional aspirations to be a dancer. I wanted to be a footballer, maybe that is evidence that I’ve always had an interest in movement.
In my university days where I was studying public administration, I was part of a youth dance group, within a religious context called YWAP (Youth With A Purpose). In YWAP we were called “ministers” in some sense, because dance was a way of ministering, of communicating something, almost spiritually, to a congregation. more than just technique, we were concerned with really reaching out and touching people in transformational ways. And it was during one of these sessions that a preacher, in a prophetic, trance-like state, came to me saying: “You will be someone who is going to dance in front of prophets and kings and people from different nations.” I didn’t know what that meant. But I believed in prophecy and the power of the prophetic word, and so I held on to it.
In The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, there’s this word that I like. It’s called maktoub, meaning destiny, it carries the idea that some things are destined to happen, as if written by fate or the universe. And most people think that it’s a flimsy word. But I disagree.
I think I was maybe 23, 24. I had never travelled outside of Nigeria before, but as soon as I graduated from my studies in administration, I left all of it behind to follow my path of maktoub.
My parents were telling me that it was time for me to get a job and start a life, and like who does dance for a living? And so, to relieve myself of the pressure, I had to say that I had got a job in Lagos, which is like 20 or 30 hours away from Kano. But I didn’t get the job. I lied because I wanted to be far away from them and just follow my destiny.
And so I went to the city, with nothing but hope, but it gave me the time and space to be able to throw myself into dance. And amazingly, it’s also part of the thinking of the Alchemist that when a man is on this road to destiny, that all of the universe conspires to help him reach his dream. ThereforeI feel like I have been lucky in the sense that everything has been shaping and adjusting to help me follow my dream.
And when things got really difficult on this journey, I miraculously met people who helped me along the way, so that I never gave up on my dream. While I was stranded in Lagos, a choreographer took me under his wings. And I was really inspired by the way he worked, the way he was thinking about dance beyond just technique, but also as a way of communicating, of storytelling. His name is Qudus Onikeku. He’s a famous Nigerian choreographer now. But I didn’t know about him before I went to Lagos. And so I went there, I met him, I started to intern under him.
His way of working is based on a really precise way of using the body to feel, but also a precise way of using the mind to communicate that feeling – it kind of blew my mind. And I said to myself, I really want to have the level of articulation that he has, not just with his body, which, of course, it’s a different way of communicating, but also with his mind. I was really inspired by that.
And so, I think that this maktoub kind of pushed me to look for a master’s programme. It was really hard to find a degree or study programme in dance in Nigeria, because most people really don’t consider dance as a profession. My practice, coming from a traditional dance and street dance background, gradually evolved into contemporary dance, but I also wanted to connect dance to society. And then I found a scholarship in what I think was the best fit for me which is a master’s in dance and anthropology. So basically, not just dance in terms of the technique, but questioning who is dancing? Why are they dancing? What’s the reason? And how dance functions within a variety of social contexts.
It was a nomadic master’s programme – we had to study it in four countries. So we spent eight months in London. We did four months in France, three months in Hungary, and then 10 months in Norway.
And so I began travelling around. Once more I felt like being plunged into this intersection of cultural diversity because that was what the master’s programme was. It was people from different parts of the world, from Finland, Russia, Kenya, Peru, Brazil, France, from Ukraine, India, Palestine…
And we sit there and we’re discussing dance, and we’re bringing in all of our cultural backgrounds and using it all to understand movement, what it does to other people, and what it does to us. And this lasted for two years from 2017-2019. And I think some of the pathways that I’ve used to continue my professional career came from this time. For example, during my studies I met a dance artist from Finland called Heidi Seppala, with whom we founded an artistic research collective called DANCO – School of Decolonizing the Art of Dance. Under this collective we have been doing cross-cultural artistic research, one strand of which was titled “Patterns of masculinity” sponsored by the Center for Contemporary Art in Lagos, Villa Karo and the Nordisk Kulturfond. The outcome of this research was presented at the Nordic Summer School Oslo and the Lappeenranta Museum of Art in Finland. I have also participated at the Turku New Performance Festival, so I have many connections with Finland.
And things have just expanded, really beyond my imagination. I think coming from where I come from, a lot of people will see this life that I have as a dream because I go back over it sometimes and I’m like, wow, you know, it’s just been destiny. Maktoub. I have no other way to explain my journey as an artist.
Thinking about your role as a choreographer, an artist, a performer: what kind of themes do you explore and how do you consider the audience’s relationship to these themes?
A major theme for me to explore is the form of dance itself. And I always bring it back to ‘what is dance?’ For example, in Igbo language, the word dance is translated as egwu.
Literally, egwu is dance, but it’s also music. So if you say egwu, depending on the context, you can say ana ma kwu-egwu ( I am making music) or ana ma abga-egwu (I am dancing). So there’s a slight change to make sure someone gets that you’re talking about music or dance, but literally music and dance are the same word.
But egwu also means to play. like a kind of childish play, ana ma egwu-egwu (I am playing). And when you say ana ma egwu-mmili, which means like (I am playing with water) – this is how you say swimming. Also wrestling is also a kind of egwu, a kind of manly game that people play. And so for me, kind of really just going really back to the words and seeing how these different forms of egwu can create different performative relationships with the audience. In a way, engaging the audiences in ways that go beyond the western conventional artist/audience separation.
I also try to use things from my own personal stories to connect to deeper human experiences. And one thing that I’m working on right now is on masculinity and perceptions of the body and gender. My latest work, which I started in 2022, is called Traces of Ecstasy. Basically I’m exploring what it means for two men to encounter each other and to be vulnerable in the presence of each other, leaving aside all kinds of social expectations. In this work, there was a lot to do with really deep and intimate conversation, deep and intimate looking and witnessing of the other based on the principle in Igbo we call ihunanya, which means love. But translating it literally, it means to look into each other’s eyes. So there’s also these principles of really deep looking and seeing the other beyond just stereotypes of the body.
I’ve been working on this project over a long period of time in collaboration with Heidi Seppala and Jalmari Nummiluikki from Finland and Femi Adebajo from Nigeria. We created a research project exploring masculinity and how it manifests itself within the Finnish or the Nordic context versus how men in Nigeria kind of think about masculinity, intimacy and vulnerability within an African context.
And also, finding how lack of space for men to be vulnerable and to be emotional sometimes manifests across cultures and across countries and how, in some ways, performance can be used to make that visible.
Things like touch, gaze and communication became tools that I used to do what I refer to as hacking – basically seeing the body as a kind of hardware and culture/social perceptions as a kind of software. And for me, sometimes we’re using touch in a certain way, we’re using this intense gaze to really hack into all of these codifications of the body, all of the structures of the body and to open it up, to find spaces of freedom, of vulnerability, of open and creative engagement with yourself and with others.
As part of the Traces of Ecstasy project we ran a series of workshops with men cross-culturally in Germany, in Finland, in Benin Republic, and in Nigeria, where basically we’re exploring these ideas of intimacy and vulnerability. And then it became a performance where me and another artist from Nigeria, really engaged in this closeness and intimacy and used it as a way to invite people into our world. As an audience, you may feel grateful to witness this moment of vulnerability and intimacy, but also kind of questioning, in fact, what right you have to witness or judge the personal lives of other people.
And so this is really one way, which is both engaging deeply with the form of dance beyond western paradigms and seeing what kind of new relationships are created, but also engaging social questions and seeing how other people, just by participating or by witnessing, can connect to it in broader ways – all in the framework of the Nordic and African cultures.
What have you discovered from working in those kinds of environments? Because it feels like they are, geographically, culturally, socially, quite far apart. What are your observations of that?
I think one thing is really in terms of space – how we’ve been taught to think about space and the body.
For example, whenever I’m in Finland, I think I always struggle to understand people’s shyness. It’s really difficult to pinpoint if this shyness is a result of, I don’t know, shame, or just being yourself, in a way. Whereas in Nigeria, people are really loud and expressive. Sometimes I think both can become a mask, that if one’s not careful, one can hide behind. And kind of seeing how sometimes I hide behind just being expressive and being too overt. Whereas, being in Finland, I see sometimes people kind of say, oh, you know, we’re just naturally shy people.
But I think having this cross-cultural conversation is really interesting to me, because for me, in Nigeria, we say something: we listen, we don’t judge. It’s a strange thing, because sometimes it is hard to avoid judgement, but really just being able to encounter people as they are, and just also mapping out the range of ways that people are in the world and being in the world.
I remember participating in a Nordic Summer School, where I was introducing a traditional ritual practice from Nigeria, from my community, which we call Adamma. Which is basically an experience where men would perform flirtatiously within a ritual context, behind a mask painted with a woman’s face. I use this as a way to engage with femininity, in some sense, and show this sort of fluidity of experience of gender by hacking my body with this mask. And a lot of the time, in the Nordic contexts, there’s a response of exoticization of cultural practices, especially when it comes from Africa. Nowadays when dealing with contemporary African artists It is useful to see beyond stereotypes, in some sense, and just engage with what is in front of you.
Also I think a lot of Nordic people are really practical. And this is also a difficult thing that I try to negotiate with Finnish artists that I collaborate with, for example, how we think about time. When we worked together in Lagos, one of the Finnish guys always complained that we were always late. And not just me, but all the participants from Lagos. And so sometimes if he says to meet at 10am, everyone’s like, oh, that’s 11.30 or 12pm then. Because in Nigeria people take their time to arrive in a place.
And so for me, I never bother about this in Nigeria, because I’m like, okay, everybody comes when they want. But he was really strict about time, and he always freaked out about the noncompliance with time. He would go crazy. So I think, again, not only how we think about time, but how we think about work. On the Finnish side of the project, there has to be a leader, things have to be structured. And for us from Lagos, we trust that the work is going to happen. If you grow up in Lagos, you really learn to trust on improvisation, because for example the bus doesn’t work, electricity is not there. So nothing is fixed. People say improvisation in dance, but for me, I think it was first a way of life for us. You really have to be flexible and observe. To cross the road you have to look left and right and cross, because there’s no traffic signal that tells you when to stop, when to cross like in Finland where even daily life experience is choreographed. So this choreography of space really affects the way we navigate the world. Going to Finland and seeing how things are really meticulously programmed, I really see how this difference can shape us in really interesting ways.
You mentioned about the body being the hardware, and the culture being the software.
That really refers quite heavily towards technology, and I wanted to touch on this subject, because we are now in the middle of the first Bucharest Dance Hack. What actually interests you, first of all to apply for a Dance Hack, but generally about technology?
I think that, for a long time, I have been really sceptical about technology.
Because I think from the start, for me, the body is my first technology. The ability to produce sound, to produce movement, to create really interesting visual experiences. And I was afraid of what technology would do to the medium which is really at the core of my practice, my survival.
And so I was dismissive of it, especially the way people present it as the future. And you see what technology, especially new technology, does to jobs, even really manual jobs, with machines replacing humans in the workplace.
But I think with the way that the Dance Hack programme was presented was a kind of dialogue between dance and technology, and, as I’m always interested in hybridity, it gave me the idea that there could be some creative use of the body in collaboration with technology.
At this stage in my creative process, I’ve been thinking about how to start using rudimentary forms of technology. First, a projector screen, using it in a functional way in my performances, and getting interested in the possibility that it provides to bring Lagos visually onto the stage in somewhere like Germany. This was interesting for me, and also thinking about that and seeing how the framing of the Dance Hack programme is all about collaboration and creativity. I have been in a VR experience once and it felt really spiritual – it felt like a way to access some of the things that – within a ritual context – sometimes we strive to achieve with the body.
So, I wanted to challenge myself to leave my insecurity aside for a moment and to engage with new technologies in dance. I think there’s still something really special about us gathering to see the body used in creative ways, but I also want to see how this collaboration between dance and technology will evolve. Even something like amplification of the voice with a microphone – as simple as that is you know I think it has power and this is what I’m interested in the Dance Hack – this possibility of collaborating not subsuming the body with machines or with technology but seeing what kind of creativity we can experience together, what new creative ways we can use the body and tech. I really like the idea of when we talk about hacking here, it could also be about breaking the machine to produce interesting things, so that motivated me to apply, and here we are!
And have you reach the point of performing for kings and prophets or are you still on that journey?
In one sense I was looking at it from a different Christian perspective at the beginning, thinking about this prophecy of “dancing for kings and prophets” as probably performing in front of the powerful people in the world. And I have managed to do that, to dance in places like Eko Hotel in Lagos in front of the Governor of the state, or present my work in places like the Venice Biennale where you have really important people in the art world sitting in the room. But In Igbo traditional philosophy there is the recognition of “The king in everybody”, and this is the perspective from which I look at it now.
So then, whenever I perform with or for any public, like here at the Bucharest Dance Hack, I believe that I have fulfilled that prophecy. And as long as there’s still fire and spirit in my body leading me to dance, I am still on that journey.
Emmanuel was talking with Tanja and John