Close-up on Francis Nii Yartey
By 'Funmi Adewole
Funmi Adewole visits Noyam Dance Institute founded by Nii Yartey to train dancers and to experiment with new approaches to dance making. Nii Yartey is also artistic director of the Ghana National Dance Ensemble. He has traveled extensively: researching, studying, teaching and collaborating in dance.
Though he describes his work with Noyam as Contemporary African dance Nii Yartey finds the label somewhat limiting. Yartey’s experimentation has been in response to the choreographic legacy he received from the late Professor Okpoku who was the first artistic director of the National Dance Ensemble and a pioneer in the development of African theatre dance. Yartey confers with this legacy from point of view of a present-day Ghanaian grappling with both Pan-Africanism and Globalization and as such sees himself as a progressive traditionalist. Because the word ‘Contemporary’ is so associated with an aesthetic that evolved out of American and European circumstances he feels it lays on his work the perspectives and judgments of another dance history.
Watching the graduating students of Noyam (all of whom came from backgrounds in traditional and popular dance) one can see why he has these misgivings. One of the pieces ‘Koom’ is created solely from vocabulary derived from Ghanaian ‘Customary Behaviour’. This is a term used to describe codified gesticulation that is use in every day situations such as the putting of one’s hands on one’s head at funeral to display grief. In traditional dance drama gestures of this nature are used in between the main dances to take the narrative forward. In ‘Koom’ gesture is elevated dance. The piece is wholly Ghanaian does not refer to any particular ethnic culture. The dramatic and rhythmical clarity of the piece is stunning. Yartey only experiments with only African movement. In other pieces movements from traditional dances are extended, compressed, reconfigured.
After a while Nii Yartey left me with his dancers, a robust articulate bunch who showed how their experiments linked to traditional dances, taught me some traditional dance steps showed their course work which included finding work and staging shows locally. It was good to see a choreographer dealing with local dynamics. For the want of better word, this is a contemporary development.
