I was awarded ADAD Trailblazers Fellowship in 2006. The award allowed me to complete choreographing Truth and Transparency a work based on Ralph Ellison’s novel The Invisible Man. The award allowed me to research in New York and also take film-editing classes (since I used image projection in the choreography). The Trailblazer award and the piece itself mark a seminal moment for me since the principles that I began to explore through choreographing the piece have informed my work since then.

Ralph Ellison’s novel follows the life journey of an Afro-American man as he remembers his past and draws a picture of his current situation. Throughout the novel Ellison uses the allegory of light to refer to visibility of the Self. The man in the story narrates situations in his personal history that demonstrate how society’s perception of an individual give them more or less visibility and validity of one’s Self.

The book led to my interest in the relationship between dance/dancer and light/space, audience and witnessing. I used projection as a key element in the work in order to explore this relationship. The (stage) light depends on interaction with the physical to be noticed - light confirms the reality of the dancers by giving them form. At the same time the eye of the audience is drawn to the projected image of the dancer over the live dancer (because the screen is physically easier to watch). Light is made meaningful by what we know and recognise as the physical body but at the same time the representation the light creates or the parts of the body it reveals governs what is witness on the stage.

This exploration led me to research the work of light artists Ingo Maurer and Olafur Eliasson. As I progressed with the choreography the role of the audience’s perceptions in terms of witnessing the dance became highlighted for me. My Anglo-Nigerian background and Native American influences had exposed me to dances where the role of the audience is not as passive by-standers, but rather as active participants as in the cases of carnival, Yoruba, and Lakota dances where the audience moves with the dancers and are part of the experience. I found that this approach to audiences raised questions about my artistic goals, as I created work for a traditional Western theatre space. Western expectation is of an audience of individuals collectively seeing the same thing; there is an assumption that everyone sees the same thing and if you do not see the same thing as everyone else you are disadvantaged.

I make my work to be experienced differently according to where it is viewed. For this piece I wanted the audience to be aware of their unique relationship with the dancers and the light. I call this 'collective seeing': each audience member has an individual view / understanding of the work. This means that if you saw the work from a different seat in the theatre or in a different place it is a different experience. Therefore the totality of the work is seen across the community of the audience. I feel this also reflects the multi-generational community expectations associated with the same non-western dances mentioned above. Carnival, Yoruba, and Lakota dances involve and create communities of participants (with different roles and experiences).

Truth and Transparency was successfully performed in a few theatres along with a number of workshops based on the creative process. Having completed the work, I was able to develop ideas it had raised in subsequent choreographic commissions. My interest in collective seeing has led to three principles that inform my creative process today:

These three principles have naturally led me to create site-specific works, and works for children. In the period since 2006 I have been commissioned to create a number of site-specific works in UK and USA as well as had international commissions to create work for young audiences. It is clear that these two forms of work complement the three principles above. Site-specific work allows me to think about ‘choreographing’ the audience’s path as much as the dancers, ‘choreographing’ the space as much as the movements, since in the site the audience might walk to part of a building discovering dance in places, or the dance might be viewed from a number of stand points, through and around existing objects in the site.

The second principle of interaction (not in terms of joining in with the dance moves so much as being aware of actively viewing the work) is nourished by young audiences. Ellison beautifully expresses that meaning in the lived experience is created through partnerships of perception. Children learn and understand the world (which is so new to them) through their great skills in watching. They watch in order to better understand - theirs is an active witnessing of what is happening. The young audience challenges me to see interaction as more than allowing the audience to ‘join in’ but instead to create work that is a actively inviting the audience to join me in creative imaginings, the world the performance creates is also the world we (performers and audience) are together exploring. As Toni Morrison suggests we can creatively re-imagine a world to live together in.

The last principle overarches how my work is about addressing ‘The Gaze’, which Ellison is saying transforms the very identity of the Self. For children I think it is important to make work that recognises and validates the importance of their gaze.

By creating work that has a starting point in the communities one hopes will be the audience for the work, I engage the idea of the ‘gaze of recognition’, this has become central to my work because of the issues of social and cultural norms it raises. My Anglo-Nigerian background means I do not come from the mainstream and it is important to me that while being ‘other’ does not become my identity in the mainstream I still remain true to my unique background and the perceptions it engenders.

The gaze of recognition gives validity to the sensations that we use to build an understanding of ourselves and world around us. Sensation, experience and transformation live in the physical body. Dance talks in the language of the body; that is why dance is something that can be related to at a gut level, cutting across social and cultural isolation. Dance can communicate ideas that are not formed into words. Dance’s non-verbal communication is just as capable of conveying our perceptions of how we fit into the world: how we can expand, open, close, fall, balance: be a part of it all. The protagonist in Ellison’s novel just wanted to have some sense of being involved in the construction of who he was; not to be just the projection of what people saw him as. My work in bringing dance to sites outside the theatre and to audiences new to the theatre setting is about the same partnership of construction. Dance not being what people project it to be, but dance actively stepping into people’s lives; challenging performers and audience to find ways to witness and imagine together - the pleasure of seeing each other differently.