24 THE SECTOR MOVES FORWARD
DIVERSITY OR SKIN COLOUR
BY GRETA MENDEZ MBE WWW.GMENDEZ-OWD.CO.UK
With the way we communicate leaping further online, Greta Mendez MBE asks the question: Are we embracing this opportunity to discover and celebrate more diverse international styles? For the past year, we have lived mostly in a state of lockdown with very little direct human contact. This has meant that most of our art exchanges and consumption have been via the internet, which has afforded us a more international reach. Has this international reach meant that we are exposed to a truly diverse range of art/dance forms? Have we only engaged with dance forms that cater to Western notions of dance, peppered with a few African & Asian aesthetics? If we examine most of the images used to promote dance, we would note that they, in the main, pander to Western ideals.
Greta Mendez MBE
Greta Mendez’ Ndulgence © Tunde Shoderu, designed by Alexis Shepherd
Lockdown gave me time to look at videos of young children, mostly in Africa, doing their dances which are not yet exposed to Western notions of dance. The children’s dances were complex and dynamic, with the movements emanating out of their bodies in multifaceted, witty, energetic, joyous, and soulful vocabularies. In fact, they were the dances and the dances were them. An eleven-year-old boy, Anthony Madu, was filmed doing ballet training in his backyard in the rain in Lagos, Nigeria. Needless to say, he, like so many of the other children, wanted to be a ‘dancer.’ This video was shown on worldwide news and the actress Cynthia Erivo, who is also Nigerian, introduced him to the prestigious American Ballet Theatre where he has earned a scholarship; brilliant. There were no such global clarion calls for the children doing their dances, with all the poetic sensibilities of new and challenging dance.
