Not even the sky’s a limit to ‘Dance Into Space’ CEO Matthew Ondiege
By Margaretta wa Gacheru
July 18, 2012
Posted in www.BusinessDailyAfrica.com.
As a professional actor, dancer, director and choreographer,
Matthew Ondiege feels he’s defied the odds that bet most Kenyan performing
artists won’t go far in life.
“They either get lost in the world of NGOs, become
professionals in the corporate world or academics that give up performing
except in the classroom,” observed the CEO of Kenya’s first professional dance
company, Dance Into Space, which will be 15 years old this year.
The few illustrious exceptions to Ondiege’s point of view
include several of his former teachers. They are performers who taught him
during the Golden Age of Kenyan Theatre in the 1990s when Nairobi Theatre
Academy was going strong and Ondiege had the good fortune to learn from local
luminaries like Francis Imbuga, David Mulwa, Annabel Maule, Wasambo Were,Tirus Gathwe
and the late Dr. Opiyo Mumma.
Unfortunately, Nairobi Theatre Academy didn’t last long.
Ondiege, who’d come straight from secondary school to what was then called the
French Cultural Centre, earned a diploma in acting and dance in 1993. But NTA
died shortly thereafter, though not before it inspired performing artists like
Ondiege to stick with the stage, a sphere he’d loved since primary school.
“My first taste for the stage was in class 3 at Jamhuri
Primary. I played the head shepherd who told my fellow shepherds to follow the
star to find the chosen child,” recalled Ondiege whose most recent acting roles
have not been on stage but in film.
On screen several times in April when two award-winning
Danish films were shown during its annual European Film Festival, Ondiege was
conspicuous in both ‘In a Better World’ and ‘Lost in Africa.’
In the first (which won an Academy Award for Best Foreign
Film in 2012), he played a Sudanese elder based in Dhafur where his people were
being slaughtered every day. In the second, he had a small part playing Officer
Mutuku in VibekaMuasya’s film about Kenyan HIV/AIDS orphan adopted by Danes who
bring the boy back home for a visit where he literally gets lost in Kibera.
It was during the casting of her film that Muasya and
Ondiege first met and found they were both dancer-choreographers. Both keen to
continue Kenya-Denmark collaboration, Ondiege wrote a proposal that the Danish
Cultural Fund liked. The main idea involved mixing the media of dance, digital
film and live music. DCF also liked the linking of Nairobi and Copenhagen,
classical ballet and modern African dance (since Vibeka is professionally trained
in ballet and Ondiege is trained in modern dance at NTA as well as in Dakar,
Moscow, and Bremer, Germany.
One of the most intriguing components of Ondiege’s proposal
was his plan to work with both disabled and able-bodied dancers in a production
he calls Paths Cultural Exchange.
For while Ondiege didn’t start up Dance Into Space with the
intention of training disabled people in dance, he got involved while studying
in Germany and hearing about Gerda Konig whose dance company mixed able and
disabled dancers.
“When I learned she wanted to develop a dance project in
Africa, I got in touch with her and encouraged her to come to Kenya,” Ondiege
recalls. He wasn’t trained to teach or choreograph the disabled, but he had a
rich background choreographing dance dramas for the dance troupe he formed in
1997.
His productions include original works which he scripted,
staged and choreographed, such as Akokhan,
Freedom of My Soul, PishaPokea and Wakati, his one-man show which roused
wider recognition of Ondiege as a gifted choreographer, dancer and actor.
Even before he established Dance Into Space, he
choreographed shows such as Limenya
and Drumbeats over Mount Kirinyaga
for the Theatre Workshop Production, the company he joined shortly before
graduating from NTA.
‘I was professionally trained as an actor, but I also
trained in dance and choreography , both by Africans like George Menoe and Mathenge,
but also by French choreographers who came to Kenya,” Ondiege said.
In addition, he found his way into modern dance courses
taking place everywhere from Bagamoyo and Dakar to Moscow and Bremer, Germany.
All that training was bound to transform Ondiege into a
teacher himself. Working in the field of theatre for development when he wasn’t
choreographing shows of his own, he taught a wide range of community groups how
to use dance as a means of translating complex ideas into empowering plays.
Working with everyone from the Kenya Human Rights Commission
and Family Planning Private Sector to Action Aid and the Association of
Physically Disabled, Ondiege has trained more dancers than he can count.
However, one number that stands out in his mind is the 150
disabled Kenyans that he’s trained. Most
have come from Nairobi’s so-called ‘slums’. Many have started up their own dance
companies. In Shauri Moyo there’s Imani, in Mukuru one is called Utena, and Kibera
has got the Lake Victoria dance troupe.
Ondiege has found it rewarding to work with the disabled. “I
don’t think I have taught them anything. I have merely motivated them to
explore what they can do.” Sounding like a Barack Obama whose 2008 campaign
slogan was 'Yes, We Can’, Ondiege says he actually learns from them, since they
are the ones defying their physical limitations.
In the upcoming production of Paths, Ondiege plans to work
will be two disabled artists, Nicholas Ouma who’s been paralyzed from the waist
down from polio most of his life and Michel Ondaro, the amazing blind musician
who’s composing original music for
voice, flute and guitar for the Paths production.
But Ondiege doesn’t see Paths as being primarily about the
disabled. It’s about the way people’s paths intersect, be they from Copenhagen
or Nairobi, blind or starry eyed, classical or modern dancers, black or white.
Blazing trails for Kenyan performing artists, both with
Paths and Dance Into Space, Ondiege sincerely sees that not even the sky’s the
limit to creativity. Like his disabled dancers, he believes ‘Yes, he can’.
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