/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/THEATRE-KENYA: Boundless Love

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Katy Salmon

NAIROBI, Apr 30 2002 (IPS) - ‘Boundless Love’, a “dramatic fusion” of poetry, song, dance, drumming and percussion, breaks radical new ground in the Kenyan theatre scene.

It brings together a well-established theatre group, the Mbalamwezi Players (‘mbalamwezi’ means place of the moon in Kiswahili), and Dance into Space, a leading contemporary dance group.

Gold, terracotta and raffia-dressed bodies roll and leap across the stage, accompanied by frantic drumming. They imitate safari ants, snails and fat-bellied chameleons. Poetry is interspersed with traditional songs from the Luhya, Mjikenda and Japodhola ethnic groups.

Director and poet Peter Mudamba explains how ‘Boundless Love’ came about.

“The mode of theatre that has been peddled in Kenya quite a bit has been quite simplistic, happy go lucky kind of thing. People come in, laugh and go off. Kenyan crowds dash in so much for comedies, farce — where not so much of their mind is engaged in thinking.

“I was getting a little tired of dealing with scripted plays — plays which have been done, ready and brought. You just pick it up and go into directing, sound, lights. That’s all,” he explains.

So Mudamba decided to experiment. “There is a crowd of Kenyans who like to think. But when they see theatre that is so simplistic, they are pushed off.

“I had done a couple of shows with Mbalamwezi Players. These were poetry sessions with music but not refined choreographic dance.

“I thought deeply. I’d watched quite a bit of choreographer Ondiege Mathew’s works. They’re thought provoking, expressive and contemporary.

“I thought our artists need to be much more all-rounders — where they think, they help in devising, they dance and they are able to recite poetry and give meaning to the poetry through the expression of dance.

“So I talked with Ondiege about dealing with my poetry,” he says.

Having written and produced poetry for over a decade, Mudamba realised the key to bringing the poems alive lies in their presentation.

“I don’t think they want to sit and watch you recite because then they can simply take a poem and read it,” he says.

So he mixed poetry with music and dance. “I believe poetry and music are quite close. Poetry comes from music quite a bit.

“It is so individualistic. A person sits down and interprets on an individual level. I think the same thing goes with contemporary or expressive dancing,” he says.

Mudamba soon realised it would be unfair to just present poetry from a male point of view.

“I read quite a bit of poetry from African-American and Caribbean women writers. I thought I could balance off the man’s view from the ladies’,” he recalls.

Mudamba thumbed through ‘Daughters of the Sun, Women of the Moon’ (a Caribbean collection) and a selection of early 20th century Afro-American female poets, such as Maya Angelou with her haunting ‘And Still I Rise’. And decided “to venture into the issue of women empowerment” and “to capture the growing feeling of cultural rejuvenation and cultural reorientation”.

The first movement, ‘Longing, Yearning and the OK guys’, describes the wistful, sweetness at the beginning of a relationship. The second half runs through the emotions of ‘Woman Rebelling, Reconciliation and Love’.

Many of the poems have a Kenyan flavour. Linda Piper’s ‘Sweet Ethel’ tells the story of a sex worker on Nairobi’s infamous Koinange Street. Margaret Walker’s ‘Kissie Lee’ is “the toughest girl from Eastleigh” — a Somali-dominated estate in Nairobi sprawling slums.

Judging from first night responses — “wonderful” and “marvellous” – it seems Mudamba has hit on a winning formula — despite one complaint of “too much male bashing”.

“I think the experiment worked out quite well looking at the crowd that came to watch the first night of the show. When you give them a fusion of this kind, people sit and enjoy what they want to enjoy.

“I hope that they’ll want to see more of this kind of thing which is original, a little bit bold and at the same time trying to challenge people to laugh and enjoy,” he says.