“Dance Drama”

photos from Patrick Amanama

How do you want to spend your eternity? In Life, heaven is real and hell is real.

This dance drama by kids of Standard Foundation Nursery/Primary School (Ikorodu, Lagos, Nigeria) started with the deaths of two young men. After death comes Jugdement [the bible]. The stories of their lives while on earth was played out for them. The good man goes to HEAVEN while the bad man goes to HELL. What a feeling to be in the bossom of our lord almighty! Our kids learn to DO by DOING. Let’s make our ways straight. …..Patrick Ebi Amanama

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“Child Labor in Nigeria”

photos from Patrick Amanama

Child labour keeps children out of school. The effects of child labour in any society are poor performance and dropping out of school and exposure to theft, armed robbery, rape and drug abuse. (more…)

AVANT-GARDE NIGERIAN ARTIST DEVELOPS BUTOH-VOCAL THEATRE

In August, Eseohe Arhebamen led a Butoh dance workshop at The Living Theatre, a performance space located in downtown Manhattan.  Known as the “Dance of Darkness,” Butoh is a contemporary avant-garde dance form which was originally performed in Japan in 1959. Butoh combines dance, theater, improvisation and influences from the Japanese artist tradition and performance art.

Born in West Africa, Nigeria, Eseohe is an international multi-media performer residing in Brooklyn, NY. She is also known on stage and in performance, as Edoheart. Eseohe has taught different art forms to adults and children for many years in Detroit and New York; as Edoheart, she intimately incorporates language into her Butoh dance workshops.

An award winning poet, writer, and student of both Butoh and African theater, it is Eseohe’s “passion for language” (her own Nigeria boasts 512 of them) that has led her to explore “the semiotic nature of audio/visual communication” and “the channeling of language through movement.” Typically known for its extreme imagery and white-body makeup, the addition of vocalizations to the art form is quite an innovation coming from the Nigerian artist. (more…)

It so happens that I am obsessed with symbols and semiotics, the signs and signals with which we navigate our various environments, including that of the world wide web and her arachnid offspring, social networks. Similarly am I enamored of all things lingual, language and its turns, puns, limericks, bends and behaviors across different straits. To the end of fashioning myself another tongue with which to explore the rigmarole of metaphors and other signifying sayings, I have created a Facebook application experiment that I hope others will join me in using. (more…)