ESSENTIAL SERVICES
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Runtime: 20 mins
Genre: Dance
Venue:
Kenya National Theatre
Production Company: Dance Into Space
Directors: Ondiege Matthew
Performers: Kennedy Wafula, Lorriette Aluoch, Novaline Akoth, Kelvin Tesha, Rodgers Maithya
Censorship Notifications::
Universal
Footage Quality: Professional
Performance Date: 01/10/2020 - 01/10/2020
Writer: Ondiege Matthew
Producer: Ondiege Matthew
Sound Crew: Richard Mwendwa & Ken Gakuo
Lighting Crew: Alacoque Ntome
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Onyango Ondiege –
By CAMERON S GOVENDER
Ondiege Matthew from Dance Into Space (Nairobi, Kenya), choreographed two works Generations and
Essential Services which premiered at the Kenya National Theatre in July this year, during the peak of the
Covid-19 Pandemic in South Africa. Dance Into Space under Matthew’s guidance, produced two pieces of creative expression, that has me feeling conflicted.
There is no cross-cultural guide that one can pick up to translate a twirl into ‘confusion’ or maybe a roll into a
leap to mean ‘overcoming’. I think Dance Into Space pushes western-prescribed ways of critiquing a little/ or
maybe a lot further than just ‘interpretation of movement’. Perhaps my discomfort in terms of my ability to
‘read’ these dances is because Matthew and his dancers don’t just speak about decolonisation, they embody
it.
The African continent, for centuries, has been trying to pull ourselves out from under the weight of colonial
histories and imposed contemporary ‘Africanisms’. Matthew and his company push back, finding voice on
their own terms. Is this what decolonisation looks like?
Watching Generations and Essential Services made me in equal parts proud to be an African, and angry that
African lives still hold less global ‘value’ than our ‘western’ brothers and sisters. Essential Services, in particular, with its tongue-in-cheek engagements with the politics of what is ‘essential’ in times of a global pandemic, and who dictates these left me yearning for a time we have yet to experience… when Africa and her people
are included in ‘the world’, meaningfully and deliberately.
The work is a disjointed look at what it means to live in a country, on a continent, where access to clean water is a privilege that few can afford. As the work draws me in, I am confronted by the performer’s words:
“Everywhere on TV or radio is Corona… Now there is no AIDS, TB, Cancer or Malaria”… “Our children are dying silently from Malaria”, valid statements from a continent and a people who have been living with deadly
pandemics for years, without the global or government interventions that we see today. This is undercut by
Matthew’s disjointed choreography that urges for acknowledgement; to be seen. Essential Services delves into
how the “Covid-essential” is maybe somehow not the only essential for a continent such as Africa. We are
told to social distance, we are told to wear masks, we are also told to wash our hands: all the while many are
left without access to these “Covid-essentials”, let alone basic human rights essentials like food and shelter.
In South Africa, for instance, we have seen, on the news, how the government, Essential Services Unit, took
many homeless people, and put them all together under one tent (how noble of them), with a tap that needs
to be opened using a spanner, with baths that require someone to hold a hose.
Matthew and his company achieve much in the presentation of their works, resoundingly though, they offer a
layered narrative that combines injustices of history and of the present, bringing into sharp focus the devastating realities of an imposed (arguably un-African) one-size-fits-all model of engagement with Covid-19.