The Creative Process

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Year of Return

Although Ghana’s year of return happened in 2019, this year became my year of return. I moved to the US in August 2018 and this year, I had the opportunity to visit home. I planned to go back in 2020 but then the pandemic hit so I had to reschedule for 2021 which also did not happen due to a few reasons beyond my control. However, it happen last month after a long wait.

I was able to travel because I won a research grant which paid for my travel to Ghana. My research will commence this semester, thus I had to go gather information before the new school year begins.

I made quite a dramatic appearance at home which I posted on my TikTok and Instagram. I did not inform my family about my trip home, instead, I told them a friend I have in the US who is visiting Ghana needed a place to stay and will be staying in my apartment. They did not have the slightest inkling that I was the one visiting. I teamed up with my sister-in-law because I needed someone to play this out with, and we executed it perfectly. Also I put on a mask and a bucket hat so it was mission impossible for them to make me out. However, my sister was able to make me out even with the bucket hat and the mask. You can watch the video here.

My sister-in-law right behind me, her friend and my niece.

Without wasting no time, I went out to renew my Ghanaian passport the next morning and started talking to people about my research. My recruitment method was through word of mouth so I kept asking people to direct me to individuals who had knowledge about my research. My research is about the migration of the Ga people specifically those who settled in the town of La. My thesis project is going to be a dance piece about the migration and I needed accurate information about the migration. I was linked with one of the Chief Priests of the town whom we refer to as “Wul)m)”. I met with him and we discussed my research and we were able to schedule a day to have the interview. He invited two other knowledgable folks who supported and gave me a lot of information. Also, I was able to witness an important ritual that happens every year before our main festival is celebrated. The ritual is to go to the sacred stream of the town to fetch the “sacred water” that will be used in the cleansing of the chief’s throne. Unfortunately, I could not stay to witness the other ceremonies and the actual festival because I had to come back to the US.

Libation (prayer) being done before my interview

Children who carry the pots that contain the sacred water

I can confidently say I have enough information to make my thesis project a spectacular project and all I have to do now is process the information that I have and embody it. I look forward to telling you about my project in March.

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Directed Teaching for Contemporary Dance Class

Reflections

Taking this class last Spring semester at the Rpac was challenging due the distance that I had to walk everyday so taking it again in the department was exciting. This semester, I wasn’t just taking it as every other student in the class but as directed teaching under the auspices of my supervisor Momar Ndiaye.

Contemporary classes are the classes that I feel nervous about taking as a student and most importantly teaching. Within my dance career, I have not had a lot of contemporary dance classes except for my time at the National Dance Company of Ghana where I got the opportunity to work with some international artists. I plan to face my fears and teach a contemporary class during my final year in the department so doing a directed teaching all semester to work closely with the instructor was a huge step in the right direction. I had a little pep talk from Quianna who was in my shoes last semester and told me how important it was for her.

Finding time out of my schedule and that of my professor was not a huge task because we both had a lot of free time on Mondays so 4pm to 6pm was what we settled on. The studio sessions were great and tiring because it was just me going back-to-back and repeating the materials that were just created. Regardless, I knew that was an opportunity to build stamina and get stronger. I am a person who does not complain because I like to do what is asked of me. There were times that I felt that I needed a break or a moment to catch my breath because of the intensity of the movements but I depended on my professor to give me that break. Obviously, he was in my body and could not tell how I was feeling so I was supposed to voice out what I needed.

Then came the week that I was supposed to teach. I was nervous and excited at the opportunity. I was creating materials to teach in class, and I had to show it to the professor who helped me modify it and make it intense like most of the materials he created. After I felt so confident with myself and felt I could teach a contemporary class. I learned a lot from how materials are created and how materials can be made more challenging based on the level of the students in the class.

In conclusion, I gained a lot of confidence from taking, creating, teaching, and understudying in this class. I can tell how different it is from when I took it in the Rpac and now. With this confidence, I look forward to teaching my own African contemporary class in the near future.

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Inevitable Circling:the works of dreams

Inevitable Circling: the work of dreams is a collaborative project by the second-year MFA cohort. This project is a recurrence, a spiraling return to origin and imagination. The collaborators come from a variety of nationalities, community origins, and cultural identities, to weave together their own imagined stories of the cosmos and creation. Through the performance, they acknowledge the cyclical nature of living, dying, and transforming, telling, and retelling one story from 8 perspectives. The audience is invited to participate in the creative process as it unfolds in the space. Traversing through the Urban Arts Space galleries, the audience participants will witness the recurring events from multiple perspectives, physical positions, and conceptual frameworks.

BTS

This work was inspired by our first collective piece we choreographed in grad school as a cohort and a storytelling fused with shadow play project I did. After our 8 out of 8 project (click here to read about it), we planned to work again in the near future but did not know when. We just knew it was great to work collectively, bouncing ideas off each other and producing as a team/family. At the end of Spring semester 2021, Yukina one of my colleagues secured a performance slot at Urban Arts Space for Autumn 2021. She said, “we discussed that the group would like to work together again and this will be a good opportunity to showcase new work.” Now we had a venue, but we did not have a piece to show yet. Moreover, the first piece we choreographed was about eight to ten minutes and now we needed to put together an evening length work. We decided not to beat ourselves with that yet, so we encouraged ourselves to have a meeting at the beginning of Autumn 2021 to brainstorm.

Beginning of Autumn 2021, we scheduled a day to meet to discuss the ideas around our new project. Then Mollie, another colleague suggested that we develop an idea that I explored in my research studio class on Storytelling and shadow play, (that project can be found here). Everyone loved the idea and during the meeting, we brainstormed on which specific theme we wanted to work with. We decided to work on the ideas of storytelling, shadow play, relationships, life origin/cycles and the elements of the universe. We had several writing workshops to develop these ideas while making time to create in the studio on Sundays. We needed an extra time to plan logistically for the performance so an hour every Friday was set aside to talk and plan for the upcoming weeks. We could not rehearse at Urban Arts Space till the performance week, and this was a little bit challenging. We had to set aside time to go load in and set up the space while taking classes and teaching class. Because of time conflicts with people’s schedule, we created a google sheet where people updated it with their free times.

In all the project was a successful one but stressful because we were the creators, dancers, directors, stage managers and stagehands. A few undergrads in the depart offered to help during the performance to take some of the workload off and I am grateful they came at the right time and made the show a great one. Also, to the chair of the department, Susan Petry who began the journey with our rehearsal a few times to provide feedback. Finally grateful to the faculty and fellow grads who viewed the performance during our tech rehearsal to provide feedback in time before the show.

On the day of the performance, we had two amazing shows and the audience was excellent each time making our investigation of storytelling and audience participation successful.

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Storytelling and Shadow Play

Screenshot taken from Shadow play video.

Enrolling in this class (Research Studio), I knew I would be required to come up with a project at the end of the semester. I did not beat myself too hard about it because I knew I had time to come up with something. Within a few weeks, we were tasked to start fleshing out ideas for the projects and I began to narrow down my ideas. I knew I wanted to work on a piece that will make use of technology so I figured I will do a piece that requires images being projected on a screen. Then I figured I should delve deeper into storytelling which I touched on in my Choreography workshop class. The question then became, “How do I have a storytelling session fused with projections or with the usage of technology.”

I started reminiscing on my childhood when my brothers will make stencils of characters and move the stenciled characters behind a curtain while they narrated a story. So, we listened to the stories as we watched the shadows of the characters from the front of the curtain. This sparked the idea of storytelling and shadow play as my project for this research studio class. Then I started battling with how I wanted to align both ideas. Do I tell the story while the shadow play happens, like my brothers used to do, or do I tell the entire story and later have the shadow play at the end. I figured since it will be a virtual showing, and I will be the storyteller and dancer, I would have to do them separately. Some ideas about the whatness of the project emerged; create a community where people will be listening to a story while participating by interacting and singing, sharing moral lessons from storytelling, share stories from the Ghanaian culture, tell a story with a visual component, shadow play, and the trickster character. These ideas were solid and engaging and I planned to develop them. Several research questions about this project emerged.

How does a performer embody a story being told?

How can the audience participate in a performance?

What stories are told during storytelling sessions?

What impact do shadows make visually?

With all these sumptuous ideas and questions, I settled on telling the story “Kweku Ananse and the Pot of Wisdom.” Ananse stories are told to people of all ages since people do not outgrow stories and everyone needs to learn as each day goes by. Ananse stories expose people to moral lessons which guide their daily decisions and life choices. This particular story is told to educate people on how important and resourceful every person is, how people should not be underestimated, how knowledge is not found in just one person’s mind, how we can be knowledgeable and intelligent in different ways, how children can be very intelligent among others. There are unending themes and moral lessons that can be deduced from this story. The response from the class after sharing it was amazing. Below are some of the moral lessons that my colleagues deduced from the story.

“makes me think of what I do as a researcher/academic sometimes, but hopefully without the negative connotation or plagiarism.”

“Makes me think of the phrase “knowledge is power.”

“what we are looking for is sometimes right in front of us.”

“What ideas are we protecting/keeping secret that the world needs? The world needs your beautiful work!”

“the wisdom of children.”

“Wisdom and knowledge are always being produced!”

“Sharing wisdom as opposed to taking it.”

I was awed by the reception and indulgence that my colleagues exhibited during the storytelling session. After playing around with my shadow in my room with the help of a study lamp, I had a great piece that was showcased after the storytelling session.

Here is a link to the shadow play titled Ananse and the Box of Wisdom which is not a direct representation of Ananse and the Pot of Wisdom but rather inspired by it.

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Spring Semester 2/6

So soon, I’m in the second semester of my MFA in Dance journey. The first semester had lots of mixed feelings as none of my colleagues and I knew what school was going to be like because of the pandemic. We still made it and finished the semester strong.

Now comes a new semester with new challenges and task. Christmas break always feels short and that was how I felt when school resumed. I wondered how the Christmas holidays flew by that fast. I was so not ready to begin the new semester but I had no choice so I psyched myself up for the task ahead. After reading the course outlines for the various courses I registered in, I felt like the semester will be a hefty one. So many assignments and projects to do in all the classes but I told myself to take it one day at a time. I knew looking at the course outline for the entire semester will be overwhelming so I focused on the first two weeks.

Today is week 6, one more week to mid-sem and I feel that so far, everything is on the right track. There have been lots of individual/group presentations and creative showings which I will post on some in other posts so keep checking my blog for those.

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8 out of 8

This project came about because our Professor had some important meetings to attend and gave us two free days to work on personal stuff. As a cohort, we decided to use those days to create a group piece that we could present as a class. It was a great idea, which was well received by the entire group, so we immediately got to work. We paired ourselves into three different groups and began developing phrases that were to be viewed at the end of class.

One of my colleagues, Forrest, was fully online for the entire semester so he always joined the class on zoom. I was paired with him and Q so we developed our phrase together. We danced in front of the laptop the entire time so he could see us vice versa. Each group presented their phrases, and we knew we had solid material to work on. We met the second free day to experiment with how each group’s phrase related to others and the possibilities of pairing people from different groups. We knew this project needed time to complete so we each checked our schedules and realized we could meet every Thursday.

The people creating “Our Story” piece (it’s in my previous posts so you can check that out if you haven’t) had 2 hours of space reserved so we decided to split the time up and let the entire group meet for the last hour of that time to rehearse (mind you Forrest will still be online). I spoke to the group that I had composed music during the lockdown period and I think will be perfect for the piece, they listened to it and agreed so we had music that we started rehearsing with. We rehearsed for about 4 weeks and we were making great progress and we started planning on when we were to show the piece. We knew we wanted to show it in person so we spoke to Forrest about a week that will be free for him to drive to Columbus (he was in West Virginia).

We all picked a day and started planning towards and also planned to have a separate time to perform and shoot the dance, so we have a recorded version of it. Also, the piece we had was longer than the music I created so I was always building on the music, making additions, making some parts light, heavy, vamps, bridges, transitions, and others as we moved on with the choreography. The actual music was already created but the syncopation with the dance and extra build-up was done side by side, so I had to double up as a dancer and always run to my laptop to make changes and transitions.

It was a great experience to collectively work with my colleagues and to hold a common space to share ideas and develop this beautiful work of art that represents all of us as artists. I look forward to keeping and developing this bond with my cohort and to continue working as a group. Enjoy our piece below;

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Shabo

One requirement of the Choreography Workshop class was to create a durational work and that was new to me as a performer. I asked my Professor, what a durational project was and as I was not the only confused person in the class, she provided us with links to aid us in developing ideas for the project. It was not clear and had to go to YouTube to watch more durational videos and I still could not wrap my head around what I wanted to do.

It took me some time and I decided to have a durational video of how my body reacts throughout the night when I sleep. That was the idea I came up with and planned to find a day to shoot myself sleeping. Later on, I gave up on the idea of videoing myself in bed and planned to shoot a durational video of an upcoming trip to Cincinnati. I was still confused about the materials to shoot but the idea was strong and planned towards it. I shot lots of materials of myself packing my setup into my car, driving all the way to Cincinnati, performing, and driving back to Columbus. With these footages, I began editing but the confusion was still present so I made the first draft so I could show it in class, get feedback and work on it for a final showing. With the first draft, I started the video with me on the road to Cincy, arriving, setting up at the church, performing, and ending the video as the performance was going on.

I had lots of feedback and the key one was that the video did not feel complete and also, because I ended the video with me in the auditorium, the sense of time and day was lost. Still confused, I reached out to Mollie (a colleague and assigned buddy in my research class), who gave me ideas to improve the video and what to do to make it complete. So, I added footage of me packing my setup into my car, driving to Cincy and everything that was in the first draft, and then included the video of myself packing my instruments back into my car after the concert and driving back home to Columbus.

That gave the piece the completeness that it needed and as I presented it in class, everyone loved it and the feeling was great. I am so excited I was able to nail this project because I was confused the entire time and I am grateful and appreciative of Mollie helping me out with ideas for the project. In case you are curious about my title, Shabo is term Ghanaian instrumentalists use to describe gigs that they play with different people who are not members of their permanent band. Enjoy the full piece below;

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Our Story

This piece started as a discussion after class one day when Yukina, John, Q (Quianna), and I were walking down the hallway. Yukina asked if we would like to collaborate on a piece and we all agreed to work together on the piece. We created a group chat to share information and discuss what we wanted to create.

After brainstorming for some time, Yukina had a brilliant idea which everyone was excited about and agreed on working with that idea. We were to write a short bio of ourselves and she will translate the bios into Japanese and have us dance while she read our bio. We emailed our bios to her separately and settled on a day to begin the creating process. In the studio, we started improvising as she read our bios one after the other and we moved to the sounds that we heard in the language. I only realized she was reading my bio just because she mentions my name so that in a way influences my movements because I knew what I sent to her. But when she is reading for the other, I only hear their names but do not know what is in their bio. I’m sometimes influenced by the little personal relationships I have with them, but I mostly focus on the sounds I hear.

We experimented with different ways we wanted to go about the performance, and we settled on having the person whose bio is being read to lead that particular phrase. Speaking about phrases to bios, each person improvised and came up with phrases for their bios and we had to teach each other our phrases. We learned each other’s phrases and we exchanged ideas on how to put them together. We agreed to start with Q’s phrase, transition into John’s phrase, and finish the piece with my phrase. Looked great when everything was put together, so we had to shoot a video of it and present it in class. In class, we had great comments but there were several feedbacks on Yukina being lost in the piece. It was difficult to tell if she was just a narrator or part of the group and this meant we had more work to do. The message the piece suggests is that “these dancers had their own stories and separate lives but have now met in grad school and their lives have become entangled/woven in the fabric of life”. But Yukina was lost in our fabric and we have to find her and weave her together.

We went back to the studio and with the feedback starting rearranging and piece out the phrases to connect more. Yukina never read her bio, she was not dancing with us but rather just walking in between us, so we decided she dances more and becomes a storyteller who is telling our collective story rather than our narrator. She added her bio to the piece and created a phrase to her bio which we had to learn and end the piece with. I enjoyed the several days of brainstorming to come out with something great which will be worth the toil. I enjoyed working with these amazing colleagues of mine and learning from their dance vocabulary. Learning new dance terms like “echoing” which I never knew off and spending every Thursday afternoon on dance should how determined we were about the piece. After the additions, we presented the piece in class and we had had amazing feedback from the Prof and our other colleagues. The effort and dedication we put into this piece were evident in the development of the piece during the second showing. I look forward to spending more days and time with this team to work on more ideas.

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Adesa

“Adesa” is a Ga word that means story and as a native of the Gas, I chose this title for this piece. The storytelling tradition is one of the cultural practices in Ghana which is going extinct. Growing up as a child, older folks of households usually told stories of historical events, myths, and legends which was very interesting and knowledgeable to us as children. Currently, this act of storytelling in Ghana is extinct and one of my research goals is to investigate the storytelling tradition and relieve it.

I wanted to have a storytelling session in my Choreography Workshop class as an experiment on how the storytelling tradition will be taken. I had this planned out when Q performed a piece and gave the context of the piece which almost seemed like a storytelling session. I immediately spoke to her about my plans to have a storytelling session and openness for collaboration. She was excited to join because she had those experiences as a child growing up and this will provide an opportunity to share that experience. We had pep talks every time to discuss the story we will be telling, the plot structure, and the dance attached to it. We had this discussion every time we walked to get food or to her car after school and that was how we had the story together. I told her about the storytelling structure, and we found a story that could fit what we wanted to do. Initially, I wanted to be the storyteller and do this project alone but after listening to Q, I realized she will be the best person to tell the story. She has the eloquence and flair to bring the story to life and I needed the story to have that freshness.

For this piece, we had more discussions and actual rehearsal time in the studio. We spent time talking to make sure everything was the way we wanted, and we only rehearsed the day before our showing with some of our colleagues. We needed audience participation and we felt having some of our colleagues know what we were doing will draw the others to join. We performed the piece in class and the response was great, it was interesting and educative for our colleagues and us. With this feedback, I know my future storytelling sessions will be well received and I look forward to another storytelling session.

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The Mash Up

Creating a piece that has a beginning, a middle, and an end, all under a minute seems like a simple task but it is not. When it was mentioned in class that we needed to create a piece in less than a minute, I figured I will just be dancing till it’s a minute, then “tadaaaa” end of the piece but it turned out to be quite different. The minute of dancing should fulfill a viewer because the piece had a beginning and an end.

I had tons of ideas rushing through my head and they were all screaming “pick me, pick me”, but I wanted to be able to do something that will be relevant to my research. I initially started putting together random movements, but I did not like what I had so I scratched that out. It had very fast movements and I wanted to have an all fast movement piece to be my less than a minute piece. It must be the fast movements under a minute that threw me off because they seemed rushed and I was not getting the feel I anticipated.

Earlier in the semester, I was tasked to shoot 22 shots using two separate movements in my dance film 1 class. My MFA colleague, Jackie Courchene was also in the dance film class, so we decided to perform for each other (I’ll dance in her video and she’ll dance in mine). I created 2 movements which she beautifully embodied and we had a great shoot. I decided to have several dancers perform those same two movements to experiment on how each person will embody the movement. Initially, I planned to use this as my group project because I will have several dancers in the piece, but plans changed, and I settled to make that my less than 1-minute project. I spoke to a few ladies in class and they all agreed to help me with the piece. These ladies are Eboni Edwards, Aya Venet, and Naiya Sayavong. We see each other every day of the week because we are all in the same contemporary and African dance classes. That allowed me to always remind them of our shoot because we all had busy schedules. I finally settled on sending them a video of Jackie performing the movements, so they learn at their own time and pace and that worked for everyone. I was able to shoot the videos of Aya and Eboni after class but Naiya had packed days that week, so it was not possible. With the help of Eboni briefing her on the angles that I needed, she found a friend to shoot her part and transferred the footage to me when we met in class. The music I used is a live performance of “Feeling Alright” by Rebelution and it was perfect. This is one of the projects that I enjoyed working on and I hope to develop the movements further and have a lot more people perform them. Attached to this blog is the video to the piece.

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Man Against Himself

a photoshop project I made for my Foundations of Research class

Creating a 3 minutes solo was one of the specific requirements of the Choreography workshop class. The first idea that came to mind was reworking and presenting the 3-minute solo that I performed at the audition in January. That piece was and is still very dear to me as it brings memories of my mother whom I miss so much. Missing her got me homesick which resulted in the creating of the piece. I wanted to challenge myself, so I decided to work on something completely new.

As usual, I went through my music collection in search of a song that I can work with. I came across the song “No more, My Lawd” by the Mississippi and Louisiana State Penitentiaries Prisoners. I listened to the song continuously hoping it speaks to me (This is how I created my audition solo too). It might be both a strength and weakness that I am motivated by the songs I listen to in my creative process. But for this class, I was challenged to create some works before finding music which I did for some of my pieces.

I realized I wanted to create something about fighting an internal battle. Immediately, I cast my mind back to my undergrad days in the Department of Theatre Arts in Ghana as we studied the term Conflict. Man against Himself was one of the types of conflict I studied about and I decided to name my piece “Man Against Himself” (It is my first time finding a title to a piece before the actual piece is created). I started improvising in my bedroom while the song played, and I began exploring and connecting movements. I came up with a two-minute version which I presented in class as the first showing for my solo. I received positive comments which encouraged me to build the piece. I had a second showing which was quite different from the first and the main suggestion was to incorporate the floor movements I had in my first showing. I took some time to delve into what I wanted to portray and how I can showcase that precisely.

I finally had a solid piece that was ready to be presented to my colleagues and professor. In addition to the piece, I wrote this note which after reading inspired certain gestures that shaped up the piece for the final presentation. “Sometimes people fight internal battles/conflicts which take them to a place where no one understands and knows. It is impossible to fit into one’s shoes to know exactly how he/she is feeling. You might empathize with the person because you have been in that situation before but definitely, the feelings and reactions wouldn’t be the same. This piece is based on individual struggles and pain that people go through, the mental imprisonment they are experiencing because of whatever their problem is. Whatever you pick from this piece might be different from what the next viewer sees and resonates with. Enjoy and ponder over this food for thought.”

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The Space Within

I traveled last semester with the school of dance majors at Ohio University to Canada for a dance sharing at Concordia University, Montreal. At the sharing, one student spoke about how she had always done fast movements and was told by her professor to explore other tempos. She performed a slow piece which was interesting and was pleasing to watch. After the sharing, I decided to explore slowness and how my body reacts to slowness.

With this, I knew I would not be working with music. I rehearsed about six movements and slowed them down, adding different shapes and gestures. I rehearsed it for a day and presented it in class. Surprisingly, everybody loved it and I was given ideas to make it interesting. One idea that came up was to perform it in an enclosed space (between two buildings, in a confined place, in a box, etc) and shoot a video of it to present in class. I decided to give it some time to let the ideas sink in well so I could come up with something mind-blowing.

One day as I was in my car trying to make a turn, I noticed how the cars filed past me in both directions and an idea dropped into my head. I decided to perform this in the middle of the street with cars filing past me. I began to look for possible streets that had spaces in-between them that I could perform there. Also, I realized it should be a place where people will be walking around, crossing the streets, and going about normal daily lives. I located the street behind the Ohio Union as it had people walking to the building and from the building to the Oval and other parts of campus. I asked Jonathan after a class in the Tent about dancing in the middle of the street and he said once I’m being safe, I would not need permission from anyone. “Perfect” I exclaimed, then moved on to speak to my colleague Yukina about helping me shoot in the middle of the street.

The shoot turned out great and with some editing skills learned from my Dance Film class, I made an amazing piece. This piece is a piece that I will rework in the future and submit to a dance film festival.

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From Ghana to the US

The Ghanaian Smock also known as Fugu/Batakari is popularly worn by Chiefs and people in the Northern part of Ghana where it originated from but it is now widely worn across the entire country. It is the costume for some dances in the Northern part and the most popular is Takai. The smock exhibits its glamour when the dancer does spiral movements. This made me curious to experiment how it will look on a ballet dancer.

John Cartwright is a colleague in the MFA program here at OSU, and being a very good ballet dancer, I decided to go on this quest with him. I spoke to John about a collaboration and he eagerly jumped onboard. I had been listening to songs by a French Afrobeats artist called Hiro and his “Motema” song really moved me and I wanted to choreograph to it. I shared the song with John and he offered to explore some ballet movements that fit the song while I also offered to develop African dance movements specifically from Ghana. We met for the first time, shared ideas and tried out some movements, it was a great start and we were empowered by the materials we had, and kept exploring. We had a week to finish up this project and present it in our Choreography Workshop class so we had to keep experimenting and bringing out ideas. We both had different schedules and that meant limited time to meet and rehearse. On our second rehearsal, we had a solid piece which was ready to be showcased in class. The second and last rehearsal was very vital as we had to dance with the costume because that was the icing on the cake. I have danced in smocks several times but I knew John had to rehearse with it in other to be very comfortable in it during the performance since it was his first time. John’s first impression when he held the smock was “wow this is very heavy”, “yes the smock is a heavy attire/costume”, I replied. I made him move about with it for sometime till he got comfortable. The ballet movements and traditional Ghanaian movements looked great with the costume on and we were ready to present it in class.

We presented it in class and the feedback was great and this is definitely a piece I would love to develop in future. I would like to experiment it on ballet dancers to use the costume for a full ballet piece. Also, I would like to develop the idea of ballet movement and African dance movements further and this might be in the near future. Thanks to John on working on this piece with me, I hope we develop this piece soon. Here is John’s block post about our exploration and adventure.

This project provoked a few questions about male identity in dance: what is masculine movement? What is feminine movement? How do the clothes or costumes we wear influence the movement and the audience’s perception of the performer(s)? What does it mean to see two male identifying bodies dance together? How do different cultures perceive what is masculine and what is feminine?

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So Far, So Good. (Mid-Sem Diaries)

photo accessed through the department of Dance, OSU.

A friend asked me, “So how is school”, and I responded, “it’s great, I’m really enjoying it.” She was like “how is that possible because most people say grad school is difficult.” Well, yes grad school is difficult, a lot of school work coupled with personal tasks to accomplish. Those who are married or live with their partners or children have extra load on their plates and that also can make grad school very stressful.

For me, this is my second masters program so I have had a taste of what grad school is all about before beginning this journey. This journey has so far been challenging but a great learning experience. I have always wanted to get into a dance program here in the US so this is like a dream come true for me. The best part of it was getting accepted to the only school I auditioned at which was my first and best choice.

It is tedious to be dancing 5 days a week since I had not really been dancing full time for some years. I remember before classes began, a colleague and I volunteered as dancers in a video shoot which was being done by the University. The new West African dance professor was to work with us in the video. We only spent an hour shooting the entire video but we both got sore after the shoot and could not really move the next day. That showed how the lockdown period got me and many dancers out of shape. During the first two weeks of classes, my whole body was in grievous pain but the joy and excitement I had from being in my dream program was always a motivation to “keep on keeping on”. My body could not understand some of the movements which I was being introduced to and instead of giving myself time to adjust, I was trying to rush the process and get better overnight. A few conversations with some professors and grads made me realize that all I needed was time and dedication. Ever since that sinked in, I have been enjoying the program even more. Although I do not get some movements immediately, I allow my body to process it and get in tune. In addition, dancing with masks on has not been easy at all. Dancers are advised to breath while dancing and here is the situation where by there is a piece of fabric reducing the amount of air one takes in at a time. I understand this is the new normal and this might go on for some time so one has to adjust. The first few weeks were rough but currently, my body has adjusted to dancing with masks on and I feel great.

I enjoy all my classes but for my Advanced Academic Writing class. I believe I would have enjoyed that class if it was in person. Since everything is online, it becomes overwhelming to read and understand everything that is being posted. It is a lot of work and sitting behind the computer for the entire period makes it stressful. Aside from that, I love the exposure to certain new writing styles I did not know about. I believe this class aside from being stressful will help me become a better writer which is an essential skill in grad school.

So far the journey has been great and I am looking forward to see my artistic and academic development over the rest of the semester.