Joachim Keke describes himself as an artist who uses dance, fashion, and storytelling to connect culture, identity, and healing. In The Clinic of Remembering, one of his most recent performances in Bradford, UK, he emerges on stage wearing a white chiffon trousers, his bare torso inscribed by chalk marks, while doing dance moves in interpretation to Sona Jobarteh’s “Saya,” a song whose atmosphere evokes serenity, playing in the background.
He introduces The Clinic of Remembering, “Today we are all remembering and I am a vessel,” he says. “I carry with me fragments of care that were once shared, but are now forgotten. From those who were here before us, those who are still here and those yet to come.” He engages the audience in a chant, and afterwards performs a series of dances to a spokenword piece on immigrant experience, especially humans treated as paperwork, and care as transaction. When dance is presented the way Keke does, one gains an almost renewed perspective of the human plight and the mindful ways of navigating it.
Keke’s dance performances can be described as an Afro-diasporan breed; it blends African and black immigrant cultures that have found their way to the west. This makes his art a process of retaining cultural identity, mainly that of his Igbo origins. Hence, his muses are the four elements representing the traditional four market days in the Igbo cosmology; air for Nkwọ, fire for Eke, earth for Afo, and water for Orie. The movement of these elements and the stability of the earth are fundamental to the inspiration for his art.
What makes Keke’s work important is the consciousness he strives for, which he tries as much as he can to embody: a dancer is a medium and his dance, a message. For Keke, his experience and observation of the African and diasporan experience is focal. “You only see traditional dances, maybe at a festival, or on a stage play where there is the infusion of dance in it, unlike the ubiquity of commercial or popular dance.” To counter this, The Clinic of Remembering, for example, and his theatre are commitments to the memory of traditional dancing, which in turn celebrates the culture they represent.
“Individually, there are very few people who express themselves through dance as Afro contemporary dancers. So, I am researching and testing ideas to make it more familiar. I’m trying to be more confident in my statement and in my art form; as a performer, as a dancer, and as an Afro contemporary dancer. Because the Afro-diasporic dancer’s performance has not been given a definitive presence in the scene. With only a few artists involved in it, I’m trying to create a method, a system, an ideology around it that could tie our ways of life as individuals or as performers, and as an artistic person.”
In his current work-in-progress, Onye Ozi, which translates in English as “Messenger,” he is hard at work on the dancer as a messenger. Like Ibiam Ude, and Amarachi Attamah, Joachim Keke is among rising thespians who push the boundary of theatre to tell stories, engage history, and awaken the consciousness of a people in promoting the African culture. But most especially, in showing how art steeped in the Igbo culture can aspire to universality; in his case, the Afro-diaspora experience.♦
Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera is the author of Loss Is An Aftertatse of Memories. His essays have been published in The Republic, Afapinen, and Open Country Magazine, among others.