This year for Culturama, we explored the theme of stories, where each dance represented a fictional or real story that occurred in different countries around the world. Having tried out Culturama for the first time last year, I was keen on approaching this year’s show with the intent on leading a dance myself. Along with one of my friends, we auditioned to lead a dance to represent Kenya – a culture we both found interesting for its liveliness, energy and unique dance. Our story revolved around a woman, named Mekatilili Wa Menza, who was noted as one of Kenya’s most influential freedom fighters in the early 1900’s, fighting for the freedom of her tribe during the British colonisation of Kenya. One of our aims in this dance was to convey her entire journey through depicting the different stages – showing how she evolved as an individual through this – in order to entertain the audience whilst also educating them about this historical event in Kenya.

Despite the excitement, I was also nervous about leading a group as this is not a skill that I am particularly confident in – yet trusted my experience in dance and my dance partner to work through the challenges as they came. By the end of this experience, I hope to become more confident in leading a group / developing leadership skills, and to learn time management skills from juggling the workload of school along with the organisation required in running a dance in this show.

After having received the news that we are accepted as dance leaders for Kenya, we began to choreograph the routine that we will be teaching our dancers over the summer holidays. We met up a total of 4 times to start this and had planned to complete it by the end of the holidays however the complexity of the choreography was underestimated and we ended up complete 3 out of 4 minutes by the end of the holidays. This was predominantly due to our lack of understanding of traditional Kenyan dances along with style of Afropop hence we invested more time in understanding and researching about the nature of these styles before our choreography. This was very important to us as it was essential to portray the culture with as much accuracy as possible, especially given how both my partner and I did not have a full understanding of it.