‘Between us’

Wales/EthiopiaLab

Addisu Demissie, Jessie Brett and Jesus Rubio Gamo.

One week to explore a concept, which we could research for a year. Resulting in a lot of ideas leading to more ideas, leading to more ideas and so on.

Two people living between Wales and Ethiopia, this is the basic concept of the work, which could take us down many paths.

We already had one solid movement idea, which we used as our starting point; it grew and developed a lot with the guidance of our outside eye Jesus. There were many directions we could have taken it in and we by no means explored everything we could, have due to the short time. It might have been an interesting task to just focus on this material for the entire week but we wanted to see what else we could come up with. 

https://vimeo.com/150614882

We talked a lot about our experiences, trying to figure out if they were relevant and said something bigger. We were searching for stories, which had a bigger meaning.  A simple, mundane experience, which could sum up the feeling of throwing ones self from one culture to another.

There is a very special feeling of knowing two very different worlds intimately and observing the people we become in those worlds.

We discovered that dance is a more important tool than we realised for fitting in. It is our link to both places and one of the keys to connecting us to something in that place. We explored dancing in each other’s styles, me dancing Ethiopian and Addisu dancing contemporary and dancing them together. Audience members in our sharing did not see the ‘west’ in contemporary movement but they did see Africa in the Ethiopian dance. It’s easier to see difference than recognise something that your close to all the time.

We found interest and some focus when thinking about Community.

Community in relation to how each culture uses space?

How party’s are so different in both places?

We wrote texts about community, parties, landscapes and journeys.

We found it interesting discussing how fast Ethiopia is changing particularly Addis Ababa the capital.

Trying to avoid stereotypes of Africa and Uk. Realising that just by dancing together we are always emitting some kind of meaning.

We worked on tasks to do with journeys, our journeys from one place to another. The journey to and from Ethiopia over the years. The things we observe in the others country when we arrive.

We started to question the meaning of everything for example: What is everything? What is What? What is is?  What is a question mark? Which reminded us of feeling completely lost and misunderstood.

After a very interesting week we decided we want to continue and perhaps make a dance film, some filmed in Ethiopia and some in Wales. We felt it would be interesting to place our movement in different contexts. Perhaps as part of a live show or just a dance film.