Heading back to his African roots

soulful steps

His is a contemporary conversation with inflections of African dialects. Kinetic energy has a new name, and it is Lucky Lartey; Patrick Lartey, if you want to be politically correct, but the nickname given to him at birth by his father has served well, thus far, for the choreographer. “I am lucky to be here!” he points out, referring to his residency with FACETS International Choreography, organised by the Attakkalari Centre for Movement Arts, Bengaluru.

Lartey moved from Ghana to Australia in 2011. “Although I’m an African dancer in Australia, I don’t call myself an African dancer. I am an artiste, a choreographer, really interested in seeing how I can draw on African culture to explore what I am interested in (contemporary vocabulary), in an Australian context.”

People are always intrigued with the connection between his roots and his work. “I may be exploring sensations or feelings or thoughts (rather than tradition); but because they see me as an African, they want to see that in the work,” says Lartey.

When he moved to Australia, it took him a long time to get used to the western culture of articulating ideas on paper. “Everything had to be written down; the why? How? The methodology, the trajectory... it is a conceptual way (of working),” he explains. In Africa, it was much simpler. “We learn it, we sing it, we swallow it... we dance a lot! I needed to adjust and adapt to fit in,” he confides.

Working with choreographers from different backgrounds — sometimes as many as seven as he did for his first work Meeting Point — coupled with his interest in exploration, led him to discover his own methodology. “My dance has changed a lot since I got here,” he says. “You grow in experience working with people. Though I have been lucky setting up my company, getting work, being able to fit in and establish myself as a dancer and a choreographer, nothing has been easy; but it has been great!”

What makes African dance different from Western dance is the relationship between the music and dance; “they really work together”, says Lartey. The drummer is pivotal to the presentation for it is he who controls the dancer through his versatile rhythm. The audience and their physical engagement in the dance is of equal importance. The sharply delineated gender roles, reflective of the roles played in society or community, is yet another facet. The dances mimic everyday life and living, whether ritualistic or realistic. “I’ve studied a bit of dance from all over Africa,” says Lartey; which is an understatement for what, in effect, has been his life’s mission.

“The constant creation, constant discovery; the challenge of sending a message across to the audience with your body,” is what excites this choreographer. Lartey tells of how a choreographer once asked him to dance the emotion of frustration. “How do you do that?!” he asks; and answers: “You research, experiment, struggle, get lost and finally you reach that moment of discovery, which is a moment of pure joy!”

The choreographer who conducts African dance classes in Australia, gets his inspiration from “plays, musicians, poetry, paintings, art and philosophy; from everywhere. Everything I have been inspired to explore is about human beings; about language, what we think when we sleep, why a man can say ‘I love you’, but a woman can’t...” 

So he has taken his learning, tradition and knowledge and used that to go beyond just dancing with music and engaging with the audience, to now tell a story with it. His is a contemporary conversation with inflections of African dialects.

Last year, Lartey was in a production with a kathak dancer, and earlier this year, he was working with an Indian and a Chinese dancer while exploring an original template of work. “I just love the tabla,” he says, having worked with a tabla maestro for yet another project. Lartey marvels that “there is a lot of work that has been done on Indian dance in terms of the philosophy behind it, in a bigger contemporary context”. It is a vacuum in the African dance scene that the choreographer is working towards redressing.