Decoding the Ayana/Afrika Ablaze Dance Company

The Ayana/Afrika Ablaze Dance Company has become a home for those who have a great longing to just dance. The majority of the company’s dancers consist of young people who join up without any ‘formal’ dance training. They enter into an open-ended dance programme irrespective of age, ability and experience. The programme works with freedom and space to inquire, investigate and explore their personal relationship with their physicality, energy levels, emotional connectivity, creativity and spirituality.

Ayana/Afrika Ablaze has a no audition and examination policy because we believe that dance has a much higher purpose than merely developing dancers based on fixed, or set creative theories and then graduating them through a system habituated by decades of subjective evaluation. The company provides a space where taking risks are celebrated, where the word ‘untrained’ means being free to invite chaos and intelligence to dance together. Where the right hemisphere of the brain is hailed as the vagabond brain with the freedom to think the unthinkable, to say the unsayable, to dream the impossible and the right to create unmake-able art.

In the ‘untrained’ body there is an immediate hunger for discovering the dynamics of movement ability. This is quickly achieved through capitalising on the body’s spontaneous responses, instantaneously recognising limitations and physical weaknesses and then instinctively reinventing movements that resonate with the body potential.  Choreographing the ‘untrained’ body is no ordinary experience. It ranges from shocking, to hilarious, to astounding, to disturbing, to amazing, to fresh, to captivating, to inspiring, to eye-opening, to joyful, to admirable, to courageous, to at times dangerous, but more importantly it allows dancers to truly liberate the beliefs they have in their hearts. Working on choreography in a room full of ‘untrained’ dancers is as exhilarating as bungee jumping. People doing bungee jumping literally throw themselves with abandonment over the edge and have no idea if they are coming back up. Like with the bungee jumping experience, the 1,2,3 jump count sends people hurtling into space, so it is with the 5,6,7,8 count down for ‘untrained’ dancers to let go and just dance.