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The Message

Info OFS

I wrote and performed spoken word in the first dance piece that Body Politic made when it transitioned into making dance theatre. It was specifically targeted at young people. We had a couple of classes if I remember correctly, teaching the material and looking at how we would work with poetry and spoken word with young people. 

There are lots of classes that encourage young people to perform at the end of the class, or like a term. Body Politic runs classes and then, at the end of that time, they have the choice to perform something on a theatre stage. But it's a choice. It's not forced, and I think that choice matters. 

The work that Body Politic do is very rooted in communities around Oxford. That’s what I really value about the work and why I've been with them for so long. If they stop their operations, their outreach work, their performances, there will be a key thing missing in Oxford’s communities.  

Mental health is something I'm passionate about. There were workshops called The M Word for young people – mental health for young people. Using dance, teaching dance choreography, helping young people to create their own choreography to be performed, and then working with them with poetry to get them to express themselves. If I'm not wrong, I think The M Word came out of an outreach project. So, when mental health came up as a strong ethos for the company, again, it felt like a no-brainer from my own personal experience – it just felt like it aligned. It was a happy and nice coincidence that it aligned with the company's ethos. And then, when you're passionate about something, it's easy to do what needs to be done to support and help other people. 

Father Figurine was a piece I wrote – I did the script writing for it. It was about a father and son relationship, how both struggle with their own personal mental ill-health, but struggle communicating it with each other, and pretty much just looking at that fractured relationship and seeing if there's potential for building bridges, reconciliations, seeing how you can navigate something as a collective rather than individually. So, it had that message, and it used hip-hop dance and spoken word poetry, and just traditional elements of playwriting to get that message across. It was a 20-minute piece at first, and then it was developed into a full-length piece, just under an hour. 

Father Figurine was quite a momentous part of my life, because that theatre piece came out of personal experience. Looking at how masculinity can play a part in the over-representation of men – specifically, black men and young adults and young men – in the mental health care system. It really resonated with the message of finding a support network, and finding support for mental health for black men, or just generally for men and young boys. And I think it really aligns well with Body Politic’s ethos, and what it wants to do, as a dance company. 

Every time we performed it to an audience, the feedback was really interesting. And because it was so specific, there was something specific for everyone to connect with. So, people talking about whether it's their husbands or brothers or family members, relatives, friends, all of that, like, everyone has that person in their life which they can see in this play. And it just felt very – it felt very freeing. I think connection and empathy is something very important in the arts anyway, and for a dance theatre company that's the best tool, dare I say, for getting your message across. 

I think it was important to highlight that through a black lens, because vulnerability and masculinity are stereotypically not given that space for black men. Because, for a long time black men have been overrepresented as being over diagnosed, being treated and sectioned in mental health. So that was an important thing to pinpoint as a target audience. Any great piece of art should be open to interpretation and will be experienced differently by anyone and everyone, but the core message and the nuances can only be understood by those who have lived experience and that tends to be black men, and young black boys, if that makes sense. Like, that's art. The moment you create art it becomes subjective to whoever lays eyes on it. We're trying to show a message and how you interpret that message will be up to you. But as long as you receive the message, then that piece of work has achieved what it's achieved. 

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