Guests Select: Yinka Esi Graves
Yinka Esi Graves is a British flamenco artist who founded the company Dotdotdot dance.
She has dedicated the last 13 years of her life to flamenco and is interested in exploring expression through movement, particularly from a contemporary and African diasporic perspective.
She features in Miguel Angel Rosales’ documentary film, Gurumbé: Canciones de tu Memoria Negra (2016), the first Spanish film to highlight the influence its African population had on Spanish culture, particularly flamenco.
Currently she is working on her solo project The Disappearing Act, and collaborations with other artists.
Here she reveals five unique artists who bring her inspiration…
Nadia Gabrieli Kanati aka Nadeeya GK
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Watching Nadeeya for me is pure joy. She is the kind of dancer that reminds me of all the qualities I need to be focussing on! Her dexterity, musicality, precision, capacity for improvisation, imagination (I could go on), seem effortless. One of the aspects of her movement and live choreography that I also find so refreshing is that whilst she is well-known in the House dance scene, so many different styles are beautifully and seamlessly synthesized in her dancing. From krumping, to sabar, house to traditional Cameroonian dances.
I haven’t yet had the opportunity of seeing her perform live, but her online videos have always stopped me scrolling and become references for me. From what I understand, as well as being a movement artist, choreographer and teacher, Nadeeya is continuously learning and working in traditional as well as contemporary African dance forms. I wonder if this connection to the ever-evolving dance cultures of Senegal, Burkina Faso, Chad and Cameroon (where she is originally from – although now based in France) amongst other countries is what keeps her work so interesting and rich in my eyes. Nadeeya is one of those artists that highlights the many shared value systems I see between flamenco and many African dance styles.
Picture Kodak
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Picture Kodak also known as Love Divine (LD) is an Afro dance choreographer, dancer, video model and founding member of the influential Westsyde Lifestyle Crew in Nigeria. The world tragically lost LD on the International Day of Dance in 2020, when she was only 25 years old. Despite her short life and career, she has inspired a generation of young women through her celebration of radical black femininity. To me she was magnetic – I watch her videos a lot. Her movement overflows with information that is both pleasing and freeing to experience. I would even say nutritious.
I am often drawn to dancers whose movement quality exists outside the aesthetics of academic dance training. LD has worked with the world’s biggest stars including Beyoncé , Wizkid, Burna Boy… (the list goes on and on) at a time when African artists were finally being recognised in the mainstream. Yet her engagement of rhythm and time feels relevant yesterday, today and tomorrow. One of the questions watching a dancer like LD raises for me is how to stay true to the urgency and energy that she possesses when working in theatres? A question that is very relevant to flamenco.
Nora Chipaumire
View a ‘visual essay’ by Nora Chipaumire here
I had to choose an artist, dancer, choreographer, thinker, who to date has probably had the most influence and impact on me: Nora Chipaumire. I am simply in awe! Her work has helped me better understand my motivations to express myself through movement and give value to them. Nora’s nhaka practice a ‘cartography of animist technologies’, beyond offering an aesthetic, shares a set of values to fine tune an expressive, receptive, communicative body. I have had the privilege of studying her practice with her and it has grounded and rooted me in a myriad of ways. Nora’s performance work is unapologetic, political and beautiful. She is constantly blurring the lines between research, performance, practice and thought, as her digital work shows. She has inspired me to strive towards making work that helps me become myself beyond the confines of a genre or medium.
Perhaps it is this that has inspired me in all the artists I’ve chosen – that they reveal something about themselves to me. This is what I most aspire to be able to do through my work.
Image credit: Elise Duval
Qudus Onikeku
Qudus is a dancer, choreographer, founder of Afropolis and Creative Director of Q Dance. The entirety of Qudus’ work is an inspiration, be it through movement, words or gathering people to create. Everything is done with great purpose, vision and connectedness. It is difficult not to be deeply moved when engaging with his work. There is an underlying generosity and sense of infinite possibility to his work. As a solo artist he gained great recognition in France and Europe, however he made the decision to return to Nigeria to support and make space for the incredible talent in his home country.
Qudus has a deep anchoring to the ground (and everything that can symbolise) that as a flamenco dancer, I am envious of! I think in part it is this physical quality of absolute groundedness that makes his movement land so deeply with audiences. For me he is one of those artists who speaks to the deepest parts of us, because they are clearly excavating the deepest parts of themselves to move.
Jacinto Padilla
I suggest watching this muted, as the sound doesn’t correspond to the image.
This fleeting moment in history was captured on film of another Black artist lost to history. It has meant a great deal to me and is something I keep returning to. He has now been identified as Jacinto Padilla: a flamenco dancer, guitarist, bull fighter and singer around at the turn of the 20th Century. Up until relatively recently he was wrongly believed to be El Maestro Otero: a white Spanish Bolero dancer and teacher. This footage by The Lumiere Brothers is the first ever moving image recorded of a flamenco cuadro ‘performance’ (1900), making this quite a seminal piece in the history of the form in cinema.
There is something about the way Padilla springs forward to the middle of the stage to join the other dancer, that reaches into me. I’ve tried to work out his steps which are believed to be in the style of a buleria, to somehow embody and pay homage to his legacy.
In my latest work, The Disappearing Act, I am trying to excavate absence as a tangible force, something material, to be played with, turned upside down, pushed against. Ultimately, speaking to ways in which people of African descent continue to resist erasure. This footage, Jacinto Padilla’s story was one of the starting points for this work.
