Cultural activism to take centre stage in New Year

Culture isn’t just about art or music or dance,” says Wanny Angerer, a woman who should know, given she’s a dynamic cultural activist who among many other things, conducts music and dance therapy sessions several times a week.

Some days it’s with cancer survivors at Faraja Cancer Support; other times it’s with orphans or children whose mothers are in prison or simply with people living in challenging circumstances who appreciate her generosity and her joy.

“Culture is all about the way people express themselves in their everyday lives,” says the founder of Moving Cultures, an organisation committed to promoting culture as a practice and a talent that everybody has.

Angerer’s holistic perspective on culture has led her to work and link up with everyone from artists, educators and musicians to foodies, yogis, journalists and fashion designers. And it’s all with a view to discovering new ways that people can link up, share their talents, collaborate and ultimately showcase their creative skills.

For instance, this past week, she, under the umbrella of Moving Cultures, was collaborating with dancers to conduct ‘Dance for Peace’ master classes at the Michael Joseph Centre. On Tuesday, they were Yoga and Indian Dance workshops led by two professional dancers who also both teach yoga.

One was a Kenyan Madhvi Dalal whose specialties are Bharatanatyam, Reiki and Yoga; her performance of a Yoga dance during the workshop was a highpoint of her class.

The other dancer was Nikolina Nikoleski, a Croatian ballerina who also specialised in contemporary dance before she discovered Indian classical dance or Bharatanatyam and the art of yoga.

Nikoleski also performed an elegant Indian dance after she had shared basic elements of the dance with young Kenyan dancers who had come from all over Nairobi to take part in the workshop and master class.

Last Saturday night, Nikoleski together with Angerer performed at the Oshwal Auditorium in Westlands, Nairobi, where they raised millions of shillings to help the Amara Charitable Trust construct classrooms in rural schools in Machakos County.

Then last Wednesday, the dance focus shifted from classical dance and yoga to more contemporary forms like hip hop. And since Moving Cultures is all about collaborating among artists and cultural activists, the hip hop dancers who conducted master classes all morning were assisted by members of Sarakasi Dancers and Angerer’s Moving Cultures Band, including vocalist and poet Adam Chienjo and guitarist Steve Kimani.

But Dance for Peace is just one facet of the multifaceted cultural movement that Angerer is striving to ignite with a specific focus on February 27. That’s the day she’s encouraging cultural venues all over the city to consider and act upon the concept that she calls “cultural stopovers”.

It’s a sort of cultural festival which, in the spirit of devolution is meant to take place everywhere from restaurants and schools to recreational venues, galleries, hotels and bars as well as malls, sports centres, NGOs and even art and craft shops.

She’s already got a whole lot of venues on board to open their doors and collaborate with new faces and forms of cultural expression.

“The idea is to get people moving out of their comfort zones to explore new dimensions of culture,” says Angerer whose primary work as a dance and music therapist is to get people moving and motivated to express their own unique creativity.

She’s a motivational force in her own right and on several continents starting in South America, in her home country of Hondures where she was devising intercultural learning projects for the American Field Service for a decade.

That was where she met her Austrian husband Roland who was and still is with Plan International. With him Angerer has had opportunities to work with cultural activists and artists around the world, a number of whom have made their way to visit her in Kenya where she always gets them involved, invariably performing with and for local communities.

Cultural Stopovers already has several venues lined up and a huge data base of cultural workers who’ll be performing all over Nairobi. We’ll keep an eye on Angerer’s working of wonders to get untold numbers involved in her enlivening artistic programme set for February 27.

Meanwhile, tonight Phoenix Players are set to stage their first production of the New Year. It’s a comedy called Twice My Age, starring Joe Kinyua, Fred Murithi and Mwajuma Bahati.

Finally, Heartstrings Kenya are also set to open in Wife Begins at Dinner at Alliance Francaise from January 20th. So we are hopefully 2016 will see even more activism among the artists and cultural activists than ever before.

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