‘In a dance class, you are often made to feel you must apologise for your body’

You don’t necessarily expect a contemporary dance show to be concerned with the global beauty business and the big stick it brandishes over women – and increasingly men – everywhere.

But having lived on three continents and experienced it in very different societies, the dancer and choreographer Wanjiru Kamuyu is intrigued by what appears to be a planet-wide love-hate relationship with this multimillion dollar industry.

Her solo show Spiral, which she will perform at the Firkin Crane in Cork next week, explores the cyclical way we relate to the notion of beauty. We all know we're expected to shape up. We know we don't. Yet we still allow the tyranny of stereotyped images to influence everything from small everyday decisions about our appearance to major surgical procedures.

Alien dance?

Kamuyu was born in Kenya, and studied ballet in Nairobi from the age of eight. “My mum put me in a ballet class and I never left. I fell in love with dance instantaneously,” she says.

Was it not something strange or alien for her, this European dance form? “It wasn’t alien to me because I didn’t know otherwise,” she says. “Actually I didn’t take an African dance class until I went to live in New York in my teens. And then I was always teased as the ballet dancer who ‘looks like she’s trying to do African’.”

Although she is from a bicultural home – her father is Kenyan, her mother African-American – as a 16-year-old immigrant to the US, Kamuyu experienced more serious forms of cultural dislocation. “It was the first time someone introduced me to the term ‘black’. I didn’t understand what that meant. In Kenya, I was never a colour. I was never a race. I was always a woman with brown skin who was Kikuyu and American.

“I didn’t understand what that term meant: black. And then, as a teenager, you have all the difficulties of interpersonal relationships – people welcoming or not welcoming you – and anyhow, I wasn’t ready to leave Kenya at that stage. So the last two years of high school were hard.

“When I went to college, I just let go. I thought, looks like you’re here to stay, so take advantage of the situation, dance to your heart’s content, and make it a career.”

Kamuyu has done exactly that. In 2007 she was an original cast member of The Lion King. From 2010 to 2012 she was closely involved with another hit musical, Fela!, based on the life of the firebrand Nigerian afrobeat musician Fela Kuti. She has also started her own dance company, WK Collective, with the aim of fusing contemporary dance with various other disciplines.

Is it very different, working on a huge, Tony-award winning Broadway musical, and working intensively, alone, in a studio, as she is in Cork, where she is developing a new solo show thanks to the Firkin Crane’s Blank Canvas residency?

“It is and it’s not,” she says. “I use all my experiences – contemporary dance, concert dance and musical theatre – to inform the way I function not only as a creator, but also as an artistic director.

"There are some organisational things that I really learned from Lion King: how to keep yourself organised. How to do an itinerary. How to do the business aspect. And then, in terms of creative movement, I learn from every creator that I'm with. For Lion King there was a dance supervisor who just taught us the movements, but with Fela! there was quite a lot of liberty in the show for you to be your own person, and there were moments where we could just improvise. So that was really quite special. But the luxury of being able to work here, like this, is immense."

Inspired by big bustles

The idea for Spiral came to Kamuyu when she visited an exhibition in Paris, where she now lives with her French husband.

“There were a lot of paintings with skirts with big bustles. And so then it really reminded me of Sarah Baartman. She was a South African woman who was also known as the Venus Hottentot. She was exhibited around Europe for many years as a freak because she had big buttocks and a big chest and big genitals.

“So again, I was thinking of the love-hate relationship – this time with hips and butt. Putting it on display; wanting it yet not wanting it. So you put this bustle underneath.”

For a dancer, hips and butt are pretty important. "They are," she says, laughing. "I was in a dance company in New York called Urban Bush Women where we actually had a piece called Bati Moves. It was a celebration of the behind, because, as a woman of African descent who has, well, a derrière, in a dance class many times you are made to feel like you have to apologise for your anatomy. So we created this piece to celebrate the body in all its forms, shapes and sizes."

Cyber collaboration

Spiral features an original score by the Michigan-based composer Nate May. "We met when I was in residency there. He was playing for one of my classes, and I just loved his synergy with my movement, so I asked him if we could do a little composition together," she says. "It was a really wonderful process, but a strange process in that we were in two different countries, so he was never in the room for my creative process. There was a lot of cyberspace conversation happening. But it worked itself out."

The piece also projects images by the Brooklyn-based Kenyan contemporary artist Wangechi Mutu. “I’m using her work because it speaks volumes to the issue of beauty and the sexualisation of the body – the political identity of the body,” Kamuyu says.

Having steeped herself in the topic of physical beauty and its often ugly repercussions, does she have any advice for women in the face of the often relentless pressure to conform to a stereotyped image?

“I would just say: be kind with yourself,” she says. “Be gentle with yourself and try to love the natural self that you are. If you feel the need to augment yourself to fit into this category of ‘beautiful’, ask yourself why you’re doing it. Does it please you? Is it societal pressure? Is it postcolonial or post-slavery trauma? Step back and ask yourself why.

“But above all, just be kind to yourself. Because I think we beat ourselves up way too much.”

Spiral is at the Firkin Crane on August 19 at 8pm. wkcollective.com