By
Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted 25 February 2020)
Fernando
Anuang’a may be best known as the founding ‘Maasai dancer’ of the dance trio
Rare Watts. But that was years ago.
This weekend,
he returns to Alliance Francaise, not with two in his team. This Saturday night
in the AF garden, he will perform with 45 Maasai dancers, 15 from Magadi, 15
from Amboseli and 15 more from Maasai Mara.
The show, ‘Maasai
Footsteps’ will be premiering in bright red suka pageantry that only Fernando
could devise.
“I have been
dreaming of creating a large Maasai dance company for years,” says the man whose
lineage comes not from Maasai but from Western Kenya.
“I grew up
in Kitengela so I started doing Maasai dances since primary school,” he says
noting that his school used to win at annual Kenya Music Festivals.
It was in
the 1990s that Rare Watts took off and performed not only in Kenya, mainly in
Nairobi and in hotels at the Coast. They also went to Europe as part of African
Heritage’s 11-cities tour and to South Africa as part of AH’s ‘African
Renaissance’ showcase.
“Rare Watts
fell apart in 1998, but I kept dancing. I went to Reunion to perform in a
Maasai Festival and to the Seychelles after we reunited briefly to dance in
hotels from one end of the island to the other,” says Fernando who went solo
from late 2000 up until 2007 when he created his first Maasai dance troupe (after
Rare Watts) with seven Maasai morans from Magadi.
Calling
themselves the Maasai Vocal Dance Group (due to the deep guttural sounds that
moran dancers make), Fernando recalls that their first performances were in
2008 in Nairobi, at The GoDown and Alliance Francaise. After that, they went on
tour around central and southern Africa as well as to Morocco and Algeria.
But the incentive
that spurred him to revive a new Maasai dance troupe happened earlier in 2007
when he was living in France with his French wife Patricia.
“I got the
opportunity to meet the [acclaimed] French choreographer, Angelin Preljocaj who
invited me to do a residence at Pavillon Noir (Choreography Centre) in
Aix-en-Provence. That experience opened my eyes to appreciate both contemporary
dance and improvisation,” says Fernando.
At the end
of his residency, he had to give three performance of the original dance that he’d
created during his days at Pavillon Noir. His ‘Journey into the Future’
was well received. But he’d been inspired by Angelin’s ‘Ballet Preljocaj’ and
now wanted to start his own company based on his Maasai dance roots.
His Maasai
Vocal Group tours were a big success. But as they weren’t full-time, when he wasn’t
touring with them, he went back to France where a friend invited him to perform
at the newly-renovated castle in the South of France owned by the French
philosopher Pierre Teilhard du Chardin.
“That is
where I met both the French Minster of Culture Jack Lang and Pierre Chardin.
That was in 2014 when I performed ‘The Traditional Future’,” says Fernando.
Both men
were impressed with this Kenyan who was already in his thirties but still looked
22. “Jack Lang invited me to perform my dance at the Museum of African Art (Musee
de Quai Branly) at its Claude Levi-Strauss Theatre,” he says, remembering
what a huge honor that was.
But as he
had already met with Chardin and proposed that he be given a residency at the
great philosopher’s magnificent ‘Espace Pierre Carden’ also known as ‘Theatre
de la ville de Paris’, he proceeded straight to Paris.
That residency
lasted two months after which Fernando felt confident to give solo performances
across Europe (in France, Sweden and Iceland) as well as in Costa Rico in
Central America and Japan.
Coincidentally,
he was contacted by an Irish filmmaker named Steve Woods who found him online
and wanted to make movies with him. “The first one that we made was a short film
called ‘Keeping Time’ and the current one is a documentary that he is now
making called ‘The Making of ‘Maasai Footsteps’,” says Fernando.
Woods was
there and filming while he was auditioning Maasai morans in Maasai Mara,
Amboseli and Magadi. He had already left for Ireland when Fernando reunited
Rare Watts and his Maasai Vocal Dance group to perform at African Heritage
House for the African Twilight Gala last March.
But Woods
will be there Saturday night when Fernando’s ‘Maasai Footsteps’ premieres at
Alliance Francaise. It’s a performance you won’t want to miss.
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