LIZA MACKAY: FORMER DANCER-NOW PAINTER OF DANCE

 LIZA, ONCE A DANCER NOW PAINTS THE DANCERS

By Margaretta wa Gacheru

For many years, Liza MacKay was best known for being Nairobi’s leading modern dancer, instructor, and choreographer. She taught dance at Alliance Francaise and choreographed musicals for Phoenix Players like ‘Sweet Charity’, ‘Joseph and his Amazing Technicolored Dreamcoat’ and even Shakespeare’s ‘Taming of the Shrew.’

But back when she’d completed her A-levels at Kenya High, Liza didn’t go study theatre or dance. She went to perfect her skills as a painter at St. Martin’s School of Art and Sussex University in the UK.

That’s how she came around to teaching art at ISK for a quarter century up until a few years back.

It’s also what brought her back to being not just an instructor but a practitioner of painting.

Nonetheless, her upcoming exhibition at Red Hill Gallery will be all about the career that brought her tremendous joy for many years, and that was dance.

Having taken ballet lessons as a child, she came back to studying dance while still in art school. That led to her dancing professionally with UK companies like ‘Moving Vision’ and the ‘Dance Theatre Commune’.

But when she got a call from one dance instructor in Nairobi, suggesting Liza come home to take up her teaching job at Alliance Francaise, Liza confessed she’d been missing Kenya terribly and quickly flew back to teach dance and to choreograph shows for James Falkland and others.

She also performed in everything from Brecht’s ‘Mother Courage’ to Baudelaire’s poetry, accompanied by Job Seda aka Ayub Ghada, and Alliance Francaise’s former director, the late Pierre Comte.

But since she stopped teaching both painting and dance, Liza has come back to fine art.

‘Choreography’ is what she’s entitled an exquisite collection of figurative paintings of a dynamic dancer in motion. Mind you, painting provides a two-dimensional perspective but dance is all about movement of human bodies in 3D.

Liza has her own unique techniques for conveying the vitality of the dancer, who in this case is her former colleague, Adam Chainjo, who came to teach dance to deaf students at ISK.

“We’ve remained good friends, so when I thought of painting a subject close to my heart, I thought of dance. I wanted this show to make the connection between these two [artistic] aspects of my life,” Liza tells BDLife as she puts finishing touches on paintings that she’s produced during the COVID-19 lockdown.

Combining photography, painting, and even photoshop, Liza’s one-woman show is all about one dancer who we encounter, first in a portrait that she painted of him, then on a beach at the Kenya Coast on a sunny day when the water is crystal blue and the sky is shimmering with heat and ethereal blue light.

And finally, her most recent version of the dancer is most ambitious. She initially took a series of photographs of Adam in specific poses that she wanted him to hold. Then she photoshopped them to create a variety of effects, all aimed to emphasize both the dynamism of the dance and the graceful elegance of the dancer.

When her exhibition opens early next year, Liza has arranged for Adam to come and dance while she tells a bit more about his story as well as about her art.

Liza will be adding more paintings to the collection that I saw tucked away in her home. But thus far, it’s her portrait of Adam that I feel is the best reflection of her skill as a first-class portrait painter who manages to convey the essential life force of her subject with sensitivity and clarity.

Her studies of mobility and grace of the dancer are also interesting; the paintings of Adam on the beach are presented as if his form is a beautiful still life, bronze and sun-baked in the sand.

Her choice to slice several poses of the dancer to create a semblance of cinematic movement doesn’t quite work for me. My eye is more inclined to look for the original dancer and try to piece his body back together again. Instead, Liza’s intent is to convey a feeling of dynamic movement that’s accelerated by her slicing and reshaping of body parts.

But whether her dancer is slightly distorted or presented in elongated ballet-like forms, it’s the elegant anatomical accuracy of Liza’s presentation that makes her paintings feel almost super-realistic.

This will be the first one-woman exhibition that Liza has had in several decades. Clearly, it is long overdue. We hope it will signal more to come from this multi-talented Kenyan woman.