Photo credit: John MacLean

Africa, in particular Nigeria, Ethiopia and Burkina Faso hold great sway as sources of human and artistic cultivation for Artistic Director Jennifer Dallas. Kẹmi, meaning 'she who takes care of us', is the African name she received in Lagos, Nigeria where she was first exposed to the work and methods of hugely celebrated choreographer Adedayo Liadi. He would become her great mentor and bestow her with the name.

A month-long voyage to perform and study in Ethiopia in 2008 with Oromo superstar Kemer Yusef provided her first immersion in traditional aspects of African dance. This work was in sharp contrast to the distinctly contemporary movement she was developing in West Africa.

Since her first exposure in 2005 she has travelled several times to West Africa for extended work periods with Liadi and other artists from Cameroon, Benin, Senegal, Kenya and Ghana. Chief musical collaborator John MacLean accompanied her over two months in West Africa in 2009.

Most recently Dallas and MacLean spent two weeks in residence in Ouagadougou Burkina Faso with artists Bienvenue Bazié and Bema "Balafon" Konaté for the creation of Converse.

Prolonged, extreme travel to challenging locations serves to disrupt what is already known to us. The human and cultural contrasts experienced with each voyage serve to inform our vision and stimulate original thought. Although we focus primarily on contemporary movement as opposed to traditional, one of Jennifer's current observations on her work and Africa is that ancient patterns of social interaction and connectedness are noticeably absent in Western cultures.

"Many of the East and West Africans I have met have little or no intensive dance training, yet they have been born into circumstances that inherently provoke movement. Their cultures normalize dance as a regular, if not daily behaviour. The innate qualities that daily participation in dance and connection with one's own body offers represents a major piece of what I believe make a whole dancer. In the Western world, our instinctual sense of movement is underdeveloped and, for the most part, unformed. We are acutely aware of our appearance instead of the sensations of our bodies. We, as a society, have the tendency to exist in "head-time" not "body-time". In contemporary dance terms, there exists a tendency toward muted expression of movement as a demonstrable, culture-wide symptom of this disconnection."
– Jennifer Dallas