In Luo dialect, Abila, the house of the patriarch, is the place for meeting and exchanges between different generations and guests.
The new creation by Opiyo Okach is entirely based on this idea of an encounter between dancers of various ethnic and artistic backgrounds in Kenya. That includes traditional dancing, cabaret, theatre, etc.

Three European artists: a videast and two musicians bring their own crossbreeding experience. They capture and integrate into the choreography, their own sounds and movements.


This way, Opiyo Okach continues his poetic quest for a modern identity among the dispersed elements of east-African cultures, a result of constant changes of hundreds of Bantu, Nilotic, and Cushitic populations, which have gone through Islam, been evangelised, colonised, then educated, modernised, and urbanised.

The choreography, the art of the memory of the body, is an element giving a structure between the cultures of East Africa, an entirely aesthetic social bond, conceived to forge a feeling of belonging to a community through the transmission of danced myths and rituals. Almost always associated with initiation, the dance is a strong identity builder : it has an effect on the public who takes part fully in the performance.
Confronted to the shock of modernity, traditional choreography is not only dying because of the lack of performers, but also because they loose this metaphysical and identity related meaning.
Compiling knowledge and myths has increasingly to do with heritage conservation, but the modern re-adaptation of this knowledge in the urban world is definitely a live art, reinvented time after time, which cannot be a simple repeat of old expressions. Opiyo does not repeat the old traditional body language, but he tries to keep their structure and motives, and to see them as an aesthetic and social practice.
The city, a place where modernity thrives, has been for a long time a new space for encounters, intercultural exchanges and a melting pot, as much as a source of inter-ethnic conflicts and aggravation of social differences. If tamed, these tensions can be cooled down and become the symbol of a pacified city dedicated to encounters, in the same way the peaceful Abila does, between generations, neighbours and outsiders.
As much as encounters in cities are unpredictable, improvisation is another side of modernity in art, raised by surrealists to the rank of full method of creation.

Abila has a strong universal nature in its encounters : we do not have the same mother tongue, we do not belong to the same culture, and still we live in the same cities, we know how to explore our basic feelings and gestures that we learnt from our fathers, then from our masters, in our villages and later in our travels.
How do you position yourself in front of this colour and this scent coming out of the soil ?
At the beginning, working proposals are the materials commomly used by most of the ethnies of the area, that all have significations in rituals of offering, initiation, passage, etc. Thus red ocher, white chalk, calebasses, fly whip, carry lots of signifiance that every dancer reveals by gestures he associates to.
Every performer thus become a resource person, that lies just hidden at the corner of urban life. The answers given by each of the performers make the base of the creation, and during the weeks of creation, rehearsal and close work together, a common and harmonised body language will be created to give to the overall work an illusion of unity.