When Anno’s Africa arrived in Nairobi in 2006 for our first pilot programme in St Johns Community school in Majengo there was no ballet to be found anywhere – not even for adults or in the smartest residential areas. The children in the slums had never even heard the word and so when Anna Nygh – our head of dance, and later a Trustee of the charity – suggested it she was met with a certain resistance with people asking how this ‘western’ dance style was relevant to children in Africa. “Wouldn’t we do far better to concentrate on traditional dance and not impose our ‘western’ culture where it was not wanted?” We did indeed instigate a traditional dance class, but Anna persevered with the idea of ballet and of course the children loved it. As soon as they put their second-hand donated dancewear (collected by Anna from the school where she was teaching in London) they became entranced.
Anna with ballet students from spurgeons
Anna is a licentiate of the institute of dancing (L.I.S.T.D) and has taught ballet both in her native Australia and in the UK. She currently teaches in North London.
Anna decided on the RAD dance syllabus because of its variety and the musicality it inspires in the children. The first year she began teaching pre-primary to 28 children, all girls. At the end of this year, charity director Bee Gilbert and head of Art, Marie Steinmann, happened to be at a concert in the Pangani hall in Mathare watching the music teacher Lulu perform at a youth festival. There they spotted Mike Wamaya, a young Kenyan contemporary dancer who had had a few months of ballet training. Anna taught Mike the first RAD grades – and he joined the Kenyan teaching team.
The next year the programme expanded to include Valley View School where some boys joined the group and the classes grew to over 40 in each school.
Classes in Mathare were held in a church hall with a rough concrete floor with holes in it and the access to which was along the edge of an open sewer, but Anna loved this space as it was set apart from the noise and traffic in the slums. Although it was a ten minute walk to get there, the hall was ideal and the children made remarkable progress.
BALLET STUDENTS WALK TO CLASS IN MATHARE
A couple of years later the charity expanded its work to include two schools in Kibera, where many more children joined the ballet. A ballerina from South Carolina, Cooper Rust, was visiting Nairobi and researched ballet so that she could do some training. She found only Anno’s Africa’s ballet in the slums (from a documentary clip on CNN) and asked if she could come and teach for a few days. Cooper was so impressed by the children that the next year she volunteered to come back and work with Anna during one of our two month long yearly workshops*. Cooper returned to teach the next year and decided to stay in Kenya and try to set up a Kenyan ballet school and dance company. She is now the Artistic Director of Dance Centre Kenya, attended by children from all over the city and with special sponsorship for those who have graduated from Anno’s Africa and successfully auditioned. Cooper has taken many of the children we have worked with, some of whom are now starting grade 5 RAD and attending classes 5/6 days a week.
*Our sister organization One Fine Day organize and run the weekly classes that continue all year round
Meanwhile we continue to take on more children each year. These children are not only achieving very high standards in their dance, but also in their academic work as it seems that the strict ballet discipline spills over into their school lives. We are also now training five 14-16 year old girls from Spurgeons School in Kibera to become Anno’s Africa/One Fine day ballet teachers themselves so that we can expand the programme to other schools and others slums...
* We would like to point out that Mike Wamaya no longer teaches with us and his Project Elimu is not connected or linked with the Anno’s Africa/One Fine Day programmes in any way..
We will be creating dedicated galleries for each of our major disciplines in the near future, but Fredrik Lerneryd’s beautiful - and now famous - photographs of our ballet programme can be viewed here!
GREAT NEWS:
“We are so happy because soon we will be dancing on a proper dance floor thanks to Harlequin Floors Our shoes won’t tear and get dirty and we can jump as high as the moon.”
Anno's Africa Ballet students, May 2017
Thank you so much to Susy and Jamie and the team at Harlequin Floors who has made this possible by donating their top-notch professional flooring for our new Arts Center in Kibera .
We are completely overwhelmed by - and so thankful for - the generous donations of dance wear that have followed recent news coverage of our ballet programme. Until we can find more storage space we are actually over-supplied with dance materials at the moment (!), but should you wish to help our ballet girls you could do so by fundraising for Anno's Africa, or by donating to the new Dance space in the Arts Centre we are setting up. Any contributions towards barres, mirrors and a wonderful, CLEAN dance floor would be hugely appreciated - however small. Thank you!
Visit our you tube channel to see Anna and our ballet students in action!