International Dance Theatre Piece Comes To Dodowa

"Broken World, Broken Word", an international dance theatre piece, which focuses on movement, language, translation and meaning and how these constitute our world as a lived experience, will on Thursday 29 and Friday September 30, be performed at the Noyam Theatre in Dodowa, near Accra.
 
The production, which is a collaborative devised piece with Noyam African Dance Institute, emerges from traditional and arts-based research work of the Creative Arts and Translating Cultures Hub of Researching Multilingually at The Borders of Language, The Body, Law and The State (RM Borders) research project at the University of Glasgow in Scotland.
 
RM Borders is a three-year UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Large Grant project, which runs from 2013 to 2016. The project has case studies in Bulgaria, Rumania, Ghana, Uganda, USA, Scotland, England, Gaza Strip and The Netherlands.
The piece explores the themes of borders, checkpoints, detention siege through language and movement over the borders drawn across lands by employing elements of earth, water, fire, air and wind.
 
It is devised through intensive work with Noyam and musicians selected from Glasgow based Ha Orchestra working with music composed by Gameli Tordzro. They include atenteben maestro Dela Botri, flutist Katrine Suwalski (Denmark), percussionists Alfred Tamakloe and Samuel Takyi, (Denmark/Ghana), kalimba player Clare Robertson (Scotland/Nigeria) and Paris based Burkinabe kora and kamali ngoni player, Simon Winsé.
 
Dancers from the Noyam Ensemble include Nii Akwei Adotey, Cynthia Onoma, Atcheah Jeremiah Obadiah, Steven Agyekum, Ruth Adjoa Asaba Swatson and Aaron Nana Kwame Kuayson.
 
Co-directed by Scotland based Ghanaian creative artist, composer, theatre and film director, Gameli Tordzro and Zimbabwean poet/writer Tawona Sithole - the piece is choreographed by Nii Tete Yartey, artistic director of the National Dance Company (Ghana Dance Ensemble).
 
Funded by the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the production brings together a team of international theatre makers such as Glasgow based German technical designer and theatre maker, Kai Fischer and applied theatre researcher Katja
 
Others are Ghanaian costume designer Naa Densua Tordzro and Prof Alison Phipps, Principal Investigator and Convenor at "Researching Multilingually at the Borders of Language, the Body, Law and the State" (RM Borders), University of Glasgow, who is leading the delegation.
 
The team equally made forays into Translating Cultures by studying the role of translation, understood in its broadest sense in the transmission, interpretation, transformation and sharing of languages, values, beliefs, histories and narratives.
 
Others are research interpreting, translation and multilingual practices in challenging contexts at the borders of language, the body, law and the state as well as evaluating appropriate research methods (traditional and arts-based) and develop theoretical approaches for this type of academic exploration.