dancing Hamilton artist her way back to her West African roots
Esie Mensah featured in new CBC dance series “The Move”
At a very young age, Esie Mensah’s parents took steps to ensure their Hamilton-born daughter never forgot her African roots.
They’d drive her from their east Mountain home to Toronto for Sunday rehearsals and lessons with the Ewe (EH-way) Dance Ensemble to learn the traditional dances of Ghana, her parents’ homeland in West Africa.
Years later, Mensah would combine that teaching with contemporary urban, ballet and jazz to create a unique form of dance she calls Afrofusion.
“It’s my duty to say ‘thank you’ to my parents and bring forth the legacy they have gifted me with, in a new way,” she says in the documentary series “The Move,” available April 29 on the network’s Gem streaming service.
Mensah — her first name is pronounced EH-see — is one of eight artists featured in the second season of “The Move.”
She is one of Canada’s most-sought after dancers and choreographers. Rihanna, Drake, Janelle Monae, Nelly Furtado and Flo Rida are among the stars to call on her talents.
Mensah was a featured dancer in Fox TV’s remake of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” with Laverne Cox and Adam Lambert. Her dance company performs halftime shows for Toronto Raptors’ basketball games.
“I get very invigorated when I get to command a room with my movement,” Mensah says in an interview with The Spectator from Toronto where she is now based. “That’s my communication with people. That’s how I speak to people. I find that movement can speak a lot louder than words.”
Mensah’s parents — Michel and Theresa — came to Canada in the early ’70s, settling down in the Upper Gage and Limeridge area, where they still live, after raising five daughters and a son (Esie is the youngest). Michel is a retired mechanic and Theresa works as a cook at Shalom Village retirement home, a job she has held for many years.
Mensah, now 34, attended high school at Cathedral, followed by three years at McMaster in cultural and women’s studies. She had given up the Ewe Dance Ensemble at the age of 17, but still loved dance.
In 2006, she decided to enter George Brown College’s intensive one-year commercial dance program. She was drawn there because it was one of the few courses that included hip hop and urban dance. She boned up on her jazz, ballet and modern dance steps with Hamilton’s Expressions Dance Company and then passed the George Brown audition.
It didn’t take Mensah long to realize that she had made the right decision. Dance would be her life.
Through connections she had made at George Brown, she quickly found employment, touring and filming with local R&B singers like Divine Brown and Jully Black. Plenty of work followed through those school connections — Coca Cola commercials and a spot on “So You Think You Can Dance Canada.”
But she found she was losing auditions, not necessarily because of her dancing, but because of the darkness of her skin. It wasn’t that she was black. She was too black.
“I knew that my shade was becoming a determining factor in the type of roles that I would be granted. That was real hardship ... I knew I was really good, but it felt me being good wasn’t good enough.”
While on a four-month contract in China in 2011, Mensah says she was told “she might be too dark for television.”
She returned to her roots, working in traditional West African styles with Toronto’s Lua Shayenne Dance Company. She found her own voice, merging the traditional with the contemporary, hip hop with Ghanaian Ewe.
“There was something special that I got whenever I would dance traditional dances, from when I was a kid to when I was older. I would be able to come alive because of the spiritual connection I would be rooted in, like I was unstoppable. I want to feel that feeling with everything that I do.”
As Afrobeat music gained in popularity in North America, so did Mensah’s style of Afrofusion brand of dance. It turned out she was ahead of the game.
She formed her own dance ensemble Black Stars Collective, named after the five-pointed star at the centre of the Ghanaian flag.
While Black Stars performed corporate gigs like Raptors’ halftime shows, Esie Mensah Creations was established to produce more creative stage endeavours like “Shades,” a 75-minute theatre-dance work based on her personal experiences with “shadeism” within communities of colour.
This week, Mensah is shifting her base of operations to Niagara-on-the-Lake where she is working as “movement director” for two Shaw Festival plays — “Victory” and “The Russian Play.”
But first, she had to stop in at her parents’ house, the same one she grew up in, for an Easter meal. She was looking forward to a feast that would combine traditional western foods with the Ghanaian specialty of jollof, a spicey rice in tomato sauce.
Mensah admits her parents were not totally onside when she first decided on dance as a career. Things have changed, however. Dance has provided a bridge to her family heritage. She dances, in part, to honour her parents.
“As much as this is my legacy, it’s really the legacy of my parents,” Mensa says. “I want to gift them, say thank you for working so hard to come here (to Canada), and I hope that what I’m doing is enough to say that it was worth it.
Newly appointed McMaster University chancellor Santee Smith is also among the eight dancers featured on Season Two of “The Move.” Smith, from Six Nations of the Grand, overcame two broken legs as a toddler to become an award-winning producer and choreographer.