Rosina Bonsu
An appreciation
SOON after the death of Rosina Osei Bonsu, at the age of 64, was made public by her family, outpourings of love and grief spread across social media networks everywhere. The sense of profound loss, tinged with shocked disbelief, was a marker of how she had – as a wonderfully intuitive movement teacher, supportive colleague, staunch friend –touched countless lives at home and abroad.
For nigh on four decades, she was a talismanic inspiration to those who joined her classes. Under-fives and over-60s alike discovered what their bodies could achieve through astutely structured movement. Many, myself included, would feel our spirits lift if we caught sight of Rosina in a venue foyer – her smile, her laughter, her unstinting interest in other people’s work, had an infectious positivity that wrapped around you like the spontaneous hug that said: “It’s really good to see you”.
From Ghana to Glasgow, where she built a multi-faceted career, married, and greatly enhanced the city’s cultural profile, was a life journey sparked with courage and a commitment to make dance matter in people’s lives. That journey occasioned a deeply personal dance-theatre solo, Coconut (1999), in which she candidly addressed the realities of being half a world away from the family home and its legacy of Ashanti customs and wisdom.
Born in Ghana in 1955, the youngest of five children, Rosina was a toddler when she moved to Italy with her father, a Ghanaian diplomat. Aged eight, she was at a private girls’ boarding school in England. From there she trained as a schoolteacher at Southlands College of Education Roehampton Institute, before finding her life’s purpose, at the London Contemporary Dance School.
Her intuitive connection with movement and people shone out: little wonder Scottish Ballet lured her to Glasgow, as Artistic Director of its outreach company, Steps Out, from 1984 to 1987. She moved on, to a similarly proactive role with Renfrewshire Dance Project, before going freelance in 1989.
Free to pick and choose her next challenges, she nonetheless continued to make Glasgow her home. Her West End flat became a regular gathering point for dancers, musicians, theatre-makers. Long Sunday lunches – stoked by her delicious home-cooked fare -- helped forge informal networks and creative friendships that still bear fruit today.
The list of her achievements is humbling in its breadth and variety, an ongoing witness to her feisty, determined spirit, her charm and ready humour. When Dance Base, Edinburgh’s National Dance Agency, launched in 1984, her immediate response was ‘why hasn’t Glasgow got its own centre for professional dancers and community classes?’ Her solution was to set up the Dance Bothy, which grew into Dance House Glasgow.
She made time alongside teaching movement classes – a role which expanded into colleges and, latterly, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland – to collaborate on dance and drama productions, even initiating some memorably large-scale projects herself. She pulled together resources for a Carmina Burana (2000) that found the RSNO orchestra and choir acting as the live backing group for massed ranks of professional and community dancers under the direction of international choreographer Royston Maldoom.
Two years later, the Rosina touch was again in evidence with another epic community project, Journey, which involved the University of Namibia Choir coming to Glasgow.
When, as part of her own learning curve, Rosina took up yoga, she incorporated the methodologies and benefits in her classes, setting up yoga programmes under the umbrella of Rosina Bonsu Moves, at Arlington Baths, and forming widespread connections. Who else but Rosina would commission an eco-pod, load it onto a flat-bed lorry for the risky road and ferry journey to a village on Crete? It became a summer haven for many. Acting with mischievous flair in Them, an NTS production, at Tramway last year brought her back into performing on-stage, and left her eager to do more. Other offers were, apparently, in the pipeline.
Becoming one of the Saltire Society’s “Outstanding Women of Scotland” in 2017 was well-deserved recognition of her work. She was energetic, energising, indefatigable... even when, as in 2014, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Chemotherapy and subsequent surgery were briskly wrapped up into ongoing work commitments and her yoga classes witnessed how she practised what she taught, bringing balance to mind as well as body. Last month, a secondary cancer took hold, and proved terminal. She was still organising work schedules from her hospital bed until she passed away, peacefully, on February 2. She is survived by her husband Mark and family members, and sadly mourned by those whose lives she gladdened and enriched.