A dance for Wales
Growing up in Swansea shaped choreographer Anthony Matsena’s dancing career. Now his Wales-inspired piece Codi is touring the country, writes Jenny White
WALES has had a big impact on choreographer Anthony Matsena. He moved to Swansea from Libya at the age of 13 and quickly settled into life in the city, joining local dance groups and pursuing the passion for dance that ran strongly in his family.
“The community welcomed us with open arms and helped us from the get-go,” he says. “I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today if it wasn’t for the community in Swansea – we have a lot of friends and supporters in that community.”
In Swansea he began attending hip-hop, African and contemporary dance lessons as well as watching NDCWales perform – his first real taste of contemporary dance and an experience that had a big impact on him. As he grew, he learnt to combine a diverse range of influences, from krump to ballet and contemporary.
“I remember watching NDCWales’ Mythology and learning the repertoire in college and thinking, ‘Wow, I want to do that dancing’,” he says. “Then I remember going to dance school and they asked what my goal was and I said I wanted to dance with NDCWales as a dancer. Then, lo and behold, when I graduated, I was an associate artist working with them – so, they have been a big part of my journey.”
Matsena had stood out as ‘one to watch’ when training at London Contemporary Dance School and was a Sadler’s Wells Young Associate in 2018. While he initially aimed to be a dancer, his focus shifted to choreography and he has enjoyed multiple successes in the field – including Codi, a piece he created for NDCWales that explores what Wales means to him.
Codi initially premiered in 2019 as part of the NDCWales’ Roots tour and is now being presented to new audiences at larger venues across the UK as part of an NDCWales triple bill alongside pieces choreographed by Caroline Finn and Andrea Costanzo Martini.
Codi is an inspirational story about the strength in communities – it’s about how people can band together to tackle the hardships of life and endure troubled times. It now features six dancers instead of the original four, with music by Lara Agar mixed by Franklin Mockett and mastered by Nick Watson.
“Codi is mainly dance with some theatrical elements,” says Matsena. “It’s a kind of universal story about the working rights of the working class being abused – how sometimes a lot of the industries that support smaller towns or communities get stripped away in a heartbeat, how that community deals with that and how they push on.”
In particular, the piece is informed by his studies of Welsh coalmining communities.
“In trying to understand my relationship with Wales a bit better and Wales’ cultural history, I started looking back at coalmining communities,” he explains. “We looked at personal stories and perspectives of what it was like in that era and what it was like to work in those coalmines, how people dealt with deaths and how people dealt with grief. Codi means ‘to rise up’ in an emotional and spiritual way.”
Also in the tripe bill is Caroline Finn’s brandnew piece with NDCWales, which encapsulates her darkly funny and high-energy dance signature recognisable in her previous works Folk, The Green House, Animatorium, Bernadette and Revellers’ Mass. Her new piece, Ludo, focuses on the importance of play, rediscovering the spontaneous delights of childhood and the thrill of mind games.
Meanwhile, Wild Thoughts, a world premiere from Italian choreographer Andrea Costanzo Martini, delivers fearless, thrilling dance full of playful wit.
“Wild thoughts is a riotous celebration of knees, arms, legs, glands, tongues, limbs and their untamed physical knowledge,” says Andrea. “What deeply touches me in this process is to see the
urgent passion these performers have for movement and their generosity to share on stage the intimate and unique relationship they have with their bodies.”
■ The show tours to Cardiff, Swansea, Mold and Bangor over the coming weeks and is online from May 30 to June 10. More details can be found at www.ndcwales.co.uk and www.matsenaproductions.com
eyes to other possibilities.
“She showed me sculptures built from welding – and I’d never put the two together before,” he says. “It hadn’t occurred to me that you could actually make art this way because, for me, welding was all about things like repairing cars or building gates.”
He still paints – and a selection of paintings is included in the current show, enabling him to expand on the same themes in a different medium – but sculpture is now a core part of his work. He has exhibited his sculptures internationally – no mean feat when the work is delicate and full of moving parts.
“There’s a lot of trial and error and things breaking down,” he admits. It was all working for
I see people changing because we’re spending more and more time physically isolated, but connected on the internet. It’s changing the way that we relate to each other