San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Oruche’s trip to native Nigeria pays dividends
Oakland-based choreographer, writer, actress and community organizer Nkeiruka Oruche grew up in Nigeria until age 14, and has traveled back many times in her adult life. But Oruche’s recent sixweek tour of the country with 21 people in tow — including her two children and six members of her dance company, Gbedu Town Radio — was different.
“It’s a dream come true,” she recently told The Chronicle during a video interview while she was still in Nigeria. “This is the first time I’ve come back to Nigeria as an artist.”
About a week before, in early December, Oruche had screened a video of her breakout dance production, “Mix Tape for the Dead & Gone #1,” to an audience of Nigerian university students. She said they were as enraptured as the live audience that experienced “Mix Tape’s” premiere at San Francisco’s CounterPulse last summer.
Indeed, anyone who has seen Oruche’s joyful and brilliantly cross-cultural theatrical work might be surprised that her confidence as an artist is still nascent. In early December, Oruche was named a Dance/USA artist fellow, an award given to only two other Bay Area artists, Bhumi B. Patel and Muisi-kong Malonga. In 2020, Oruche was named a Yerba Buena Center for the Arts 100 Honoree, an annual list that celebrates “everyday heroes” in the arts. But her creative career has been inseparable from her community work, and something of a surprise to her.
She has a public health degree from San Francisco State University, which she said she got because she had promised her parents she’d become a
doctor. But all the while, she’d always made music and danced. After attending shows at Dance Mission Theater and beginning to teach contemporary Nigerian social dances to children there, “I began to feel like a double agent. I kept seeing how powerful art can be to help people change their lives.”
“I was helping artists learn to do public health things, like keep data and statistics on their impact,” she added, “and I was helping people at places like the Boys and Girls Club develop art programs.”
This trajectory led to Oruche’s founding of the Afro Urban Society, an Oakland nonprofit that hosts Pan-African-influenced writing and dance workshops and children’s programs.
“I’m a prolific project-involver person,” she said, “and all these workshops and projects were orbiting each other and I realized it’s all the same thing: serving Black creatives, trying to get people from Pan-African urban culture talking to each other.”
Her most recent Nigerian tour has offered time for deeper research into her ancestors, the Igbo people, an ethnic group dominant in southeastern Nigeria. The first installment of “Mix Tape” began the story of an Igbo woman, Ahamefula, who has died and must decide, with the help of a kind of grim reaper/shaman figure, whether to become an ancestor.
Igbo traditions include precise burial and mourning practices specific to the life the person has led, and Oruche plans to draw on her growing knowledge to expand “Mixtape” and develop three more installments, taking viewers into the spirit world and back to the human realm.
If future productions are anything like “Mixtape #1,” they’ll be full of roof-raising dances, heart-pumping music and ingenious humor. But Oruche’s integration of her Igbo research and community service also helps members of the Afro Urban Society honor and hold pain in day-to-day life.
“It was post-Oscar Grant,” she said, referring to the 22year-old Black man shot and killed by a BART police officer in 2009. “I was out on the streets protesting and also thinking, ‘How do we be angry and fighting but also hold care for ourselves?’ We need different tools. And I discovered that in Igbo culture, spirituality is very practical, a life practice — everything is connected. It helped me say this is what I can give back: Art as a tool.”