Advocating for the African Transnational Context
July 7, 2025
An Interview with ‘Funmi Adewole Elliott
BY EMMALY WIEDERHOLT
‘Funmi Adewole Elliott is a UK-based Nigerian performer, dramaturg, and academic. After spending a decade performing with African dance theater companies, she spent time in academia, before recently embarking on a new path to found a nonprofit that supports professional development and practice with a focus on African diasporic dance and creative health. Here, she shares her passion advocating for African diasporic dance and her interest in post-colonial art forms.
Photo by Pete Martin
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How did you get into dance and what shaped you as an artist?
Dance has been a passion of mine since childhood. I danced around the house to cassette tapes of Jùjú music. I also listened to African American funk and British pop. I would dance in front of the television mimicking moves. There were no dance classes to go to. I did this from the age of eight or nine until I was in secondary school. When I look back, I was quite an isolated child. I grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, but I was born in Britain. I relocated with my family to Nigeria when I was about eight years old. I couldn’t speak the language and it took me a while to learn, so music offered a way into the world around me. I was also writing poetry at the time. This period of my life molded my approach to dance and performance. It fueled my passion for investigating the postcolonial experience and for self-directed study. Ultimately it has led to my current research interests such as ‘Dance as a profession,’ African cultural production, and practice-based research.
When I got to university in the 80s, I connected to people in performing arts and creative writing. I didn’t go to university as a dance student; I went as a language student studying English and French. I couldn’t tell my parents I wanted to change to theatre arts, because they were already upset that I was studying languages rather than medicine, so I learned through experience. I watched rehearsals, I took subsidiary courses, and I ended up as the artistic director of the poetry club.
When I moved to Britain in my mid-20s, I found I had enough experience in performance to audition for African theatre companies. It was the 90s. African dance theatre was based mainly on traditional dances. I did not know many traditional dances. I grew up in a city, in Lagos. Even though I visited my hometown with my mother and went to the festivals, my predominant experience of dance was urban social dancing. What enabled me to work in this context was my ability to move between theatre and dance. In a lot of productions, if they needed a storyteller, it was usually me because I had a background in performance poetry. I would speak to the audience from the apron of the stage and join in some of the dances being performed center stage. It was the combination of language, movement, and social dance that formed the foundation of my practice. I toured for about 10 years off and on before I went into education. Now I’m back to independent performance.
Photo by Pete Martin
Are there one or two pieces that feel emblematic of your performance career that you’d like to share more about?
I’ll mention a couple of impactful dance productions I was a part of. I performed with the Adzido Pan African Dance Ensemble in Yaa Asantewaa: Warrior Queen (2000). Yaa Asantewaa was a queen from Ghana. She is a historical figure, and it was quite an honor to play her. This was in 2000, so quite a while ago. It was one of the biggest productions I’d been in: The cast comprised of a Black-British singing group, the dance company itself, an orchestra and traditional dance outfit from Ghana. Yaa Asantewaa was performed by three women. I was Yaa Asantewaa’s the Word. I narrated the text and danced. That was a big one for me.
Another production that made an impact on me was Double Take (2004) with the Cholmondeleys, run by Lea Anderson. She made quirky interesting choreography using pedestrian movement in some pieces, which is why I could dance some of her choreographies as I am not trained in Euro-American modern dance. The production marked the 20th anniversary of the company. The opening night wasn’t great, I had nerves, but after that I took off and began to enjoy the production and flourish in the performance. The rehearsal process was challenging, but through that production, I came to understand the contrasts between choreographic structures in Western and African performance traditions, and the diverse ways movement can interact with music. I had to adapt the skills I had learnt in African performance to the choreography. It was an eye-opening process of physical translation.
You’ve also worked in the realms of dramaturgy, poetry, and journalism. How have these language practices informed your understanding of dance?
Though a lot of dance performances do not use words, dance as an art generates a lot of words. Everyone comes away from watching a dance performance with their own experience because it has less of a fixed meaning than drama. When you see choreographed dance that comes out of someone’s idiosyncratic experience, you want to know its background. This openness to interpretation is one of its qualities that stimulates discussion. Additionally, dance history is a powerful and relatable way of generating social histories. Social dances come out of the stories of a community. Knowing the social context of dance enables you to understand the dance. There is something liminal about choreography. Due to my upbringing in different cultures and spaces I am intrigued by hybridity and why it is meaningful. Dance produces stories.
I’m deeply interested in what dance and theatre communicate, what mechanisms they use to communicate, and in the dynamic relationship between performer and spectator during a performance. This curiosity is what draws me to both dramaturgy and journalism. Like poetry, choreography thrives on symbolism and making the ordinary extraordinary. I see them as kindred art forms.
Photo by Simon Richardson
You’ve also worked extensively on studying and advocating for dances of the African diaspora. I read that you recently started a nonprofit to support this work. Can you share more?
When I graduated in 1990 with my first degree in Nigeria, I went into journalism and was a TV producer. I wrote as a freelancer for magazines and newspapers. When I arrived in Britain and went into performance, I realized there wasn’t much being written about dance of the African diaspora. There was a huge range of performance styles: Afro-Latin, hip hop, capoeira, etc. that appeared in productions that were not covered in the press. This prompted me to turn my journalistic skills to dance writing.
When I got involved with the Association of Dance of the African Diaspora (ADAD), which is now closed, one of the things that others and I wanted was a magazine, which we started, called HOTFOOT. We wanted reviews of work and histories of Black performance to be documented. We wanted people to do academic work on these dance companies. The basis for a lot of the choreography created in Black-led dance companies came from social dances. I began to advocate for dances of the African diaspora as a professional practice because the creative work taking place in this context was being overlooked. I wanted to make space for that.
I started as an independent scholar. I wrote my first academic paper in 2003. I wrote a few more papers before I started my PhD in 2011. Even while I was a touring artist, I was going to academic conferences. I worked as a dance lecturer in academia for eight years teaching an African based dance class within a contemporary dance context, before leaving this year. Working across generations, knowledge systems, and countries has been extremely challenging. However, through the insights I have gained I am convinced of the vital social role of professional Africanist dance practices because they bridge these diverse spaces.
I have founded FAE Studios as a platform for my solo practice, dramaturgy, and consultancy, and Enact Arts, a not-for-profit start-up. With Enact Arts, I am supporting arts and health projects, and professional development within African performance. I am at the beginning stage.
Photo by Irven Lewis
I understand you are particularly interested in the arts of post-independence Africa. Can you share more about why this art is interesting to you?
Many countries in Africa got independence from European countries in the early 60s, some in the 70s, and some in the 80s, but the majority in 1960, the year Nigeria got independence from Britain. The continent was really celebrating. There were massive pan African festivals, which not only featured the artworks of African nations but also the diaspora. When FESTAC (Second Festival of Black Arts and Culture) happened in1977 in Lagos, people from Brazil and Cuba and all over landed in Nigeria. I was impacted by that festival, seeing performances on television.
Besides the impact of FESTAC, I experienced the arts of Africa through post-independence popular culture and education systems. Many the African nations continued to use frameworks and institutions that were originally European: the university system, the school system, the civil service. But these have developed different ways of working from those of Europe. I don’t think the knowledge that has been produced within African post-independence cultural and social institutions are acknowledged as significant or written about in great depth, even within African scholarship. There are methodologies and ways of working that have developed in this context need further unpacking.
Additionally, I am interested in the arts of post-independence Africa because they are part of my life. I grew up in Lagos with popular music, as opposed to traditional dance and music, though I experienced some of that at school. My mother worked at a TV station. I then worked as an associate TV producer, so I was in the thick of it as the film industry in Nigeria took an upward turn in the 1990s. In Lagos, I was going to visual art galleries, reviewing books for the press, and writing as a freelancer for magazines. During my MA in Britain, I began to research the arts in Africa after independence. These post-colonial art forms constitute a cultural terrain that is translocal and transnational. There’s a lot from this terrain that we use and draw on, but we don’t talk about or examine enough. We advocate the importance of pre-colonial African cultures but not so much the urban. The cultures and histories of the cities are important as well.
What’s next for you? Do you have a current or upcoming project or focus you’d like to share more about?
I’m in the process of creating a solo. My solo pieces tend to be dance or movement-based theatre and about 15 to 20 minutes long but now I am working towards an hour-long performance. I’m hoping to have a work in progress to share by the end of 2025. It will be a poetic reflection on my journey.
Photo by Pete Martin
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To learn more about ‘Funmi, visit www.funmiadewoleelliott.com.