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Animated Edition - Autumn Critical faculties. No elephants or zebras, and not a single gazelle or baboon. What kind of African trip was this? Sprawled on my bed in Nairobi's venerable old Norfolk Hotel each evening, I scarcely had the mental energy to ask the question. I was too tuckered out by my packed schedule as the facilitator of a six-day dance journalism course to seriously pine for an intimate encounter with a hungry lion or wandering wildebeest.
I was on a different sort of safari, in which the biggest game being hunted was the words you'd use in speech or print to describe and critique a dance. How did I get this shot at becoming the Karen Blixen of 21st-century African dance?
In late July the British Council sent me to Kenya to do my bit to help beef up press coverage of the art form, particularly in its contemporary incarnation. The expectation was of nothing immediately radical. That is to say, overnight headlines along the lines of 'Modern dance changes lives!
Instead, this was a laying of groundwork for the future. My visit was timed to coincide with the edition of Dance Encounters Nairobi, a young festival curated by choreographer Opiyo Okach and managed by the multi-disciplinary GoDown Arts Centre.
