CAN DO CAN DANCE
HAMBURGER TANZTAGE MIT ROYSTON MALDOOM (RHYTHM IS IT!)
Interview zwischen Mekbul Jemal und Nina Pelletier, 19.09.06
[…] I have seen you dancing and performing, seen you teaching and choreographing and I was
participant in one of your workshops. What has impressed you most and in which way changed
your life since you decided to dance.
Well, first, when I was a kid I didn’t have any idea about dancing or I never thought that I would
become a dancer, it just happened to me. […].
After I started to dance when I was fifteen, it took me two, three years to understand what I was
doing and to see the change. So after three years I started to understand what I was doing, it was
contemporary dance − because all we knew in Ethiopia was traditional dance, right? […] I was
nothing and I started from zero, and now I am something, you know, I travel a lot, I see a lot of
people, I perform, I teach, I choreograph […] you have to learn how to do that and Royston and his
colleagues gave me that training for about five years and to use it and change my life and I’ve
learned a lot in these five years. […]
If I understood you right you are still with Adugna Company. You are a dancer in the company
where the whole group is performing, but you are also teaching − is that right? What do you teach,
what is important to you about teaching and what kind of people do you teach?
When we teach in Adugna, we are not teaching just dance or just choreographing. […] we teach […]
everybody that comes to learn, and we also go to them to teach them. […] we are teaching them
about their problems through dance, about problems like HIV, Aids, problems like family planning,
problems like if you abuse your child and how to solve that problem… […] There is this big issue in
dance − issues around Ethiopia and other countries how to solve those problems […] Right now we
have a lot of kids coming to our company who are learning how to dance and choreograph and how
to teach and through that they are also lea