Ninety seconds is not much time to make an argument, yet Mustapha Nasiru spends every one of them with purpose. Within a festival stretching from noon into the small hours, a sprawling showcase of styles and bodies competing for attention, his brief solo slot demanded something most performers in that position never achieve: economy. There […]
4 years ago
Ninety seconds is not much time to make an argument, yet Mustapha Nasiru spends every one of them with purpose. Within a festival stretching from noon into the small hours, a sprawling showcase of styles and bodies competing for attention, his brief solo slot demanded something most performers in that position never achieve: economy. There is no warm-up here, no gradual build. He arrives already in motion, already committed.
The choreography moves between Afro dance and Hip hop without ever announcing the switch, which is the mark of a mover who has internalised both vocabularies rather than simply visiting them. The Afro sections carry the grounded, hip-led weight and polyrhythmic phrasing rooted in cultural memory, shoulders and torso doing as much talking as the feet. The Hip hop passages sharpen everything, tighter lines, percussive isolations, a shift from communal celebration to something more individual and declarative. The transition between the two is where Nasiru’s control is most visible. Nothing lurches. The body simply changes its mind mid-sentence and the audience follows.
What the piece sacrifices, inevitably, is development. A minute and a half allows for a statement, not an argument with acts and turns. The emotional range described, joy sliding into introspection sliding into resilience, is ambitious for a runtime this tight, and there are moments where the piece seems to be reaching for a fourth beat it simply does not have room to land. This is less a criticism of Nasiru’s execution than of festival programming that so often compresses serious dancers into blink-length slots. Within that constraint, he does not rush. He compresses.
At a festival built on volume, numbers of dancers, numbers of styles, numbers of hours, Nasiru’s contribution argued for the opposite: that a single body, fully committed, can say in ninety seconds what other acts stretch across five minutes and still fail to land. It is a small, sharp piece of proof that dance’s power was never about duration.
