Dickson Mbi draws on his East London upbringing and Cameroonian heritage for TELLUS, a new dance production inspired by a bedtime story for his son.
The Olivier Award-winning choreographer is returning to Stratford with a new dance production inspired by an attempt to tell his young son a bedtime story amid the noise of an increasingly uncertain world.
Dickson Mbi’s TELLUS comes to Sadler’s Wells East from Wednesday 21 October to Saturday 24 October. He brings together contemporary dance, hip hop, African traditional movement and an original musical score to explore humanity’s relationship with nature.
The idea began in 2023, when Mbi was looking after his one-year-old son.
Noise
With news of forest fires and people losing their homes weighing on his mind, Mbi found himself struggling to concentrate on a bedtime story.
“My brain was consumed by all this information,” he said. “… The world had so much noise, and I was consumed by a lot of that noise, and there was a human being right in front of me that just needed stillness.”
Instead of telling a story, he began singing melodies to his son, recording them on his phone before he forgot them.
That moment became the starting point for TELLUS, an epic tale drawing on climate change, drought and African folklore.
Mbi said the production was not initially intended to be specifically about climate change, but rather a response to what was happening in the world and its effects on ordinary people.
“Behind every statistic or everything is a family or someone that’s lost someone or lost a home,” he told The Citizen.
Water
As the planet heated up and fires spread, he said, his thoughts turned to the simplest of answers.
“I’m from East London, man. I’m from a working class background, and I think very simple. Sometimes I think I’m still a kid,” he said. “What gets rid of fire? Water, right?”
That reminded him of the folk stories his parents told him about Mami Wata, a goddess of water, and sent him down a “rabbit hole” of research into how that tale could speak to what is happening now.
The story follows a young boy who has become disconnected from Mother Earth and finds himself in a village suffering a devastating drought.
Two cultures
Born in Cameroon and raised in East London, Mbi said both cultures have shaped his artistic identity.
“In school it was London,” he said. “But in my house it was Africa, mate, you know what I mean? The food we ate, the music we listened to. Those influences always stuck with me when I was growing up, and I think it’s really evident in the stuff I make now.”
The sounds of East London’s grime, drum and bass and bashment scenes also left their mark on his work.
His route into dance spanned two worlds. Struggling to pick up the routines in classes at Pineapple Studios, he fell in with a group of dancers practising popping outside and joined them every Saturday. He went on to train at London Contemporary Dance School and spent eight years dancing for the choreographer Russell Maliphant.
Not fusion
He rejects the idea that TELLUS is a fusion of the two.
“You can look at them as colours, like blue and yellow,” he said. “When you look at blue and yellow separately, they are their own colour, but when you put them together, you get the colour green. But when you look at green, you can’t say green is a mixture of blue and yellow, because green is just green.”
“I try to run away from the word fusion, because fusion means half of something and half of something else,” he added. “I think it’s full of both things.”
Mbi also wrote the score himself, having got serious about composing during the Covid pandemic, when he took a course in MIDI orchestration. He worked on it with musicians including the flautist Eliza Marshall, the percussionist Beibei Wang, the cellist Gabriela Swallows and a group of South African singers he has collaborated with for five years.
Self-belief
Mbi won an Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance in 2023 for his solo work Enowate, co-commissioned by Sadler’s Wells and the Barbican.
“To be honest, I feel like not much has changed,” he said, though he felt the award had strengthened the confidence of people who had supported him.
“It also makes me believe more in myself,” he said. “Sometimes when you do things on your own, it’s not that you do it to get this validation, but it’s always nice when people say, ‘Oh man, that was great, mate. Keep going.’”
Full circle
TELLUS marks a particularly significant moment in Mbi’s career as he brings the work to the part of London where his journey began.
In his late teens, he attended a dance programme run by East London Dance at Stratford Circus, a theatre that has since closed. East London Dance is still based in Stratford.
Now, returning to Stratford to perform at Sadler’s Wells East, he described the experience as “a full circle”.
“I feel really proud actually to be coming back to Stratford because it’s where everything started for me,” he told The Citizen.
Still there
Coming back to a transformed Stratford has been “quite surreal”, he said, but the area has kept its character.
“I can see that the energy stayed. The culture, the feeling that you get when you’re in Stratford is still there, and I love that about East London.”
He hopes the production will reconnect him with people who knew him when he was starting out, while inspiring a new generation of local dancers.
“I hope that the people that knew me from back then can come down and see maybe how I’ve improved or how I’ve developed, and maybe they’re proud of me.”
Affordable
Making TELLUS accessible to local audiences is also important to Mbi, who grew up in a working-class family.
“We never used to go to the theatre,” he said. “It was just like, ‘Nah, mate, we just don’t have the money.’”
Tickets for the production start at £15, and Mbi said he wanted people from across the community to feel able to attend, including school groups.
“If some may feel it’s really challenging, they should just reach out to us and we’ll make it happen,” he said. “I’ll always find a way.”
“To have a show like this that’s in Stratford East and is affordable for working class families, I think that is a really good thing and something we should be celebrating.”
“I want everyone to see it, not just young people or not just adults,” he said.
Feel
For Mbi, what matters is not that audiences understand everything.
“What I do is not to make things that people understand,” he said. “It’s to make things that people can feel and people can connect with.”
One audience member has followed TELLUS from the very beginning. Mbi’s son has watched the show take shape and will be in the audience on Friday and Saturday.
“He can sing some of the songs, and he can do some of the dance moves,” Mbi said. “… I don’t think he has a clue, to be honest.”
TELLUS by Dickson Mbi Company is at Sadler’s Wells East, Stratford Walk, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, E20 2AR, from Wednesday 21 to Saturday 24 October at 7.30pm.
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