Meet ICDS7 Keynote: 'Funmi Adewole Elliott
Image: Pete Martin
Funmi Adewole Elliott is an independent arts practitioner whose artistic practice investigates the cross-overs and intersections between dance and storytelling in its various forms.
'Funmi Adewole Elliott is a performer and dance researcher. She founded FAE Studios as a platform for her work in arts consultancy, dramaturgy, and performance practice. In addition, she leads Enact Arts, a community-focused start-up that supports professional development and delivers Creative Health projects. Following her graduation from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria in 1990, she worked as a journalist and TV Producer in Lagos before moving to England in 1994 where she moved into performance. Her touring credits include performances with Ritual Arts, Horse and Bamboo Mask and Puppetry Company, Artistes-in-Exile, Adzido Pan-African Dance Ensemble, Mushango African dance and Music Company and the Chomondeleys, a contemporary dance company.
Whilst touring, over a period of ten years, she also developed a track record as an independent scholar and a dance advocate in the voluntary sector.
She went on to study for an M.A in Postcolonial Studies, a Professional graduate certificate in Education and PhD in Dance studies. In 2019, she was awarded a life-time achievement award for raising the profile of Dance of the African Diaspora in the UK by One Dance UK, the UK National body for Dance. After her PhD studies, she taught in the Dance department of De Montfort University, Leicester for eight years, leaving in 2025.
The developing of facilitation methods for dance and performance workshops is central to 'Funmi's creative practice. Her research interests which emerged from a combination of work experience and academic study include the theorising of Dance of Dance of Africa and the Diaspora within professional practice, somatic inquiry in relation to social dancing, artistic citizenship, performance pedagogy and Creative Health. She has been a guest lecturer at The Place, Siobhan Davies Studios, E15 and the Ageless Festival in England, PARTS in Belgium, Ecole Des Sables in Senegal and University of Ibadan, Nigeria. She continues to perform as storyteller and movement artist.
Practising from the Pulse of Lived Experience: Exploring the intersections of an Africanist and Transnational practice.
My dance-drama practice, which I call Yi Le, has emerged from my journey to becoming a performer. I began to explore my love of dance as a child, dancing in domestic spaces to Juju music, other Nigerian and African genres, African-American funk, and British pop, alongside early expressions in poetry and storytelling. In retrospect, these embodied memories were my foundational resource as I began to engage with performance formally at the University of Ibadan, where I studied languages and later when I moved to England where I toured, mainly with African dance theatre and Physical theatre companies.
In this presentation, I draw from an ongoing autoethnographic inquiry, inspired by experiential pedagogy, which resonates with the values of Dalcroze Eurhythmics. I am in accord with the significance that Marja-Leena Juntunen’s places on Dalcroze Eurhythmics ability to facilitate the exploration of ‘music’s felt qualities’ and ‘lived experience’ (2004), a capacity that has been vital to my own practice.
The conceptual frameworks I employ to develop and structure music and movement exercises create bridges between different spheres of experience: between social dancing and theatrical practice, everyday life and staged performance, approaches to African storytelling and the devices of contemporary choreography. My current preoccupations in Yi Le revolve around the postcolonial condition, the everyday, and the processes involved in reflective and creative action. Working across professional performance, arts and health, and professional development contexts, I explore the possibilities, challenges, and critical questions raised by a creative practice which is Africanist, transnational and interdisciplinary.