This week’s edition of the rebranded CNN African Voices, a 30-minute magazine programme sponsored by Globacom, captures how two new-age stars in choreography, dance and storytelling use their expertise to reshape street kids into becoming dancers and reshaping their morals through storytelling.
Viewers of the weekly programme will be treated to the elating story of how a Choreographer, film director, dancer and actor, Seyi Oluyole, 27, a Nigerian graduate of English and Literary Studies from Covenant University and Gcina Mhlophe, South African dance and storytelling specialist use their passions to remould the street kids by engaging them in the arts.
Oluyole for instance, founded a non-governmental organisation named, The Dream Nurture Foundation, which caters for hopeless street kids. Beyond teaching them the act and art of dance and storytelling, she also provides formal educational opportunities for them through the NGO. This, she does in addition to establishing a dance academy, Dream Catchers, where she engages dance as a major tool in getting indigent children back to school in line with her belief that “every child deserves to succeed irrespective of their background”.
Through these activities, Oluyole has successfully engaged such children in activities ranging from dance to drama and sports, while performing screenwriting for topnotch television series including Tinsel, Hustle and Gbera, a short film which she directed. World music icon, Rihanna recently nominated Oluyole’s protégées for stardom.
In the same vein, the 60-year-old Nokugcina Elsie Mhlophe, a South African dancer, actress, storyteller, poet, playwright, director and author, has used the art of storytelling to re-enact the horrors of suppression which characterised the apartheid years and the gains of freedom which the Rainbow Nation currently enjoys.
A native of KwaZulu Natal, Mhlophe began life her as a domestic servant, graduated to a newsreader at the Press Trust and BBC Radio, and subsequently became a writer for Learn and Teach, a magazine for newly-literate post-apartheid South Africans. In South Africa today, the multi-talented artist is unarguably, one of the few female storytellers in the country and has employed her charismatic performances in four languages including English, Afrikaans, Zulu and Xhosa as a vehicle for encouraging South African children not only to read but also to imbibe the values espoused by her stories.
Alongside that Mhlophe has performed in theatres in Soweto and London, with some of her works translated into German, French, Italian, Swahili and Japanese. She has won the Obie Award for Performance as well as the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. She navigates, most frequently, Africa and other parts of the globe, giving storytelling workshops on myths, historical information, current affairs, songs and idioms.
The rebranded CNN African Voices Changemakers, will be broadcast on DSTV on Friday at 9.30 a.m. and on Saturday at 12.30 a.m., 4.30 p.m. and 8.30 p.m. Other repeat broadcasts come up on Sunday at 5.00 a.m., 9.30 a.m. and 8.30 p.m. with more repeats on Monday and Tuesday at 5.30 a.m. and 6.30 p.m. respectively.
