Of Dance, Architecture & Writing
You Can’t Dance
The year was 1996. I was 12 years old at the 13th birthday party of my childhood crush. She had big eyes, and an even bigger smile. She was the most beautiful thing in my world at the time.
We were dancing — 90s style; a huddle of young kids at that curious phase of their lives, held back by culture, and the intense gazes of their parents who sat in their own cluster not too far away.
It was at this dance that I first had my heart broken.
“You can’t dance.” my crush said casually, as she walked off to dance with someone else. Totally unaware, she had crushed the first shoots of what then was my nascent sense of self-worth.
For weeks, those words rang over and over in my brain, and I hated myself. What was it about dancing that mattered to her? Why did she say that I couldn’t dance? Did I ‘really’ not know how to dance? What did it mean to dance?
After endless cycles of self-pity and weak attempts at vindication, I accepted her judgment call and resolved to learn to dance. I promised myself that I’d show her someday that she was wrong.
I spent hours of the best days of my life listening to audio tapes a little more intensely, with more intentionality. I became interested in how people moved their bodies to the sound of music. I paid attention to the rhythms of our local drums and gongs. Mind you, there was no YouTube or TikTok dance tutorials at this time — it was just the eye, the mind, and Life happening all around us. At every event, I danced some more. Slowly, I realized that dance wasn’t necessarily how physical one’s movements were, but how deliberate. And the overall form of one’s movements as perceived by a watcher (or a dance partner) was what made people say whether someone could, or couldn’t dance. A flick of the chin at the right moment, a pause in movement to admire your partner, or mirrored moves to bring your bodies to a pleasant togetherness — these were all the things that mattered.
In time, I became a better dancer by paying attention to how I interpreted each song in movement. I also practiced trending dance moves in solitude till I was confident enough to integrate them into my ever-expanding movement library. Soon enough, family and friends commented on how much I loved to dance and called me in whenever there was something to dance to. I still wasn’t the best dancer of my siblings— my younger brother was in a league of his own, but I’d learned to dance eventually.
My victory wouldn’t end there.
Many years later, I got another chance to dance with the same girl, now turned woman. Well, I will leave you to figure out how that went, but this piece isn’t about that — it is about the connections I later discovered between my understanding of dance, and the architect and writer I would later become.
The Architecture of Space & Words
Fast-forward a couple of years, I’d be heartbroken again, but in a different way. I was in my second year at university studying architecture. I had entered into a much anticipated inter-university design competition that offered handsome cash rewards — a sure motivation in those days of daily diets that read like binary code. The competition, which was hosted by my school had entrants from 5 other universities and was to be judged by a fairly diverse panel of tutors and practitioners from outside the campus. Armed with my above-average ability to draw, and being one of the representatives of the host school, I was sure to win.
Well, I didn’t.
Dr. Hassan Anifowose (superb architect and now friend) won that competition by unanimous decision.
When the judges later explained their reasons for giving him the top prize, they repeated some of the things I’d learned from my struggle with dance. They spoke about his superior concept, and how he translated that into his design using form. They used words like rhythm, and harmony, and balance. To tell the truth, while I had a vague appreciation of these design terms, I didn’t understand their justification. I believed that my submission had more artistic merit.
I felt cheated.
Much later, I understood why Hassan had won the competition despite my nice drawings. With time, I understood form, and the many dimensions required to communicate design intention in the clearest, most aesthetically pleasing manner. I learned how a seed thought is organized around a concept to achieve the creator’s set objective, and how that ‘organization’ is deemed successful when others can reverse-engineer the creator’s thought process, and reach back to the essence of that seed thought. Architecture showed me the linkage between design and communication in its general sense. Increasingly, I began to appreciate architecture as the act of communicating an intention using space. This slow realization would later take on a life of its own; it would make me dance even more, and understand my early struggle with it in a different light.
With dance, the essence of that seed thought is codified in the music, and interpreted in movement. My place as the dancer (or the interpreter) was to return to that seed thought by following the same path of harmony, rhythm, and balance that the creator had chosen to speak to me. At another level, I had the liberty to retell what was being communicated in the language of my soul — that little dose of me that turns what I hear into a personal conversation.
This understanding is arguably the most profound revelation in my appreciation of art and its connections. It permeated other areas of my life in the most unexpected ways. When I started taking writing seriously, it illuminated my craft, and catalyzed my growth in understanding story, and how to tell it. It helped me to better understand what I needed to say, and how best to say it.
Choosing words to describe my thoughts became synonymous with specifying materials for spaces, or what I should do next with my hands once the music takes a different turn. Lines became the arch of my shoulders, the literal texts of my stories, and how I told the builder that I wanted a step up, here or there. Pauses in movement, as a break from monotony, became the color red used sparingly to direct the eyes in a room of neutral palettes; silence in dialogue signified rests in the beat, and symbols and motifs moved from one art form to another, masquerading as different things but serving the same purpose. Lobbies came to mind whenever I decided on a transition between different dance movements to the same song. Repetitive elements on a façade mimicked rhyme as the line between creation and interpretation blurred.
“How are you an architect and a writer?” I have been asked by several people, especially at interviews, and my answer is that beneath the surface, they are the same thing.
I suspect that this response might come across as pretentious, but it isn’t. The architect, the writer, and the dancer that I am is the same person using different languages to say the same thing — that call to create, older than the earth, that lends a voice to our innermost thoughts and shines through our most profound stories.
Osundolire Ifelanwa
Architect. Writer. Aspiring Immortal