DANCING IS HIS LIFE

When we were growing up, we all wanted to take up what were universally considered to be 'prestigious' careers. We wanted to be doctors, lawyers, maybe pilots. But not this kid. Eugene Magina just wanted to dance. ;"My father was a lawyer, and during school holidays I would work in his firm," he said. In the typical 'like father, like son' tradition, it was expected that Eugene would one day join the tribe of the learned. However one day in the early nineties something interesting caught his eye. Invitations were sent out for dance competitors to show what they could do - and win a car if they out-danced all the other competitors! So Eugene and two of his friends formed a dance troupe that they named Foresters, specialising in a lingala and traditional African dance repertoire that saw them through to the quarter finals. Then in typical Hollywood fashion, his group was spotted by a scout for the world-renowned Safari Cats dance troupe that performs at the Safari Park Hotel in Nairobi.

Foresters were invited to fill in as part of the interval act during the Safari Cats' performances."The Safari Cats had just been formed and I suppose this was the turning point in my career," said Eugene. "We all thought we could dance until we joined them." Four months into their deal with the Safari Cats, Foresters were considered good enough to be integrated into the main act and for the next three months, Eugene went through the rigorous training that was to transform him into a Safari Cat. "We had to learn how to be more limber, and that involved intense stretching because of the sudden twists and turns involved. At times I would get dizzy from all the kicking," he Contrary to common belief that anyone can dance, the creative artist today has to undergo intensive training. For three months, six days a week and nine hours a day, Eugene learned a whole new angle to dancing. Because essentially there is no standard curriculum to teach the new language of movement, each dancer must largely discover his means of communication for himself. He had to learn how to read music, count the beats, know when to move when to stop. "It was like mathematics", Eugene recalls. "When we were Foresters, when we danced to a lingala tune, all we waited for was the drums to guide us. ;A true dancer, says Eugene, has a temperament that directs him to express feelings and ideas through moving the body in space. The instinct, however, must be greatly enhanced by training so that in the end, not only has he a strong co-ordinated instrument, but he also has an immediate impulse to translate his comments and reactions into rhythms, muscular dynamics and spatial arrangements. The cabaret speciality of the Safari Cats is slightly different from the European counterpart on which it is modelled. This is because it is blended with ethnic African attributes from the length and breadth of the continent. The Afro cabaret (for lack of a better term) avoids the dry technicalities and vague formlessness of ballet, and instead has a lot of the distinct African rhythm most of us can relate to. Watching the Safari Cats on stage is a spectacle to behold. Rarely does one see such fluidity and grace in a musical performance. Watching Eugene demonstrate a dance, what stands out is the proud posture of the trained dancer, the carriage of his spine and his head. You can also sense his enjoyment. Every dance, Eugene explained, had a theme that went hand in hand with the choreographed music. "It's a bit like a theatre performance," he reveals. All this talk about themes and theatre sounded a bit lofty until I watched the cats do their act at Safari Park Hotel and with childlike awe I stumbled upon the essence of 'art' in dance that Eugene so fondly speaks of. I found myself involuntarily moved by the purity of line, by the breathtaking accuracy of the movement, that seemed to create an inner sensitivity to every one of the body's parts. This was a totally new experience. I have watched cabarets before in popular night-spots and it's obvious that one couldn't compare the two styles. The focus of other acts in the night-spots is primarily on bodily gyrations, performed provocatively in a steamy atmosphere to create a sense of eroticism. These dancers used their 'instrument', their 'raw material' (their bodies) in a more personal way, to seep into the inner mind of the audience.style

;Eugene (far Left) in Zebra costume at the Smirnoff Awards, 1997

The dancing brought to mind a time long before recorded history, when dance must have been a developed complex skill that early humans used to help surmount the riddles and tragedies of their daily lives. They lived at the mercy of natural forces which we have now come to understand and to some degree control. Dance was for those early beings a powerful way to reconcile those forces. Ritual dance was the insurance of success against the natural enemies of hunger, disease and death. They performed fertility dances and war dances. They danced to celebrate joy in triumph or sorrow in defeat and believed that their very survival depended on a dance of such strength and agility that it would be worthy of notice by the gods who controlled their destiny.>Thousands of years of civilisation have endowed us moderns with only a veneer of refinement that separates us from our crude and naive ancestors. Our instinct is still innate and we all have the capacity to use movement as a release for deep feelings of gratification and frustration. It doesn't take much prompting. A splash of melody is all that is required to get you 'tapping to the beat, getting down to the boogie' or as one Will Smith puts it, 'getting jiggy with it'. Those who cannot dance are imprisoned in their own ego. ">The whole notion of training to be a dancer is something I had been inclined to associate with the aristocratic European tradition, the classical ballet thing that grew out of court performances in which the king and queen and the ladies and gentlemen in waiting made up both cast and audience. That was my thinking, prior to my acquaintance with this professional dancer with complete dedication to his craft.As an accomplished choreographer, Eugene follows in the footsteps of dance choreographers Ami Carter from the US (she trained the first crop of Cats) and Francis D'Mato - picking up the fundamentals and finer details of teaching dance. "Choreography requires a great sense of creativity and you can only be taught so much.



The rest is up to you," says Eugene who has had the opportunity to try his hand in a number of commercial ventures choreographing dances, his most recognisable works being the Trust Condom advert. He has also been involved in numerous product launches mostly for petroleum-based products from Shell, Caltex & Helix.">Talking about his chosen career, Eugene has no regrets. "It pays off," he explains as he stresses the importance of being paid for what you not only enjoy but are good at. Unfortunately, like all careers considered 'foreign', being a dancer comes with its usual truckload of stereotypes. "My mum was initially opposed to my being a dancer until she realised I was making more money than she was," he reminisces. Indeed, dancing as a career still has the 'raha' connotation, an inevitable process that every new career has to go through before it receives mass approval. But the industry is opening up, although very slowly.<
Eugene changed track in July this year, leaving Safari Cats for a job as a fitness instructor at the Hilton Health Club. (He holds a diploma in fitness and nutrition). While at Safari Park, he was a member of the 'Shake into Shape' aerobics crew that used to run daily morning sessions on the Kenya Television Network (KTN) before they were banned after Presidential disapproval deemed they were 'showing too much body'.>Modelling is also one of the many hats Eugene wears and if he looks familiar, you might have seen his face in the Tusker 'My Country, My Beer' advert. But Eugene has not abandoned his chosen career. He hopes to start his own dance company and he believes there is a bright future ahead. Dancing is his life. For him, it is an art form, like an easel painting or a mounted piece of sculpture that requires diligent study, arduous practice and feeling whose end result is perfection.Eugene now has me converted, and I am already thinking of taking up dance lessons. As a friend put it, however frustrating and limiting the pattern of accepted social dancing often may be, nobody can escape its rhythm.