In the wake of the pandemic, Jua Kali Pedestrian Project has been forced to reflect on its meaning and relevance afresh now that life in public spaces, social co-existence and mobility took on new meanings. Social distancing and face masks are the new means to navigate public spaces. Fear and scare penetrated deeply into private and public spaces – blind trust has become impractical because the closest person could be the ultimate health danger as contact with city surfaces pose health risks. The Kenyan government (like many governments around the world) imposed civil surveillance to monitor movement patterns in public spaces. These measures in some ways, choreographed the social body, ordering pedestrians to observe physical distance between themselves. To an extreme they put an end to human presence from the public spaces in the times of the lockdowns.

During the pandemic, walking in public spaces gained significant social and artistic interest more than ever. In Jua Kali Pedestrian Project, Jared ONYANGO (the choreographer) is investigating movements in urban spaces and contacts city spaces have with pedestrians – their traces, stories and what it means to walk in public spaces during a health crisis. As such Jua Kali tries to capture, reflect and build on the multiple sensorial registers of places — smell, touch, taste, sound, texture and ephemerality – as a way of critically engaging with the intersections of time and substance through which those spaces contingently emerge and become.

I will work with two dancers Jackson Atulo and Jack Bryton to bring out the dance performance. It will be performed in Nairobi’s city spaces. The architectural design of Nairobi city makes it ideal for achieving rich experiences by comparing and contrasting movements within the city as a form of artistic analysis.