Esie Mensah – An Identity through Dance

BY: ALYSSA MAHADEO

Ghanaian-Canadian dancer Esie Mensah is revered as one of 2017’s, 100 Black Women to watch in Canada, the 2015 recipient of the Cultural Promotion Award from the Ghanaian-Canadian Association as well as the 2014 Black Canadian Award Winner for Best Contemporary Dancer.

Esie has worked with the industry’s biggest icons such as Rihanna, Drake, French Montana, Janelle Monae, Francesco Yates – opener for Justin Timberlake’s Man of the Woods Tour, Luminato, TIFF, FIFA, WE DAY and more.

The youngest of six children, Esie began dancing since she was in her mother’s womb. Her family was a part of a traditional Ghanaian group for over forty years, and her parents wanted to give their children the chance to understand more about their culture as part of the Ewe Tribe in Ghana.

“That was my first point of contact with dance,” Esie shares. “It allowed me to know and understand the traditional dances of my culture, and through that, I developed a love for it.” Growing up in the city, her parents and other members of the Tribe in North America were a part of the Ewe Canadian Cultural Organization of Ontario where their children were able to be immersed in the culture of their African Tribe.

Before receiving any formal training, Esie would watch and learn movements and choreography from music videos teaching and educating herself in the art of dance.

“I decided that I wanted to pursue dance full time,” Esie explains. “That decision didn’t come for me until after my third year of university when I chose to leave university.”

While attending McMaster University for Women’s and Cultural studies, Esie continued to dance, falling deeply in love with performance arts, so much so that it became a central aspect of her life, and something that she wanted to pursue as a career path. She wanted to see where it would take her, and even if she failed at it, there was still the option of going back to school and completing her degree.

In 2007 she enrolled at George Brown’s commercial dance program, where she was able to get familiarized with other dance styles and techniques she wasn’t already familiar with, learning ballet, jazz, hip hop, musical theatre, acting, and singing.

“I fell in love with the arts and doing stuff that I always saw myself doing as a kid, I just never really had more of an opportunity than what I was doing in High School or University,” Esie says.

After that, it was all about making the right connections, and networking with the right people. Esie says a friend in her program who was already in the industry was able to introduce her to people who would pave her way and jump-start her career as a dancer.

“My first year as a full-time dancer, I started a career in commercial dance, I was doing backup dancing, I was in music videos, going on tour with Divine Brown and opening for the Backstreet Boys and it really showed me my potential as a dancer,” Esie shares. “Then in my second and third year, it was like the reality of the business, playing the waiting game, waiting for someone to hire you and waiting for someone to basically say you are worthy of this job.”

Esie explains that it’s frustrating leaving your fate in someone else’s hands, waiting for them to determine whether you are good enough for a position or even the right fit. There were times when she was even the victim of shadism, the color of her skin preventing her from booking jobs.

She was able to overcome these challenges, presented with the opportunity to travel to China and showcase her dance skills. While she was there she was able to gain valuable experience and insight into the obstacles that dancers face every day and how they can overcome it to prove themselves and move forward.

Back in Canada, she was recruited by another friend, the owner of an African Dance company, immediately upon returning from China. She was able to join their latest performance at the Harbourfront Kuumba Festival and from there another relationship began to flourish.

“I had a five year on and off connection with the company, but it was amazing, it was my way of reconnecting to a dance form that I had started in, reconnecting to my roots and dancing from spirit oppose to just dancing for dancing sake.”

Esie says the biggest impact working with that company was the ability to reconnect with her spirit. “When you are doing traditional African dancing, you end up connecting to something that isn’t your physical body and I think that’s something that is so precious to hold on to, and once I found that feeling it was hard to let it go.”

Esie says she didn’t just want to do commercial dance, and she wasn’t satisfied with just performing a traditional dance. “Afrofusion became a bridge between both of my worlds.”

Too often Esie feels that the African people are mistaken for Jamaicans taking away from the accomplishments of people from the continent. “This was my way of trying to bridge the gap and bring Africans more to the foreground, because the dance industry both in the commercial world and in the contemporary world is very Caribbean focused and there’s not a lot of African dancers or choreographers in the business. I wanted to do something that represented me and my culture and community in a different way.”

Although she didn’t finish her degree at McMaster, Esie says there was a lot that she learned while in her program that she was able to use in creating her performances. “It’s interesting because when I really started to create I didn’t think the work that I had done and learned in University would ever come back and seep into my work.”

On her path towards a career as a performer, Esie has always been inspired by other great names of our generation like Debbie Allen, Michael Jackson, Oprah, Maya Angelou, Sidney Poitier, and Lauryn Hill just to name a few.

“As I started to formulate my career, and as I started to understand myself as an artist from a spiritual connection, I was always listening to things that were bigger than myself,” Esie says. “I always like to hear their process and how they made it, it’s really inspiring to me because I felt that there weren’t always people around me who were going through the same struggles, and I didn’t have exposure to things that would help me keep going.”

Esie continues to expand on her abilities and you can catch her in the upcoming production of Shades that debuts September 27-30 at Factory Theatre. She encourages all aspiring dancers to “Stay true to yourself, honor you and don’t pay attention to the noise, sometimes it distracts for no reason, listening to the voice inside of you knowing the path could take twice as long when you get there it’s going to be twice as gratifying.