Dancer Dickson Mbi: ‘There are people I look up to but not from my demographic’

Somewhere in a parallel universe there is another Dickson Mbi with a steady job in IT but, thanks to a chance collision with the world of dance in 2004, the Londoner’s career took a very different path.

This weekend sees the premiere of his one-man show, Enowate, about his life. Speaking during a break in rehearsals, Mbi recalls the afternoon when his life changed track. “This girl I met was going to a class at Pineapple Studios. I went with her to learn dance and I realised it was really hard, so I walked out and met a group of guys outside. They were doing a style called popping . . . That’s how my journey began.”

Mbi hadn’t done dance or gymnastics at school and, while he was fast and fit, playing for West Ham United’s under-16s football team (“They let me go at 16 so I wasn’t that good”), he had a lot of catching up to do.

“I practised at home, I practised at lunchtime at the IT firm” and every Saturday he and his new friends would be on the streets of Covent Garden with a boom box fine-tuning their moves. “People would say ‘shall we give you guys money?’ And we said ‘no, we’re just doing this.’”

Years passed with Mbi happily leading a double life until a dance teacher, Stuart Thomas, spotted that, for all his dazzling ability to isolate and flex every individual sinew in rhythm, the young “popper” had his limitations. “Being 22, I was on top of the world, winning a few competitions. I had a reputation in the street dance world so when Stuart said ‘Can you touch your toes, mate?’ I said ‘I don’t need to touch my toes to dance.’”

Mbi agreed to take some classes (“just to prove him wrong”) but after three months Thomas encouraged him to move on. “He filled out an application form for Lewisham College and then he lied to me. He said, ‘My friend is teaching a class there’. I didn’t know it was an audition.” With the support of his mother and a sideline teaching hip-hop, he managed to give up his IT career and stay the course — “the hardest two years of my life”. 

The curriculum at Lewisham and then at the London Contemporary Dance School broadened his dance horizons: Graham and Cunningham technique, jazz, even ballet. “I only did ballet for two or three years. I can’t point my feet,” he confesses. But, despite his minimal training, his teacher, Patricia Rianne, put him in the top group. “I wasn’t that good in terms of my technique but my expression was what she kept pushing. Everyone was saying: ‘Watch Dickson.’”

While doing some hip-hop improvisation at Sadler’s Wells’s annual Breakin’ Convention, he was offered a job by a passing choreographer. LCDS was unimpressed by his plans to drop out until he named his new boss: Russell Maliphant, the Royal Ballet-trained contemporary dancemaker who enjoyed a globetrotting partnership with the ballerina Sylvie Guillem. “They said, ‘Dickson you need to go!’” 

During his eight years with Maliphant, Mbi maintained a parallel career in international street dance, but he was always eager to explore possibilities in pop music, theatre and TV, building up a string of contacts. While choreographing Unstrung, the Petrushka-esque winning routine on the BBC’s 2019 Young Dancer, he met choreographer Kenneth Tindall, who introduced him to David Nixon, Northern Ballet’s artistic director from 2001 to 2022.

Nixon promptly commissioned Mbi to create a one-act ballet, Ma Vie, which can be seen at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Studio next month. The piece could be seen as an attempt to fill in the blanks in Tindall’s Casanova (2017), a handsome but slightly one-dimensional take on the life of the Italian adventurer and author. “Focusing on him being a womaniser wasn’t what I wanted,” says Mbi. “Casanova was such a nuanced person.” Staged using costumes from the original production, the result is both elegant and intriguing. “One of the coolest pieces I’ve made,” smiles Mbi. “It’s a lot of joy.” After Ma Vie he will be working on a Nelson Mandela musical for the Young Vic as well as a 2023 commission for Scottish Ballet.

Mbi’s action-packed CV has meat enough for a biopic. But for now it’s just an hour-long dance solo: Enowate, “truth stands” in the Kenyang language of south-west Cameroon and Mbi’s name within his family.

Now 36, Mbi spent his first 12 years in Cameroon but a change in financial circumstances prompted a move to Dagenham in east London. A key episode in Enowate was inspired by a return to Cameroon in 2016 to judge a popping competition. While there, he travelled from Douala to his home village 800 miles away to attend a family funeral.

It was unquestionably a homecoming — “I learned about my name, I learned about my culture” — but Mbi also recognises that Dagenham had a hand in moulding him. “When I go to Cameroon I’m an outsider: the way I spoke, the way I dressed.” The same humility that makes him name-check every teacher, mentor and collaborator made him anxious to avoid culturally appropriating the funeral rites of his homeland. “I felt that this . . . was something quite secret. It’s the hardest, most personal piece I’ve ever done.”

His collaborators for Enowate include Simon McBurney of British theatre company Complicité, who helped him give theatrical shape to his multi-faceted life story. It forms part of a short season showcasing the work of black dancemakers and helping further broaden Sadler’s Wells’s audience base. Mbi is the ultimate crossover artist. “I’m fortunate to be part of two worlds: a street dance world and a contemporary dance world and I’m trying to break those barriers.”

Among Friday’s audience will be 50 students from his alma mater: Mayfield School in Dagenham. “I think it’s really important that this work is seen by the area that I’m from, for the young people to see that you can do whatever you want. When I look around, I don’t see a lot of ethnic minority choreographers. There are people I look up to but not from my demographic. I’m from Dagenham — know what I mean? I’ve got to connect back to where I’m from.”

‘Enowate’ October 14 & 15, sadlerswells.com

‘Ma Vie’ November 1-3, Linbury Studio Theatre, roh.org.uk