You have been involved in a lot of projects recently. What would you say is responsible for that, and how are you coping?
It is God. It’s just awesome, but sometimes there is so much happening, so much pressure, everybody wants the best for whatever they hired me for, different things are happening at the same time, but at the end of the day, God has been so great that at the end of the day it will be good, I thank God
After the PFA and the Malta Guinness dance campaign, what other projects will you be working on?
A lot of things are coming up that I can’t really reveal right now. I am going to be really doing something really major soon, something that is going to take Lagos and Nigeria to another level and it’s coming up really soon. This project is one of my life-long dreams and I’m putting a lot in place to make sure the project actually works out. The next step for me after Project Fame and all is my reality TV show. I am going to America soon to start the filming of some of the shots that I plan to do. I am trying to bring the reality of the dance business, both behind the scenes and on stage, to people’s knowledge, because when they understand the trade and the people involved in it, they won’t look down on it. Since dance has become an entity in the entertainment industry, and we need to build and find a structure for it.
You recently had some of Arsenal’s soccer stars under your tutelage, what was it like, coaching footballers in the art of dance?
The effect hasn’t even dawned on me yet; you know when you are passing through a stage with high performance speed, you don’t even know the effect of what you’ve done till later, so I’m still waiting for that effect. I’m an Arsenal fan, and for me to have the chance to actually stand next to these guys, and not just standing next to, but I happened to have them listen to me, be coached by them, at some point, I was famzing in my mind, me self want take picture o, but before I knew it, an assistant to one of them came to me saying one wants to take a picture with me. I was like okay, I’m the man here! It’s awesome. I thank God for that opportunity, I thank God for allowing me be in the position of making it good because some people have the opportunity but don’t deliver.
Did you ever think you were going to raise the bar so high for dance in Nigeria, and in such a short time?
I dreamt to be this big and bigger. This is not how big I want to be, this is not how I dreamt to be. This is like the world unfolding one layer at a time, and I am taking it one layer at a time, but I am taking it with a lot of passion, with a lot of prayer and with a lot of force.
What challenges were you faced with as a young dancer 10 years ago?
A lot of challenges, I must confess, because they [family] saw me as that A-class girl, that science student that was supposed to be an engineer, a doctor or something. They never expected it, but after some time they began to understand the success that started coming in from what I was doing and the respect that followed. They were expecting their daughter to roll with ministers, doctors, engineers, governor and all; but I’m still doing that even as a dancer, so today I might have a meeting with Governor Fashola, tomorrow Governor Tinubu, or a meeting in Cross River and they are like ‘is it this same dance?’ As a result of that, they started realizing that their child can actually be someone great. To top it all off, I got married, and I have a child. They didn’t believe I could be that settled. Even my own parents thought I was doing dance because I wanted to be out there and be promiscuous, but it’s not their fault, it was because that was all they understood about the trade and the entertainment industry itself, especially the women involved in it. They see them as promiscuous and loose, [but] for me that can’t be said; I’m focused and now I’m married, so that was a blessing for them.
Speaking of the image of ladies in entertainment, are you making efforts to erase this notion and help create a better one?
It’s what I am doing right now. I think my life is a conscious effort. What I am doing right now is a conscious effort too, because I always try to push myself to do something better and I always get good results. There is always someone saying that the story inspires them, even someone that does not have anything to do with dance. I have been to a bank before and somebody told me I was the inspiration for him doing what he was doing, that I was the one that inspired him to get up and do that work, so it’s not really about dance, it’s about telling young people that there is no excuse not to be a success. If you want to be successful, you have to work hard. I mean, there are different ways to get it; some people get it easy, while some get it hard, but hard or easy, success is the same plate they are going to eat from. Let’s strive to achieve success, that’s what I am always preaching about. I had parents that were billionaires, they were rich, but at the end of the day the money couldn’t help me out, they lost everything, so that’s all about not planning properly. It’s not about your parents’ money or your parents’ being there, it’s about what you want to do with your life.
How do your parents feel now, seeing that you have made a success of your career choice?
They are great. They’re older, and understand me better now and understand life better now. They have adapted to God and life in such a beautiful way and I am happy for them.
What are some outstanding memories you have from your formative years that pertained to dance?
It was fun doing dance as my hobby, going to parties and everybody had to sit down and watch me or I get to win all the medals, but it got to a point in my life when I never even danced. When I went to secondary school I never danced. People in my secondary school never knew me as a dancer, because I was more into sports; I played soccer, I played basketball, and ance was just a part time thing that helped me enjoy my sport. I started bringing that into the workout for the ladies in my basketball team, then into the Lagos Island basketball team, the Warriors basketball team; we used to work out together and stuff like that. They really enjoyed the fact that apart from the rigorous training, we brought in some other fun and exciting ways to work out, and that was where it all started.
When did you decide to make it into a career?
It was more or less like when something in life tells you to be focused and decide quickly. I was going and keeping up with different jobs to stay afloat, the pressure became so heavy I had to drop out of school at a point, because I was the one funding my academics and it got to a point where I couldn’t meet up anymore. I was working in Lagos state, schooling in Ogun State, four-five days a week, I shuttled between both states, and it wasn’t easy. Things were tough because of the countless expenses I had to bear, include mine and my siblings school fees. Then I told myself; if we are going to school to help us adapt knowledge to apply in our life, I have adapted knowledge to entertainment and dance, let me push further and use that as a medium to make money right. Then, I decided to be serious with it, so all my knowledge in Physics, Biology, Mathematics and everything, I just applied it in dance and that’s where I am today.
What course did you study?
I had a short thing in Mechanical Engineering in Yaba Tech, and then I did something in IME (Industrial Maintenance Engineering) in Yaba Tech. From there, I went to Ogun State and I did an ND in Computer Science, [specifically] Data Processing, then I continued with Sport Science which I didn’t finish, and that was when everything started going offside. I didn’t really have an excuse not to excel; I just wanted to find another way. You know, sometimes it’s not about paper alone, but the application of that knowledge and how many lives you can touch, and I wanted to prove that if you go through school and it doesn’t want to go through you, find another channel and make it work, because going to University is one channel of success, [but] there are so many channels, and people shouldn’t limit themselves to school as an excuse not to excel.
Even if you are not schooling, you are studying, you are studying every day. You learn in your field every day, you are working. Even the internet allows you to study on the go with the web, Google, Wikipedia, and encyclopaedia. I don’t think anybody cannot acquire knowledge outside a tertiary institution, except you just want to be ignorant. I did some certificate courses online for my fitness thing as a fitness instructor, group instructor and as a personal trainer. These are the things I did out of school, and I teach people that claim to be in 200 or 400 level in Sport Science stuff they should already know. In secondary school, it got to a point my teachers donated school fees for me many times because I repeated classes due to funding. There were many times I had to stay back at home so my sisters could go to school, and when it got to a point we couldn’t afford that anymore, we started borrowing books from our neighbours that went to school, so there was no reason not to study; we might not be in school, but we are studying, and that’s how education life has been.
You decided to found a dance company, Imagneto. What inspired that?
I wanted to be taken seriously. You need a structure so people can take you seriously, and so things can move forward.
What is running a dance company in Nigeria like?
It’s not very easy, because the dance is still on the popularity commercial side. We need to be structured to make it work. This is what people like me, Span (Society for the Performing Arts in Nigeria) and Ijodie are trying to do every day. It’s not easy to bring it together. [With young people] some of them don’t even bother to train, they are just there for shows, so what we do in my company is that we try to instil work ethic, professionalism, and the ability to be very disciplined. I create an avenue, a place for them to work, and I train them so I can expose them to the ethics of the place.
What are some of the greatest career challenges you have faced so far?
Apart from individual challenges from the young people themselves that I am training, money doesn’t come sometimes the way you want it, either because they are paying too little or you don’t want to accept what they are paying because the job they are offering is not what you want for your image. You have to be careful about the kind of jobs you do, how you do them and stuff like that, and those are the things I want to showcase in my reality TV show, so that people can understand the reality behind the work that we are doing.
Let’s talk about Danceathon. Tell us what the experience was while preparing for the dance competition.
[You] don’t prepare for a danceathon. If you train, you will just kill yourself; instead, you just think about it and go. The only thing that we did was run a race that qualifies you, then I assisted in co-ordinating the fitness. A week before, we were doing small workshops and seminars on what people should do and expect, and that continued even though we were later split into different groups.
What was on your mind when you were on the dance floor after everybody had left?
Nothing was on my mind, I wanted to go home and sleep, but my body was just going. I just had to stop because everybody was tired, even the cameramen had been filming for days, I just had to stop
Did you ever feel like stopping while the competition was going on?
Yes, I had pneumonia, because it was during the month of Ramadan fasting period and I was fasting, that was like the third day of the fast and I wanted to continue the fast, but that pneumonia just started, and my temperature was so bad that even the doctor said ‘you can’t go back in there’ but we were the only group left, so I couldn’t quit, because if I did, a lot of guys and girls would not keep up that level of energy, so I went to meet one of my trainers Steven, I spoke to him I was like ‘omo mhen, I won comot, my body dey ache me’ and he was like ‘let’s go if u commot I go commot’ and I [thought to myself that] if he, who was supposed to be my strongest person, says he’ll leave, what is the hope for everybody else? Let me just stay, so we just pulled through.
Do you still hold that title?
It’s not about the title, but about breaking the record. It’s not a title really, it’s a record, and I am sure it has been broken again, I haven’t checked, but I don’t think we still own the record. The Guinness Book Of Record gets updated every year, so I think it must be. The last time I read, I think over 40 thousand entries every year, different records are made every day. So many people are trying to achieve that record and now that we have, we have to look up to what next, that doesn’t change the fact that we won. If you go to their record Guinness book of record danceathon 2006, they will find our name there.
Would you like to break it again?
It’s not a wish now; if I’m ever going to break it again, maybe it’s because I am going to save 20,000 people on the street or [do it] for hungry children, it has to be [for something] beyond money for me to do it again.
Finally, what’s your advice for young women who see a mentor in you?
It is important that every woman place a worth on herself and refuse to compromise. Ladies in the entertainment sector stand a bigger risk but with a lot of self-respect and determination, a lot can be achieved.
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