Tobi Omoteso: 'It’s a completely different Ireland to when I first came'
Hip hop dancer Tobi Omoteso. Picture Clare Keogh
Long before he wanted to be a b-boy, Tobi Omoteso wanted to be an astronaut. Now, he jokes, maybe he can be “the first b-boy in space”.
For now, the 33-year-old hip hop freestyle dancer and dance facilitator has his feet firmly planted on planet Earth, or Limerick city, to be precise; a city he says is “hands down the hip hop capital of Ireland.”
You can chart the Treaty City’s noteworthy DIY hip hop music scene from The Rubberbandits via Rusangano Family to Denise Chaila, but Omoteso is keen to point out that hip hop culture isn’t only about rap and DJing.
“Hip hop culture consists of four elements,” Omoteso says. “There’s graffiti, rap, breakdancing and DJing. All this culture is evident in Limerick, but actually, hip hop was first introduced in Limerick through breakdancing: there’s an RTÉ archive of it online.”
Omoteso runs the Top 8 Street Dance Battle from Limerick, and heads up a b-boy crew, the Recession Squad Ninjas. Having spent time breakdancing in New York’s street scene, he’s got strong opinions as to why hip hop’s seed found such fertile soil Shannon-side.
“Hip hop is a political movement, where marginalised black and Afro-Caribbean young people came together to make a living because they couldn’t get jobs,” he says. “It’s a political way to enable themselves in their own right as artists.
“Adversity, art and self-expression go hand in hand. When there’s no adversity, there’s no fire in the belly to go out and express things in a bold and daring way. Limerick has that history of adversity in spades.” Omoteso’s family emigrated from Nigeria when he was little, arriving in Celbridge, Co Kildare when he was 10. His father, a healthcare worker, and his mother, a hairdresser, are of Yoruba ethnicity.
The Yoruba are a majority ethnic group in Nigeria with an internationally influential dance tradition, everywhere from Cuba to the US. Even in breakdance culture, there are echoes of Yoruba dance, where individual dancers take turns to occupy centre stage and show off their athleticism accompanied by bata drums.
But growing up, dance was just something he saw at birthday parties and weddings and christenings. “It wasn’t something I thought of actively pursuing,” he admits.
As a pre-teen in Celbridge in the late 1990s, Omoteso encountered instances of racism that left a lasting impression on him.
“That feeling of isolation and loneliness, and not being good enough for the world, is quite difficult to deal with,” he says. “What was most shocking was the adults, in hindsight. The kids were just mimicking the behaviour of the adults, and what they allowed towards somebody that was different to them.”
His family moved to Carlow for his secondary education, and it was there he first watched You Got Served, a high-octane 2003 hip hop movie. Omoteso was hooked: with friends, he watched and re-watched the film and learned the dance moves. Then, they took a chance and performed at an open stage in Carlow for St Patrick’s Day.
“Me and my friends summoned the courage and went on stage and they thought we were like this professional dance troupe, but it was our very first performance,” he says. “A dance teacher came up and said, ‘we’re looking for some street dancers for our dance school, can you come and teach?’”
So Omoteso’s very first dance experience was as a teacher. He continued to teach breakdance when he moved to Waterford to study mechatronics and then applied electronical engineering, the closest he could get to his childhood astronaut ambitions, following school.
He realised he had a dearth of knowledge and spent six years visiting New York on return visits, where he initially studied in Broadway Dance Centre: “But I felt the essence of the dance was being watered down, so I went into Brooklyn, Coney Island and the Bronx to meet old-school dancers, the people who created the artform who don’t teach in studios: they’re still on the street, living the lifestyle.”
Now heading up an international troupe performing in Cork’s Elizabeth Fort for the Midsummer Festival, Omoteso feels a radical change in Ireland since his early experiences of racism here: the younger generations that he teaches, and his six-year-old daughter’s schoolmates, belong to a different, more innately accepting mindset.
“I feel like it’s a completely different Ireland to when I first came,” he says. “For those teenagers, racism doesn’t have a leg to stand on. They don’t see themselves as different from each other.
“When I teach, I can encourage that with outreach programmes, to showcase diversity and different cultures. Imagine if we were all the same, what kind of world would that be? Richness is in diversity. The fun is in the diversity.”
- A Midsummer Celebration curated by Tobi Omoteso includes artists such as Cuttin Heads Collective, Px Music, and Limerockers Bboy Crew. It takes place online throughout Cork Midsummer Festival from June 14-27, culminating in four live performances at Elizabeth Fort on June 27. https://www.corkmidsummer.com/whats-on/midsummer-culture-jam
