Olayinka Shitu is 16. He came to Germany from Nigeria. But not with his mother or father.
He arrived in Berlin ”with someone who then left me”, he says cryptically. Somehow, he found a place at a school, the Heinz Brandt Oberschule in the tough Weissensee district of north-east Berlin.
Last night, thanks to an initiative by the artistic director of the Berlin Philharmonic, Sir Simon Rattle, Olayinka was preparing to go on stage to dance to Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring, performed by what is generally regarded as the world’s finest orchestra.
The young Nigerian was one of more than 200 schoolchildren plucked from some of the German capital’s most disadvantaged schools to take part in a performance that was due to be watched by an audience packed with British and German dignitaries including the British culture minister, Tessa Jowell.
Like the majority of his fellow dancers, Olayinka had no experience of classical music or the stage until six weeks ago when training began under the eye of the British choreographer and teacher Royston Maldoom.
”It’s making the family bigger,” said Sir Simon, sweeping a hand in the direction of the packed stage. ”We have to be evangelists.”
He recounted with enthusiasm how many of the children’s parents would be in the audience for the performance.
”Part of our job as an orchestra is to be part of the city — to get underneath it and not be some expensive ornament,” said Sir Simon, who took charge of Berlin’s debt-laden but most valued cultural jewel last year just as the first cuts were being made to the city’s budget. He also felt that the Berlin Philharmonic could encourage others.
”Orchestras look to this famous old institution and say if the Berlin Philharmonic is doing it, then it must be right.”
Maldoom has already worked on similar projects, one of which led to a company of Ethiopian street children dancing at the Royal Albert Hall. For Sir Simon’s scheme, he took 80 of the 230 dancers from amateur groups in the German capital and the rest from two schools ”where the kids were running around and crawling up the walls”.
”I had two sessions a week of three hours with each group, which is longer than I would normally have,” Maldoom said. ”In many ways, that worked against us because you don’t get the opportunity to shut them out of their everyday life. If I have them for a week at a stretch, I can get them to focus more easily.
”Two of the hardest things to achieve are stillness and silence. Kids like this, whose lives have quite a lot of chaos in them, their energy is not controlled. So the hardest thing for them is to stand totally still or not say anything for half an hour.” The other big problem was ”attitude”.
”They come into the room with what I call their ‘adopted child’ and I won’t collude. I say: ‘No. I don’t want that child. I want the one behind’.”
Fifty miles from the Polish border, Berlin is a natural first point of settlement for many of the families smuggled across the river Oder, dodging the border guards’ dogs and the thermographic detection cameras. Some of the children spoke so little German that Maldoom and his team needed the help of a Russian and an Arabic interpreter to make sure their instructions were understood.
Tara Haddad, aged 15, arrived in the German capital five months ago after leaving Baghdad. ”For me the most difficult thing is the idea,” she said. ”Why did Stravinsky want to make this music and why did they want to do this dance with Stravinsky’s music? This music is sad and I’ve always danced to happy music before. Well, Eminem.”
But she was clearly very excited by the project. So excited, in fact, that she was having difficulty sleeping.
”This is my first time dancing on a stage. This is my first time on a stage doing anything. I’m really nervous.”
Sir Simon did not look too worried, though. After watching two lines of girls dancing in perfect time to the rhythmic throb of Stravinsky’s music, he laid down his baton and said: ”Artistically, you could put that up anywhere. You could tour with that.”
Olayinka was pretty confident too. Looking grave, he said: ”Royston told us: there is nothing that we cannot do.” – Guardian Unlimited Â