Re:INCARNATION Lagos Premiere

Re:INCARNATION is a 2021 dance, music, fashion and visual art creation, that showcases the depth of ancient Yoruba philosophy, mixed with the current Nigerian youth culture. It is the work of a crop of Nigerian dancers marked by the rhythm and groove of LAGOS. Paying tribute to this richness, the choreography is written with a highly musical structure, combined with an intricate and carefully designed visual aesthetics, all layered in three parts.

This new creation is the result of six years of continuous movement research around body memory with young dancers in Nigeria, all undertaken since my return from Paris to Lagos in 2014, with subsequent workshops around various cities in Nigeria. I found it rather interesting, how young people appropriates the energy of the 60s/70s, and reactivates it, renews it, re-incarnates it in the present, consciously or subconsciously loaded with past and current socio-political struggles.

I have since immersed myself within the creative energy of Lagos and its continuous burst of inspiration and innovation, and I have then built strong trust relationships with its young major makers of aesthetics, strong enough to dare to create such an ambitious work by us all, for the world to have a feel of the level of thoughts on art and aesthetic beauty, that showcases the depth of our youth culture, as well as the pure and uncompromising joy, which inhabits present day Nigeria.

Coming from a deep Yoruba cultural understanding, we have placed at the core of this multimodal and multi-sensorial composition, the Yoruba central concept of reincarnation (birth, death, re-birth) which offers a distinct way of thinking about time in a cyclical manner.

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Qudus Onikeku