Lagos Becomes the Choreography in Qudus Onikeku’s New Berlin Performance

Lagos is being presented on a Berlin stage not simply as a setting, but as choreography.

Nigerian choreographer Qudus Onikeku and QDance Company are presenting LAGOS is a R.A.V.E. (Radical Audio Visual Experience), a contemporary dance work that uses movement, soundscape, fashion, archival material and electronic music to interpret the rhythms and social systems of one of Africa’s largest cities.

The production, created for 11 dancers, received its European preview at Berlin’s Humboldt Forum on 3 and 4 October.

Reading a city through movement

The work approaches Lagos as what its creators describe as a “living choreographic system” — a city in which millions of people continually negotiate space, time, work, faith, pleasure, commerce and survival.

According to the Berlin programme, the production deliberately moves away from familiar portrayals of Lagos primarily through congestion or dysfunction. Instead, it examines the informal networks through which people continually reorganise urban life.

That makes movement more than a performance device. In Onikeku’s framing, it becomes a way of understanding how communities exchange, adapt and coexist in a city whose formal systems do not always explain how daily life actually functions.

Lagos as cultural material

The production draws on Yorùbá cosmology, Nigerian political history, Afrobeats, rave culture, youth culture and street economies. Its historical references include colonialism, military rule, migration, oil economies and religion, while its contemporary language draws heavily from the cultural energy associated with Lagos.

That combination reflects a broader development in African creative industries. Cities such as Lagos are increasingly not only locations where culture is produced but subjects through which artists interpret African modernity for audiences at home and abroad.

Music has made this most visible. Afrobeats has taken elements of Nigerian urban culture to global audiences, while Lagos fashion, visual art, film and photography have also acquired wider international reach. Contemporary dance provides another medium through which the city can be interpreted without reducing it to conventional narratives of either crisis or celebration.

A different export

LAGOS is a R.A.V.E. is therefore also an example of a different kind of African export: intellectual and cultural work built from local experience but presented within international arts institutions.

The economic scale is different from film, recorded music or fashion, but contemporary performance forms part of the same creative ecosystem. International touring creates professional networks, audiences and opportunities for African artists while giving cultural institutions outside the continent access to work developed from African ideas and artistic traditions.

Onikeku’s production ultimately asks audiences to read Lagos through the bodies that navigate it. In doing so, it turns the city’s constant movement — its pressure, improvisation, tension and release — into the performance itself.

Source: Berlin Bühnen / Humboldt Forum — LAGOS is a R.A.V.E..