Qudus Onikeku
Fascinated at the sight of a man doing acrobatics, Qudus Onikeku, born in Lagos in 1984, was barely five years old when he tried to imitate him and initiated movements. As a teenager, he trained at the Ballets of Nigeria, where he quickly grew tired of the repetitive gestures of traditional Nigerian dancers. He then took training courses in contemporary dance and joined, in 2003, the company of Heddy Maalem, for whom he notably interpreted The Rite of Spring. His acrobatics apprenticeship at the Centre national des Arts du cirque (CNAC) in Châlons-en-Champagne, but also in hip hop and capoeira, permitted him to free himself from codified choreographic vocabularies. Form interests him less than the meaning and intensity of the present, shared with his companions and the public, during the time of a performance. Reflecting on art and the world from his own viewpoint, shaped by his origins but also by the international reality of his discipline, is what truly animates Qudus Onikeku. For the last few years, he has been developing a powerful and chiselled dance, occupying space like a surveyor and a warrior. Inspired by the culture of the Yoruba, one of the oldest peoples of Africa, constantly questioning the history of Nigeria, Qudus Onikeku explores the complex relationships between the individual, memory, the body and history. QADDISH is the last part of a trilogy composed of a solo on solitude, My Exile Is in My Head, and a play on the tragedy of history, STILL/life, whose first version was premiered with Damien Jalet in 2011 at the Festival d'Avignon in the framework of Sujets à Vif.
RB, April 2013.