LAGOS is a R.A.V.E.

LAGOS is a R.A.V.E. (Radical Audio Visual Experience) is a new choreographic work for eleven dancers by Nigeria’s foremost contemporary choreographer, Qudus Onikeku, and his QDance Company. It investigates the mega-city Lagos as a living choreographic system. Bringing together dance, soundscape, fashion, archives, and electronic music, the work explores how more than twenty million bodies collectively negotiate space, time, heritage, desire, economy, and survival through the cycle of hope, tension, bloat, conflict, release and hope again.

Rather than approaching Lagos through familiar narratives of chaos or dysfunction, the work proposes the city as a living intelligence whose informal networks continually reorganise themselves beyond institutional structures. Here, movement becomes a social technology through which communities invent new forms of coexistence, exchange, spirituality, pleasure, and resistance.

The work draws from Yorùbá cosmology, Nigerian socio-political history, Afrobeats, rave culture, youth culture, and street economies. LAGOS is a R.A.V.E. investigates the city as choreography, it asks how history continues to move through bodies carrying the afterlives of colonialism, military dictatorship, migration, oil economies, religious ecstasy, and the relentless invention of new futures. Humour, confrontation, celebration, exhaustion, and collective trance emerge as interconnected states within the city’s metabolism.

Dancers: Joshua Tervar Anum, Evangel Austin, Bright Bassey, Emmanuel David, Abok Ezekiel, Ruth Felix, Vessy Igben, Matthew Ilione, Tijese Jatto, Lizinmwa Man, Angela Okolo
Choreography: Qudus Onikeku
Lightning Design: Michel Abdallah
Sound: Anum Joshua Tervar
Production: Hajarat Alli’

The QDance Center, Lagos