Masterclass with Qudus Onikeku

Participants will be guided through a unique exploration of visceral body movements and techniques, drawing on Onikeku’s explosive choreographic style with influences from kinesthetic practice and Yoruba traditions.

About Qudus Onikeku

Qudus Onikeku is the founder and Artistic Director of The QDance Center, a world-renowned artist, researcher, innovator, and social impact engineer, who subliminally uses art for non-art outcomes. Over a decade, he has established himself as a major international artist, working with different media: performance, installation, curating and community organising.

His international artistic practice intersects between his interest in visceral body movements, kinesthetic memory, and embracing an artistic vision and a futurist practice that both respects and challenges Yoruba artistic traditions. He has created a substantial body of critically acclaimed work that ranges from solos to group works, as well as artist-to-artist collaborations with visual artists, architects, musicians, writers, multimedia artists, data scientists and technologists.

After his higher education in France in 2009, Qudus created his first company YK projects in Paris, with which he created several solo and group dance pieces of critical acclaim. In 2014 he returned to Lagos with his partner Hajarat, and together they co-founded the QDance Center, an incubator with which they examined and experimented with the possible intersections between arts and society.

Qudus has been a favourite on major international stages, and festivals across 60 countries including Biennale de Lyon, Festival d’Avignon, Centre Pompidou, Philharmonie de Paris in France, TED Global, Venice Biennale, Torinodanza, Roma Europa in Italy, Kalamata Dance Festival Greece, Dance Umbrella in the UK, Bates Dance Festival in the USA, Festival TransAmerique Montreal. His dance works are in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Canada. He has been a visiting professor of dance at the University of California Davis and Columbia College Chicago. Qudus is currently the first “Maker in Residence” at The Center for Arts, Migration and Entrepreneurship of the University of Florida. His current research ATUNDA, explores a deep tech solution, an AI-ready dataset for dance recognition and movement analysis, to lay a background for cutting-edge interactive systems to synthesise, preserve, protect, and securely share dance and movement data in the age of virality.