Chaos as Choreography: Re:INCARNATION Recovering Precolonial African Rhythms — An Interview with Qudus Onikeku

Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, is home to some 20 million people and pulses with vibrancy amid a chaotic everyday life. In the eyes of choreographer Qudus Onikeku, however, Lagos is a world unto itself. “It’s very loud, noisy, and active, always moving, yet so concrete that there’s no room for romanticism.” Speaking about Lagos, he smiled brightly, noting that survival here demands a deeply practical mindset. Everyone remains on edge, navigating each day with heightened alertness. “If creativity is a tool for artists to make a living, in Lagos it is a means of survival,” he said. 

People are shouting loudly everywhere in the city. “People feel this is the only way to be heard,” Qudus said with a smile. “To live in Lagos, you have to keep all your senses open and stay fully alive in your body. After a while, you even learn to smile at the chaos. That vibrancy is exactly what I love most about Lagos.” In Qudus’s view, the city itself is a form of choreography. Chaos, rhythm, collision, and vibrancy constantly intertwine. People try their best to live, and try their best to perform their life.

And when people begin to dance, the city’s rhythms enter their body. 

Qudus began dancing at the age of 13, later moving to France to work with choreographers. He did not receive formal dance training until he was 23. Moving defined his youth. Grounded in the Yorùbá culture of his upbringing, he absorbed knowledge like a sponge through learning and reading, gradually forming his own philosophy. In 2014, he returned home and founded QDance Center, where he began working with young Nigerian dancers. “When you become a dancer, the body becomes a space that carries memory.” Qudus sees the body as an archive, and dance as a medium for transmitting memory and sustaining culture.

Colonial rule took up nearly fifty years of Nigeria’s history. Political power and education have shaped people’s ways of thinking, accumulating as archives within the body. Qudus reflected on the labels he carried: “Born into a Muslim family, raised within Yorùbá traditions, becoming a heterosexual man, and later an artist in France… these are all part of the archive of my body.” He does not mix these archives together like a salad, but instead organizes them like a library, retrieving the relevant file when needed.

Qudus believes that dancers have a deeper understanding of body memory than most people, and are more attuned to the body’s capacity to transmit messages. He suggests that when dancers draw on their bodily archives to transmit messages, they are also forming a sense of collectivity and connections. Just as genetic information is passed on through the body, memory, too, recurs through acts of transmission. “I believe that keeping memory alive is one of the reasons people dance.”

Qudus’s grandfather witnessed the arrival of colonial rule; his father was born during the colonial period, while he himself grew up in an independent era. Across these three generations, colonialism created a rupture with their original cultural roots. Only his grandfather had experienced Africa in its uncolonized state.

However, Qudus is not seeking to return to the past, but to recover a Nigerian identity unburdened by colonialism—its most original form. From the people and their ways of life to the broader social atmosphere, this means a time and space free from whiteness, and unrelated to the U.S. Black Lives Matter movement. “Black is just Black—it can be ugly or beautiful. When people say Nigeria has 200 million Black people, I would say Nigeria has 200 million people. Whether they are Black or not is beside the point.”

Without an external cultural frame of comparison, Re:INCARNATION becomes a kind of reincarnation of reincarnation. Qudus believes that only by shedding the burden of colonialism—by rediscovering an original cultural state and the energies of music and the body—can one begin to reimagine Nigeria’s future.

As Afrobeats sweeps the global music scene, winning Grammys and dominating the charts, many people remain unaware that it originates in Nigeria, or of the cultural roots behind its music and dance. “In Africa, music and dance always go hand in hand,” Qudus explains. “Music calls forth the body’s rhythm, and dance, in turn, brings out beats and sound.” For him, Re:INCARNATION is an attempt to guide audiences back to these cultural origins: to encounter an African culture that is rhythmic, dynamic, resistant to romanticization, and grounded in concrete reality.

“To understand this dance, one must understand where it comes from.” Qudus did not choreograph fixed movements for Re:INCARNATION. Instead, he brought each dancer’s “body archive” to the forefront, uncovering their unique life stories, personalities, and energies through a process of careful excavation. In doing so, the dancers are able to perform freely on stage, in a state that is both natural and primal. “The city of Lagos is not something that has been ‘choreographed.’ It is ‘choreography’ in its own right.”  

Each dancer in Re:INCARNATION, then, is like an independent instrument. They perform individually. At times they clash or fall out of sync, yet ultimately they interweave to form the texture of the city. Qudus believes that when everyone strives to perform their own lives with full intensity, the city itself becomes a vast and powerful symphony. 

For Qudus, if dancers play any role in this world, it is as bodies that preserve memory. As AI sweeps across the globe and ever more technically dazzling dance robots emerge, he asks what truly matters: “What makes us human—and not AI?” If the body is merely an accumulation of data, then it is no different from a machine. What artificial intelligence can never attain, however, is the human spirit. They are the qualities that belong uniquely to the human body.  

Qudus therefore emphasizes that if the performing arts become nothing more than an accumulation of movements and styles, they will inevitably be replaced by AI. “A good performance should be like a blank sheet of paper, on which the audience can write their own stories.” He believes that when people use their bodies, memories, and spirit to forge deeper connections through art, there is no need to fear being replaced by AI. And the performing arts will continue to have a future.

The body is not only an archive, but also a vital medium through which memory is preserved. Re:INCARNATION does more than bring audiences to distant Nigeria to see Lagos’s vibrant life; it also uses dance and the body as an archive to show us the abundant vibrancy that makes us human and irreplaceable.

Qudus Onikeku & The QDance Company: Re:INCARNATION ▶Learn More