Biography
Born in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1984, Qudus Onikeku met Heddy Maalem there in 2003 and joined his company in Toulouse. Admitted to France’s National Centre for Circus Arts (CNAC) in Châlons-en-Champagne, he graduated in 2009 and the same year set up his own company, YK Projects, in Paris. His first creations, My Exile is in my head (2010), Still/Life (2012) and Qaddish (2013) won international recognition and were performed at prestigious festivals such as the Venice Biennale, Avignon Festival and Roma Europa. He returned to Lagos in 2014 with his partner Haji, and they co-founded The QDance Center, a creative incubator for training and nurturing talent, and for community engagement. The QDance Center serves as a testing ground for interactions between the arts and society. Onikeku also founded Afropolis, a multi-disciplinary platform and annual gathering which uses design thinking and digital technologies to explore new means of professional and community participation in the performing arts. Over the years, he has developed an artistic project that is wide-ranging yet consistently grounded in all aspects of his cherished Yoruba culture and the many dances of the African diaspora. In 2017 he created a video installation, Right Here, Right Now, for the first Nigerian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In 2018 in Germany, he created Yuropa; and in 2019 he began preparing a solo piece, Spirit Child, at the MC93 culture centre in the Paris region, while also working on a collective and multi-disciplinary piece, Re:Incarnation, for 2021 Biennale de la danse de Lyon. His works are held in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Canada. Onikeku has been guest professor of dance at the University of California and at Columbia College in Chicago. He is currently the first Maker in Residence at the Center for Arts, Migrations and Entrepreneurship at the University of Florida. His current project, ATUNDA, explores the possibilities of AI-driven software for annotating dance moves to build a dance data bank for deep learning, laying the foundations for an interactive system that classifies, preserves, protects and securely shares data on signature moves that acquire the status of viral dance trends.