QDance Company - Re:INCARNATION Festival Theatre Edinburgh 18th October 2024 Review
Qudus Onikeku/ QDance Company - Re:INCARNATION at the Festival Theatre Edinburgh tonight was an opportunity to get a glimpse through dance and movement into Nigerian youth culture, Yoruba culture and belief systems.
Drawing on Afrobeats music where western soul, jazz and funk merge in and around traditional African music, Qudus Onikeku (founder of QDance) and musical director and composer Olantunde Objeun have created a 90 minute work (with no interval) that allows the QDance company to fully explore in movement and sound the endless cycle of birth, death and re-incarnation.
From the brightly coloured poster for this show you might expect something similar to be reflected on stage, but often this is not the case. Yes, there is a blaze of bright colours in the dancers’ costumes when we first see them, but this very quickly turns into an often darker view of the everyday life of many Nigerian youths. Still though there is enormous physical energy in this production and every dancer on the stage tonight is giving this performance everything that they have to give. A mixture of pre-recorded and live music is always there as a soundtrack to the unfolding narrative that the dancers are giving us all in physical body movement, often with surprising synergy between the two.
Watching this production was, for me, a bit like glimpsing into another world, one where the language of the dance itself was often a new one to me, and that at times did provide a certain level of dislocation from the performance. A simple hand-out giving some insights into both the dance source material (traditional and contemporary) and the belief system of birth, death and re-incarnation would have been informative and I am sure that I would have got far more out of this production than just the music and the physical performance of the dancers. I am aware that my lack of understanding some of the cultural references here was a bit of a barrier for me.
Many things are, however, universal in this world and that synthesis of musical forms from different cultures and time periods into something very unique was a surprise to me and left me realising that there is so much about Nigerian youth culture (and the wider culture in general) that I need to find out a lot more about. Here, QDance have achieved one of their principal aims in bringing the sheer energy and creative diversity of Nigerian culture to a new and wider audience. Exploring all of this further is going to be an interesting experience.
Review by Tom King © 2024
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com
Drawing on Afrobeats music where western soul, jazz and funk merge in and around traditional African music, Qudus Onikeku (founder of QDance) and musical director and composer Olantunde Objeun have created a 90 minute work (with no interval) that allows the QDance company to fully explore in movement and sound the endless cycle of birth, death and re-incarnation.
From the brightly coloured poster for this show you might expect something similar to be reflected on stage, but often this is not the case. Yes, there is a blaze of bright colours in the dancers’ costumes when we first see them, but this very quickly turns into an often darker view of the everyday life of many Nigerian youths. Still though there is enormous physical energy in this production and every dancer on the stage tonight is giving this performance everything that they have to give. A mixture of pre-recorded and live music is always there as a soundtrack to the unfolding narrative that the dancers are giving us all in physical body movement, often with surprising synergy between the two.
Watching this production was, for me, a bit like glimpsing into another world, one where the language of the dance itself was often a new one to me, and that at times did provide a certain level of dislocation from the performance. A simple hand-out giving some insights into both the dance source material (traditional and contemporary) and the belief system of birth, death and re-incarnation would have been informative and I am sure that I would have got far more out of this production than just the music and the physical performance of the dancers. I am aware that my lack of understanding some of the cultural references here was a bit of a barrier for me.
Many things are, however, universal in this world and that synthesis of musical forms from different cultures and time periods into something very unique was a surprise to me and left me realising that there is so much about Nigerian youth culture (and the wider culture in general) that I need to find out a lot more about. Here, QDance have achieved one of their principal aims in bringing the sheer energy and creative diversity of Nigerian culture to a new and wider audience. Exploring all of this further is going to be an interesting experience.
Review by Tom King © 2024
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com