QDance:Re:INCARNATION – Southbank Centre, London

Director and Choreographer: Qudus Onikeku

Nigerian choreographer Qudus Onikeku brings his QDance company on a UK tour with a dance production inspired by, and infused with, Yoruba culture.

Re:INCARNATIONopens with a prologue, the dance company performing mechanical movements as if it were soulless automata. It’s a subdued start choreographically, but one gets to see how Nigerian dance styles have inspired, and are in turn inspired by, parts of the hip-hop and street dance styles.

As the prologue progresses, the dancers loosen up, as if the monotony of the working day gives way to partying and sex. After the dancers pair up to simulate joyful, enthusiastic coupling, a simulated labour sequence leads up to the piece’s first major act: birth. Here, the joy continues, emphasised by the troupe’s primary-coloured outfits.

But the spirited choreography of this segment soon gives way to the piece’s longest portion: as a partying man is beaten by beret-wearing assailants, Re:INCARNATIONmoves onto Death.

Rather than focussing on a larger narrative, the piece fragments somewhat into a series of vignettes in which members of the company become animalistic spirits, from simian-like nightmare creatures to clucking, seed-pecking birds. From one dancer flailing on his back like a wounded bee to the movement’s more supernatural elements, Onikeku’s choreography is always watchable, even when the thematic relevance feels tenuous.

What is striking is composer Olatunde Obajeun’s score, a combination of pre-recorded work and onstage guitar and percussion work from Simeon Promise Lawrence and Daniel Ifeanyi Anumudu. At times simultaneously joyful and relentless, and occasionally intensely dark, Obajeun’s propulsive score adds an authentic atmosphere, especially to the Death sequence.

The last segment – Rebirth – is both the most visually striking and the most infuriating. One dancer narrates Nigerian aphorisms (in English) as the rest of the company smear her and themselves in lustrous, jet-black paint. A projection states that one must “Get Black to get back”. In the dances that follow – in the piece’s most subdued lighting, but with the shiny body paint accentuating the dancers’ musculature – there is a sense of Western colonialism being stripped away, of truly celebrating Nigeria’s origins and culture. But even as Obajeun’s score propels ever onward, the dancers often have lulls where the action pauses, and they wait around for another explosion of movement to occur.

That results in a finale that tends to taper out rather than reach an epic conclusion. Maybe that’s part of the point – with a cycle of life, death and rebirth, there is no real conclusion. But as a piece of dance theatre, that sense of anticlimax diminishes some of the breathtaking work that has gone before.

Continues until 19 September 2024