Community
Our community engagement extends from our immediate community in Lagos Island to encompass our global community of creatives, with whom we feel kinship and allyship. Our community programs have helped to provide access to the arts for underserved communities, including children and young people who might otherwise not have the opportunity to experience art. Many low-income earning communities around Nigeria lack access to quality arts and cultural programs due to financial or geographic barriers. The QDance Center is dedicated to provide access to the arts through scholarships and free access to our programs, to bridge this gap, providing young people with opportunities to engage in the arts and develop their creativity and self-expression.
We deliver our work in a six-pronged approach codename QDance CREATE, which encompasses our core values and strategies, allowing us to maximize our impact and drive innovation in the creative industry. Through QDance CREATE, we focus on fostering Community, Research, Education, Artistic excellence, Technocultural advancements, and Entrepreneurship.
Research
The research department of The QDance Center plays a crucial role in advancing our mission and objectives. It conducts studies, contributes to program development, supports artistic creations and curatorial works, host residencies, workshops, outreach programs and seminars, it collaborates with all other arms of the center to provide context, participates in grant writing and fundraising narratives, and publications that promotes community engagement. The research department generates new knowledge, fosters academic collaboration, secures funding, and enriches public understanding and appreciation of both our company culture and well as the role of culture at large. Overall, it serves as a hub for knowledge creation, preservation, and dissemination within The QDance Center and the communities that we serve.
Education
Our pedagogical program; The QSchool, will help to cultivate the next generation of artists. Our art education program is here to remind our students of their values in the purest form, how they perceive their creative energy and surrender to the multiplicity of their being, and since art resides not in the what, nor in the why, our approach pays better attention to the how, which is cultivated in practice, review and analysis, contributing to the growth of the arts sector locally and internationally. In addition, our punctual training and mentorship programs will provide opportunities for employment and entrepreneurship in the art sector.
Art Practice
The QDance Center’s core activity is in artistic creation, our artistic director is a vibrant creator, and structure we have built around him gives him the ability to deepen on his art making processes, a better conducive environment for research and create more works available for tour. Our performances and tours will continue to generate revenue for the center and the venues where we perform, as well as for local businesses such as hotels, restaurants, and malls. These performances are equally a source of inspiration and cultural enrichment for audiences locally and internationally, helping them to foster a sense of community and shared experience.
Technology
Till date we have undertaken three different tech related projects; Afropolis, Oraqu and Atunda. We have developed a hybrid platform for antidisciplinary exchange between performance, design, community engagement and digital technology, we have built an interactive mobile app that give users a unique access to a sonic archive, based on the mechanics and architecture of Ifá divination system of the Yorùbá people, with further inquiry into harnessing the power of AI to restore and revitalize Yorùbá cultural heritage and knowledge systems. We are currently developing research in tech for analyzing dance moves across cultures through an interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers, data scientists, software engineers, and various dance communities, using AI-driven movement recognition and classification methods. The overall goal of the research arm of QDance Center is to invest in research and inventions that explore the current, and sometimes unexpected convergence of the technocultural world across disciplines.
Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship is the ability to identify a problem, and creatively solve that problem, for the people that needs it. Our entrepreneurial muscles are therefore, being channelled to transform dance to an art form, a communal practice, an idea, and a service in demand, by finding the necessary resources - money, people & stuffs – to turn it into a profitable career for a new and vibrant generation of dancers. Our success story over the past decade has proven that the business model we’ve developed is sustainable and surely transferable. We recognised that innovation usually happen when two or more sets of knowledge collide. Often, art and business operate in different worlds, our ability to operate ‘at the edge’ led to new ways of doing. Our aim is to continue to advocate for entrepreneurial practice in the arts to ensure that the value artists bring is matched by the income they generate, demonstrating that art can be a sustainable and financially rewarding career choice, with the capacity to create real jobs.