CONCEPT NOTE:

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TERRAPOLIS is a term coined by the feminist cyborg scholar Donna Haraway, it combines the Latin ‘terra’ for earth, with the Greek ‘polis’ for city or citizens, a term known in Yorùbá as Aràayé. The Yorùbá cosmology conceive of the cosmos as an interlace of two distinct yet inseparable realms, ayé – the visible, tangible world of the living, ruled by the Earth Goddess, Onilè, and òrun – the invisible realm of the dead, ancestors, gods, and spirits, governed by the Sky God, Olorun. Here, TERRAPOLIS is an Afrofuturist adventure that isn’t down on any map, set against the backdrop of our current conditions; climate terrorisms, viral pandemics, lingering ghosts of colonialism, the incessant threat of a nuclear war, complex matrixes of racial, patriarchal, capitalist and technofascist oppressions.

Terrapolis is a speculative exploration of the human condition, building on previous experiments on Yorùbá aesthetics and contemporary youth culture, now mixed with an existential concern, to devise a lyrical piece that seeks abstract ways of composing co-habitability of the planet among community of the living. With 15 diverse dancers of eloquence, we take the audience into a parallel world, somewhere amid the Sky God and the Earth Goddess. Musical, lucid, absurd, and a composite of humanity made of multiple trajectories, all chasing the ungraspable phantoms of life, chasing illusion, chasing death. There are two never ending roads to take, and they are both hard; through the forest or over the sea, on one you could drown and famish, the other you could be nutrient for wild creatures and evil spirits, it is an abstract goal with nothing definite or concrete to accomplish, you can anticipate what will happen, but nothing ever does, aside being led to what is unexpected, and the ball rebound only to bounce forward again.

A lot of symbols are here, religious allegories, myths, legends, laughter, grains of madness, everything is mixed in and none hardly rational; how they morphed into animal kinds or elemental forces like fire, matter, or wind. Lots of facts too. Native philosophy, pseudo-scientific theories, earth’s right declarations like mantra. Perhaps it is a tale that borders on the terrible act of cosmic cohabitation, telling how different people reacts in different ways to the same experience of looming tragedy, an initiatory journey into the confused state of souls that are spiritually impotent, plagued with influenza, scavenging and scabbing for food, in mud, under surveillance, things fall apart all around, trenches filled with filth and modernity’s excrement.

This could be a party at the lower region of Hell, an underworld flooded with light, or a tale in which one regains faith in an otherwise dark world, because you see angels too, except they aren’t snowy and fancy, more like benevolent spirits, good witches, djinnis with magics, friendly strangers, and spirit animals, with whom one learns to make kin in the TERRAPOLIS, a vast arena for the interplay of forces at the crossroads of the living and the dead, where the human spirit wonderfully resists an abridgement of its humanity.

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Qudus Onikeku