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TUMELINE

 

April/May 2023 - TERRAPOLIS Virtual Audition, to select young dancers from anywhere in the world and any dance style.

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September 2023 - Afropolis 2023 Lyon, 2 weeks testing at the Biennial de la danse de Lyon.

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Oct /Nov 2023 - TERRAPOLIS choreographic research, 4 weeks residency in France.

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January/Feb./March 2024 - TERRAPOLIS creative process, 4 weeks residency in Europe.

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April/May 2024 - TERRAPOLIS technical production, 4 weeks in Europe or America.

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May 2024 / TERRAPOLIS World Premiere, to be determined.

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PRODUCTION
 

The QDance Company

www.qdancecenter.com

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Hajarat ALLI

Production / Touring

info@qdancecenter.com

 

Qudus Onikeku

Artistic Director

qudus@qdancecenter.com

 

Production

YK Projects. Paris

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FILES DOWNLOADS

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SOME TECHNICAL DETAILS

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

 
 

Touring:

1 Choreographer

15 International Dancers

2 Technicians

1 Tour manager.

 

Art Design:

The aesthetics we are working with will be a continuation of the visual research for Out Of This World and Re:INCARNATION. In TERRAPOLIS, costume and body painting will play a major role.

Light:

Light design of this creation is of particular interest to Qudus, he will be working  closely with the light designer to deliver this work.

 

Costume:

We wish to further our experiment with costume design, by delving into the world of FashionTech, a feild which combines Fashion, Technology and Interaction Design. In where Design is aimed to create a dialogue with the body and the environment of the dancer, creating a vision of cultural transformation that is both exciting and disturbing.

Sound:

Music as subtext, chanting as choreographic elements and sounds that adds  additional layer to the scenic landscape in the Terra. Out Of This World (2023) is a sonic research project, working with three different sound artists, in partnership with IRCAM, the module developed in this research will find its way into TERRAPOLIS.

 

Stage:

Stage will be a black box with minimalist scenic elements, with a particular focus on  the light, music, and costume designs.

 

minimum stage size

12 x12m

 

Scenography:

The set design will be minimal, we’ll however be working with a scenographer as consultant, to see what minimalist idea can be imagineered together.

 
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