The Q Dance Studio, Lagos, has unveiled its upcoming performance art festival titled Afropolis 2024, theme: We Need New Myths.
The founder, festival artistic director, and dance artiste, Qudus Onikeku in his curatorial statement about the festival said it will explore performance, place and time, both past and present, as part of what shapes a people, a society and its mythology.
Noting that Africa had its aspirations and imagined futures prior to colonial invasion, Onikeku said there is a need for the continent to recall its forgotten futures and original destiny through the gathering of its dismembered and scattered bodies in close proximity, in the same place, at the same time, in order to weave new mythology.
Myth, he said, encapsulates not just the rituals and beliefs of a people, but the stale and worn-out misconceptions the world has about Africa as a dark continent, doomed with black magic.
With the continent’s present struggle ‘with the way Africans see themselves, and the way they want the world to see them, through African’s lens’, Onikeku said old myths no longer apply, rather new myths which have not yet arisen, and thus left present generation confused.
Artists, writers, historians, culture curators and scholars, he acknowledged, play a huge role in re-establishing the cultural intelligence, innovative thinking and knowledge production of African societies, where they had been attacked.
Like magicians, Onikeku said, they rebuild place (physical space) through shape shifting, and time-bending storytelling skills aimed at moving societies forward.
“Performance is a language that allows us to bypass words, and discourse altogether, in order to say the unsayable, and transform the chaotic world of sensations into a world of forms and representation. The stuff magic is made of; the kind of magic Africa retains an absolute mastery.”
Afropolis will hold October 26 to November 3rd, 2024 in Lagos
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