Choreographer Qudus Onikeku: ‘I want to mirror the real world – vibrant, chaotic, problematic’

Qudus Onikeku could have chosen an easier life. The Nigerian choreographer moved to France aged 20, launched his own company at 25 and within a few years had picked up awards and plaudits, toured 20 countries, performed at Avignon festival and secured regular three-year funding from the French government. He had it made. And then on the verge of being 30 he promptly gave it up, returned two years’ worth of funding and moved back to his home city of Lagos.

Lagos is many things, but easy isn’t one of them. Choked with traffic – cars, battered yellow minibuses and tuk-tuks (known as “keke”) – the city’s scent is petrol fumes. The place pulses with energy: this mega-metropolis of more than 20 million people is growing by 3,000 people a day and predicted to become the world’s most populous city by the end of the century. This summer, fuel prices hit a record high and food inflation rose to 40%. The majority of its inhabitants live in poverty, yet you can turn a corner and find a white-pillared millionaire’s mansion, or an Instagrammer’s dream restaurant with huge AI video screens and your starter served on a cushion like Cinderella’s slipper. It is truly a city of extremes.

When Onikeku was younger, he didn’t think he could work with the corruption and cronyism he saw around him. “What matters most in Nigeria is: ‘How much is in it for me?’” he says in an essay on his website. So what made him come back? “With all the money we were given in France, I really felt like I was working for the government,” says the now 40-year-old. “Like I was a civil servant, and I didn’t like that.” In Paris, Onikeku would perform at theatres with a handful of Black people in the audience, not at all a reflection of the streets outside. “I said to myself: I want to mirror the real world – vibrant, chaotic, problematic.” He wanted artistic freedom and no strings. Some people in France told him his work was too political, but he wasn’t interested in fighting the establishment; he just wanted to “invent a world that I was not given”, he says, “go to a space where there is nothing and start to rebuild”.

Being a dancer was the first rebellious act in my life

So here we are, sitting in the “media room”, a corner carved out of his studio in a shopping mall in Onikan, in the Lagos Island area of the city, where people play Fifa between video edits. In the thick heat of the morning, dancers are warming up, chatting, laughing. There are brightly coloured costumes piled on the floor and musicians jamming by the window. It feels a lot more DIY than most dance studios, and it is: they make the costumes, create films, do everything themselves, have fingers in multiple pies. They are entrepreneurs as well as artists (Onikeku has a side project in AI). There are challenges here, for sure, he says, but Onikeku muses that maybe it was the lack of challenges in France that made him come back to Nigeria, “where I can be wrestling with something real, not just an idea”.

What’s real here is the level of energy in this hugely youthful population. When Onikeku moved back, 65% of people were below the age of 25. There is significant unemployment, but also entrepreneurialism and huge social media engagement; Onikeku first found some of his dancers on Instagram. “They have this vibrant, young energy and were inventing a new genre of dance, called Afrodance. I was like: wow, this is a space I just want to dive into.”

Onikeku now runs the QDance Academy, which is free to students (although they have to pay if they’re late or miss a class, an effective way to spur commitment). He is in the midst of building a new dance centre, the QDance Hub, which will be a focal point for the arts in the city. And he creates stage works for the QDance Company that tour internationally, including new show Re:Incarnation, which is being brought to the UK by Dance Consortium for a nine-venue tour.

Re:Incarnation marries the energy, life, noise and power of athletic bodies springing from the floor, tight to the rhythm, with themes of community, connectivity and Black joy, before swerving into searching solos and duets that have a mysterious sense of transformation and a darker feel. The movement draws on street dance, as well as Yoruba traditions, but you can’t pin down its style. The idea of different dance “styles”, to Onikeku, is “a continuation of nationalistic thinking, border thinking, the thinking of the 20th century”, he says. “Like warring entities building our world out of fear, not love, bewilderment or curiosity.”

Related: Lagos Leap: inside a ballet school in Nigeria's suburbs - in pictures

In rehearsal he works with dancers to “open up something deep inside themselves”. Onikeku says in the process dancers may burst into tears or fall into a trance-like state. “It’s almost similar to what ayahuasca or marijuana will do for you,” he says, “but through dance, the body will do it for itself.” Watching, even in the studio, you’re definitely going on a journey with the dancers. Onikeku talks of dance as therapy and healing. “My dance is a kind of a prayer, an impulse that gives energy – to the audience as well – to go and build that kind of future that we all want.”

Among many things, the future Onikeku wants is one where a creative career is a viable one. When he was young, nobody thought being a dancer was a real job. As a child who was always moving, Onikeku got into acrobatics and copied moves from Michael Jackson and MC Hammer videos. He felt like Billy Elliot, he says, with the same burning passion and disapproving family. It was a lower-middle class Muslim family, “very modest – education was the key thing”, and Onikeku was the 12th of 13 children, “meaning I have 11 people in front of me who know what’s best for me”. He was able to join a dance group and keep it secret for a while, until he started travelling to competitions and had to fess up. “Being a dancer is the first rebellious act I ever made in my life,” laughs Onikeku. It wasn’t for lack of options, but he only wanted to dance.

QDance Company will be performing at the reopening of the Nigerian National Theatre, across the water in the neighbourhood of Iganmu. It’s a landmark 1970s building of concrete, marble and stunning wood carvings – the only beautiful thing in Lagos, Grace Ekpu, our photographer, quips.

But around the city you can see new investment in the arts from the state, whose eyes, Onikeku tells me, have been opened to the potential for cultural tourism. Across the road from QDance’s current studio is the John Randle Centre, a boldly designed museum of Yoruba culture, opening in the autumn. In October it will host a nine-day festival Onikeku has masterminded called Afropolis, a pan-African gathering of creatives in dance, music, poetry, fashion, comedy, visual art, film and more. It’s a gathering of people, but also of momentum.

Previous editions of Afropolis were held in Europe, but now Onikeku has brought it home. Much like his own journey, it’s a move from presenting African artists to outside audiences to firing up a creative generator on the continent itself. Not “speaking truth to power”, but “creating other spaces of power”. And Onikeku, both a disruptor and a community builder, a man who goes his own way, is just the person to stoke that fire.

Re:Incarnation tours from 18 September to 19 October; tour starts at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London .