Memory Lab

There ain’t no party like a Lagos party.

Or so they say. This weekend, Dazed flew out to Lagos, Nigeria for the third annual MTV Africa Music.

Awards and spent a few days and some late nights meeting rap, R&B and kuduro superstars from across Africa: names like Banky W, Fally Ipupa, Daddy Owen, Cabo Snoop and Radio & Weasel, from Angola to Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo and beyond, all huge stars in their own countries, selling truckloads of records despite rampant piracy and a rickety music industry. These guys are kind of the Jay Zs and Snoops of Africa, basically.

Memory Lab
- A participatory dance performance in the dark

Memory Lab is a performance that, like many of my previous works, revolves around memories and dance.

Already in 2003 I inherited the work Dixit Dominus, choreographed by Kurt Jooss for the Indian dancer Lilavati living in Sweden. In my work Future Memory (2012/2014), memories are processed from a postcolonial and highly personal perspective where the intersections of the meetings between Western dance canon and an Indian contemporary and traditional dance are explored. How can dance, movements or rather memories of movements be inherited and carried on? These questions filters through my latest work, An evening with Astad, where I, together with Astad Deboo, 72, a pioneer of contemporary Indian dance, explore histories and memories. An evening with Astad had its 2017 premiere in Lund and played last summer in Munich within a project on post-migrant dance.

Memory Lab explores how memories can live on and be embodied with the help of the audience members. Participatory choreographies that shift our conceptions of canon and traditions, while at the same time, through the physical and immediate participation of the body, we experience a unique closeness to memories – both our own and of others.