Company Background
Bode Lawal's Sakoba Dance Theatre, together with its sister company Sakoba Dance For All, lives and works in a multicultural society in which dance is a key expression of culture.

Formed in 1994 by the charismatic dancer and choreographer Bode Lawal, Sakoba strives to produce innovative and original choreography that combine the many dance styles and influences from around the world that its director has encountered, while remaining true to his rich African cultural traditions.
Bode Lawal's Sakoba Dance Theatre
SAKOBA is an African Peoples’ Dance (APD) company rooted in the real-world situation of the twenty first century. To a greater extent than ever before the people of Africa are now located all over the world, taking their heritage and their culture with them and creating new traditions through their interactions with new situations. This evolution and change reflects the contemporary reality of African people. SAKOBA arises from the vision and experience of its Artistic Director, Bode Lawal. As a child growing up in Nigeria , Bode became immersed first in the dance tradition of his tribe and then in the wider framework of African national dance and artistic expression.
When a European dance company visited Lagos , Bode was immensely excited by his discovery of a wider dance tradition. He set himself the task of creating an evolutionary form of APD, which - like the contemporary African nation – would recognise and interact with the European tradition. In this way his choreography creates an entirely new but traditionally legitimate set of possibilities, still maintaining the central theme of reflecting and commenting on the human condition from an African perspective. Once SAKOBA had become established in Europe, Bode was able to address the final remaining part of his artistic vision, which was to study the American dance tradition in order to extend the work of SAKOBA to include the wider contemporary African diaspora.
Through Bode’s recent work at UCLA and in California, this step is also now securely in place and the work now being produced reflects a truly contemporary African vision – that of Africa in the wider global community.

For this reason, the work of SAKOBA has been correctly described as post-modern, as it takes the elements which arise from history and reassembles them to represent an interpretation of contemporary reality.
Sakoba Dance For All
Sakoba Dance For All is the sister company formed to provide educational outreach workshop projects of the highest quality to a wide and diverse audience. The company's role as a key advocate in the UK for African Peoples Dance has been matched by the tremendous contribution the company has made since 1986 in terms of education, outreach and professional training, through an exhausting schedule of projects and residencies across the country.


SAKOBA is a living work – it is about growth, experimentation and change, located – as is all humanity – within a particular cultural framework. It speaks clearly about, and to, people of all nations because it deals with life.
Sakoba Latest
NEW PRODUCTION


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AUDITIONS

Male & Female Dancers Wanted.
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MASTER CLASSES

27th July.
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