Short Introduction
Dancers
Audience
Countries
Youth-work
Ticket Coverage
Tabanka Dance Ensemble delivers an unparalleled experience of expertly crafted, high-quality contemporary dance performances. These performances are deeply rooted in the rhythms, energy, culture, and interactive traditions of Africa and its Diaspora. At the heart of Tabanka's ethos is a unique blend of groundbreaking performances, nurturing artist development, education, and active engagement with communities and youth. This ensemble is globally renowned as the home of the Talawa Technique™, a distinguished and fully codified technique in African and Caribbean dance. Tabanka expertly weaves dance as a catalyst for social change.
Led by its professional dance troupe, Tabanka gives a powerful voice to the often-unheard narratives, providing platforms that celebrate, preserve, and elevate the artistic heritage of Black Nordic identity.
With an impressive outreach, the company has captivated over 786,000 audience members, consistently maintaining a 97% ticket sales rate and producing two major stage productions annually. Its youth initiatives have positively impacted an average of 16,000 teenagers and young adults each year. Furthermore, Tabanka's digital presence is formidable, with videos garnering over 16 million views on YouTube and a substantial following of 72,000 on Facebook.
Tabanka excels in crafting bespoke experiences for any setting, be it high art events, business gatherings, or community activities. With a firm belief that African and Caribbean dance should transcend societal boundaries, the ensemble demonstrates that dance is an art form without limits in application or value. Tabanka actively collaborates and consults with various organizations, contributing to their creative growth, health initiatives, and audience development strategies.
As a leading figure in the African Diaspora Dance scene in Europe and the Nordics, Tabanka is committed to elevating the field. It achieves this by sharing knowledge and practices, and advocating for fairness and representation within the European and Nordic art scenes, and society as a whole.
Artistic Approach
African Aesthetic Dance
Tabanka uses the rich aesthetics of Africa and the Caribbean in order to create vibrant contemporary work. The performance technology of deep cultural rituals are given a continuation as it claims new spaces through reverse colonialization. Ancient Future is a central principle of narration in Tabankas art. Audience and dancers are weaved through call and response, as they imagine, forward, and back, together.
Identity, colour and body
The body mediated through perceptions about identity, belonging, ethnicity and colour, is a central theme in our thinking surrounding identity today. In Tabanka we lead a close dialogue with our ancestors´ moveable architecture and our own sensorial perception of the reality and ourselves.
The black body in motion is tainted by strong contrasts of associations: the primitive, urban, animalistic, sensual, forbidden, dangerous, liberal, conservative, political, humorous, free and enslaved. In Tabanka we want to have a fearless approach to this, and seek to challenge the black body’s artistic potential. The black body’s many powerful associations, myths and taboos gives it an unique ability to create temporal displacements, and embody memory-technology in our use of narrative layers. This we explore and use as a strong artistic means.
Redistribution of the sensory
Tabanka takes upon itself what the French philosopher Jacques Ranciere, in his description of arts ethical-political potential, called “the redistribution of the sensory. The art is political because it can contribute to challenge the existing redistribution of what can be seen and heard, and by whom.
Sensory fellowship
We open up for new sensory fellowships. By representing untold and undertold realities and fiction, in Norway and in the West, we challenge the current distribution of what is real or fictitious, and myths about who, what and how it is physically move in Norway and in the West. Tabanka confronts established stories about the body – especially the black body – and consequently also about the world and our existence.
Immaterial Experiences (Embodied knowledge transmission)
Africanistic diaspora art has a tradition of focusing on the context of bodies and identities, as part of the danced ritual. Africanistic deep cultural traditions communicate and relay visible and invisible knowledge and experiences through the body. This creates both sympathy and empathy on a muscular level. The audience can sense this through the dancers´ body.
The dancers transfer, through movement, the most immaterial and intangible of these experiences. This is further enhanced through the´ “call and response” tradition, which reformulates the contract between the spectators, audience and the staged subjects.
Audience
Tabanka attracts a very heterogeneous audience, that extends beyond and crosses boundaries, be it geographical, cultural, ethnic, experiential, sociocultural, and political, not at least in terms of the question of identity. This is a new and unique audience composition in Norway. Tabanka makes use of African and Caribbean performance methodology in order to break down hierarchical systems and oppositions between the different audience members´ knowledge and experiences. The result is a sensory fellowship in which the audience is enhanced as a norm-breaking and meaning-creating participants, who are woven into the fiction of the art piece. Transforming the audience into bound and participatory witnesses to the identity that is about to manifest itself through the danced
THE TALAWA TECHNIQUE
A Fully Codified System
Talawa Technique is a fully codified and examinable technique for Africanistic kinaesthetic movement.
The Talawa Technique seamlessly merges ancestral movements, culturally contextualized vocabulary and contemporary movement sensibilities. It bridges the gap between “urban freestyling”, traditional and contemporary dance. Thus offering a fused approach to stylized movement for stage and art production.
Talawa Technique uniquely combines rhythmic structures, a specialized approach to grounding, and traditional African Aesthetic movement qualities, such as: trembling, shaking, undulating and pulsating.
The Talawa Technique makes a clear distinction between aesthetical and technical choices. This allows the dancer to develop full ownership of their bodies natural bends and curves. The approach connects them to history and culture in an empowering way. Dancers are guided to skilfully master multiple isolations and polyrhythmic articulations, alongside the work of breaking down mental and cultural barriers, in order to free movement. The technique uses knowledge and culture as a liberating tool to create confident performers, who embrace their own identities, as well as the multiple identities of africanistic movement.
In Tabanka we aspire to draw heavily from the movement elements from danced rituals from Africa and the Caribbean. From deep within the body, the polyrhythm, the hip rotations, and the extreme contrasts of the rituals, vibrations will stem and blend into black bodies in danced rituals made to fit the specific context and diaspora in Norway and the West. Not without causing reactions, ranging from harmony to dissonance. The dancer´s flow, vibrations, transitions and breaks will nevertheless be felt and perceived through our many senses, also those that do not have had traditions to uphold them in the West.