Thomas ‘Talawa’ Prestø is a choreographer creating contemporary work based on the foundation of Africana dance and Indigenous Knowledge Systems as they relate to dance production. Thomas has created more than 30 full evening performances and is the founder of Tabanka Dance Ensemble, northern Europes´ only full time predominantly black dance company. The company creates work to tell undertold and untold stores, through dance from this perspective. Tabanka and Thomas create without concern for normativity and in defiance of standardized Europeanist gender, ethnic, social, patriarchal, and colonial hegemonies. Tabanka is proto-feminist, proto-queer, and proto-melaninrich in its approach, and could in many ways thus be considered non-binary. Tabanka and Thomas work for the diversification of “blackness” as well as actively for social-justice through art and community.
Thomas is internationally known and celebrated for the systemization of the Talawa Technique. A fully codified technique wholly structured on Africana Indiginous Knowledge Systems and epistemes for dance and movement. Thomas holds a Masters Degree in Choreography, from a Westernised perspective, from Oslo National Academy of the Arts.