The Impact of Impact dance: Hakeem Onibudo's Praxis

This paper will focus on the career of Hakeem Onibodu, the artistic director of Impact dance and his contribution to developing a theatrical context for the performance of Hip-hop. His company turns twenty this year (2014).

Hakeem emerged in1990s as a dance teacher, promoter and choreographer. It was a time of debates around the meaning of Black dance as evidenced in two documents published in 1993 - Advancing Black Dancing, and What is Black dancing in Britain? Onibodu say he was not aware of these debates as he worked outside the subsided sector, aligning his work with the fitness industry and recreational dance. Tired of waiting for professional opportunities he produced a platform called the SPITZ at the spitz for young dance crews. The platform helped launch the careers of several artists. This ran for ten years from 1997 to 2007. When he began to work in Youth dance with Salder’s Wells theatre his interest in choreographic development as a practice grew. Consequently with the support of Kiki Gale then the artistic director East London dance he started a platform which ran for two years called Two’s Company. The platform featured Hip-hop dancers in a series of duets. His idea was to give dancers accustomed to performing en mass or as virtuosic soloists a space where they were required to focus on the more dialogic and relational aspects of Hip-hop vocabulary.

In this paper I will discuss Onibodu’s work in relation to Pablo Ferie’s conceptualization of Praxis, which he defines as "reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it " and the postcolonial studies notion of re-routing to find what insights they might give us into Onibodu’s career and Hip-hop’s potential as professional practice outside the club setting and beyond commercial dance.