Dance film in Nigeria has long existed in the shadows. While the country pulses with movement in music videos, stage performances and traditional festivals, the deliberate marriage of choreography and cinematic storytelling remains largely underexplored.
Though, a few notable works have emerged over the years, including Qudus Onikeku’s This Is My Nigeria (2018) and the recent When Nigeria Happens (2025), which was billed as Nigeria’s first contemporary dance film and selected for the Locarno Film Festival.
Yet dedicated platforms, consistent funding and widespread audience recognition have stayed out of reach, leaving the genre on the margins. Meanwhile, choreographer and filmmaker Femi Adebajo, founder of The Future of Dance Company, has been quietly building a body of work that refuses to wait for permission.
Adebajo’s latest dance film, Memory in Transit, premiered on YouTube on March 29, 2026, marking a deliberate step away from traditional festival circuits. The film explores how memory shifts and transforms as people move through different spaces and experiences, drawing inspiration from Fulani nomadic culture and the artist’s own life between Lagos and Zaria.
In an exclusive interview with The Nollywood Reporter, Adebajo discusses the concept behind the film, his collaborative process with Dance Never Ends Lifestyle, and his plans to build a dedicated platform for dance films in Nigeria.
The title Memory in Transit reflects Adebajo’s understanding that memory is not fixed. “It moves, shifts, and transforms as we journey through different spaces and experiences,” he tells the Nollywood Reporter. Working between Lagos and Zaria made him aware of how movement reshapes perception, how the familiar becomes distant, and the distant becomes intimate.
He was also drawn to Fulani nomadic experiences, where memory is not tied to a single place but carried through continuous movement, shared, embodied and collective. This idea became the guiding concept of the film, shaping how he worked with the body, the camera, and the landscape.
“Movement is not just subject but method,” he says. “The choreography carries memory, the camera follows rather than controls, and the film unfolds like a journey rather than a fixed narrative. Memory in Transit is both a condition and a process, a reminder that memory survives by moving.”
As both concept creator and director, Adebajo did not see film and movement as separate elements but as extensions of each other. “The body became the primary narrative tool, and the camera became another moving body within that system,” he says. To balance cinematic language with the raw physicality of dance, he worked from the idea that choreography does not exist for the camera but within the environment, and the camera responds to it.
This meant allowing moments of instability, letting movement dictate framing, rhythm and distance rather than imposing a fixed cinematic structure. “The film is built through listening to breath, to gesture, to space,” he explains. “I used the camera to translate energy rather than control it, so the rawness of the dance is preserved while cinema becomes the medium that carries it across landscapes and memory.”
He describes the balance not as a compromise but as a collaboration. “Dance gives the film its pulse, and cinema gives it space to travel.”
The collaboration behind Memory in Transit began from a shared intention between The Future of Dance Company and Dance Never Ends Lifestyle to grow the audience for dance film in Nigeria and to expand how stories can be told through movement.
As the director of The Future of Dance Company, Adebajo led the concept and overall vision while also working closely with the director of Dance Never Ends Lifestyle, who was both a collaborator and a featured performer alongside their dancers. This created a dynamic exchange rather than a top-down process.
After developing the concept and storyboard, Adebajo held a series of conversations with the dancers and the cinematographer to align everyone with the vision. He then travelled to Zaria ahead of the shoot to work closely with the performers, developing choreography, responding to the environment, and refining how the movement would live within each location.
Each partner shaped the final work by working from their strengths. The Future of Dance Company anchored the conceptual and directorial framework, while Dance Never Ends Lifestyle brought a distinct physical language and energy that influenced the choreography and performance quality.
The cinematography also evolved through this collaboration, responding to the dancers and the landscape rather than imposing a fixed structure. “In the end, the film became a shared space where different artistic identities met, challenged each other, and came together to form a unified, living work.”
When asked why he chose dance over traditional narrative filmmaking, Adebajo says the story he wanted to tell exists beyond words. “It lives in sensation, memory, and the body, in ways that traditional narrative filmmaking often tries to explain too clearly.”
He was particularly interested in how Fulani men move through space within a nomadic process, how their journeys are continuous, rhythmic and deeply embodied. “That movement is not just functional; it carries identity, memory, and history. I felt that this kind of experience could not be fully expressed through dialogue or a linear narrative.”
A traditional narrative would try to explain or structure this experience, but he was more interested in expressing its fluidity and continuity. “Dance allowed me to translate that sensibility, to explore movement as language, and the body as an archive of lived experience,” Adebajo submits.
Since Memory in Transit is rooted in ideas of displacement and journey, using physicality made the story more honest and immediate. “Rather than telling the audience what to understand, dance creates space for them to feel the weight, rhythm, and flow of movement, to experience the journey, rather than just observe it.”
The decision to premiere the film on YouTube was deliberate, rooted in accessibility and reach. From the beginning, the project was driven by a desire to grow the audience for dance film in Nigeria and beyond, and Adebajo was interested in meeting audiences where they already are. “Traditional festival circuits are important, but they can also be limiting in terms of who gets to experience the work.”
By choosing YouTube, the film becomes immediately available to a wider, more diverse audience across different locations, backgrounds, and levels of access.
It also aligns with the film’s spirit. “Memory in Transit is about movement, circulation, and shared experience, and releasing it on a digital platform allows the work to travel freely, much like the ideas it explores,” he opines.
For Adebajo, accessibility is not just about visibility but about removing barriers, making sure that people who engage with dance, especially within the local context, can encounter the work without restriction. “In that sense, the premiere is not just a release strategy, but part of the artistic intention.”
The biggest challenge in translating a live dance piece into film format was preserving the raw energy of live dance within the camera frame. He had to rethink the choreography for the lens, allow the camera to move with the dancers rather than control them, and edit in a way that maintains flow without breaking the body’s rhythm.
He chose the dancers based on their connection to the location, culture, and lived experience with which he was engaging. It was important to work with performers whose physical language already carries a sense of place, identity, and movement rooted in that context. “Collaboration and shared growth were also key in bringing the right people together. The movement style emerged from this exchange, blending my choreographic direction with the dancers’ own embodied knowledge.”
The choreography was not fixed beforehand; it developed during the filmmaking process. He arrived in Zaria ahead of the shoot to work closely with the dancers, creating and refining movement in response to the environment, the concept, and the energy of the space.
For Adebajo, the most important emotional layers were transformation and continuity, how memory changes over time but never fully disappears. He was not focused on nostalgia as mere longing for the past, but on how past experiences persist and keep reshaping the present.
“The dancers helped express this through their bodies, using repetition, shifts in rhythm, and energy changes. Their movement carried traces of what has been, while still existing in the present moment, allowing memory to feel active and evolving rather than something distant or lost,” Adebajo states.
He hopes audiences, especially those new to dance film, feel that they don’t need prior knowledge to connect with the work. “The film invites them to experience it through feeling rather than analysis. More than anything, I want them to leave with a sense of movement, of being carried through memory, space, and emotion, and to see that the body itself can tell powerful, complex stories.”
Looking ahead, more dance films are coming. Adebajo and The Future of Dance Company are currently developing a new dance film titled Until We Remain, inspired by the idea of Abíkú children and explores cycles of return, disappearance, and fragile presence through movement, body, and landscape.
This film, he says, “continues our interest in how memory, identity, and existence are shaped through repetition and shifting states of being.” Alongside this, they are also building a new platform, the first dedicated space for dance film and experimental film in Nigeria.
This platform, according to him, will support the creation, sharing, and development of dance films and expanded moving-image practices, giving artists a space to experiment and reach wider audiences. “For The Future of Dance Company and me, this marks a new phase, more films, deeper collaborations, and building an ecosystem where dance film can grow and exist more strongly in Nigeria and beyond.”