Guest Artists and Masterclasses

Pape Ibrahima Ndiaye ("Kaolack") was born and raised in Senegal by his grandmother, Kaolack began his professional dance career at École des Sables in Toubab Dialaw, Senegal. He was a member of Germaine Acogny’s Compagnie Jant-bi from 2001-2007 with whom he toured internationally and danced in works by choreographers including Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Kota Yamazaki.

In 2008, Kaolack became the first Senegalese choreographer to win the pan-African contemporary dance ‘Danse l’Afrique Danse’ Choreographic competition from Africa and the Indian Ocean, in Tunisia with his solo J’accuse. He currently lives between Philadelphia and the Czech Republic. In 2014-2016, he worked with Nora Chipaumire on portrait of myself as my father, which was an incredible experience that opened his mind and furthered his understanding of the aesthetics of the black body, Black African performing bodies, and the radical black African presence.

Inspired by the Senegalese Ndaga, he created his own dance vocabulary and continues to investigate it and unpack its potential as a technique. Kaolack’s work is entirely focused on pushing boundaries off space and time, race and gender, liveness, and the full being in the spaces we inhabit and claim as our own, while making space for spirit to be present. It is also about the transmission of embodied knowledge, our bodily knowledge, the animist information rooted in indigenous cultural dance practices that are connected to ancestral wisdom.

His work deconstructs decolonization by creating images that are mesmerizing and futuristic. He received an MFA from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Penn.