Jared Onyango

Onyango is a Pina Bausch Foundation 2016 fellow for dance and choreography, for which he worked with Italian choreographer Francesco Scavetta of WEE Dance Company, based in Sweden and Norway. Onyango is also a 2020 Cape Town University Fellow for the Institute of Creative Arts. For his Institute of Creative Arts Fellowship with University of Cape Town, he presented the project “Jua Kali Pedestrian” as a digital performance for the university’s website. In February 2021, the performance was presented at the French Cultural Centre in Made in Eastlando for the 2021 edition of La Nuit des Idees (The Night of Ideas). 

Onyango’s latest projects have been about exploring movements in public spaces and how architectural designs of public spaces in the city affects movements and behaviors of people in those spaces. In April 2021, he collaborated with Lea Pischke, a Berlin-based dancer and choreographer, to research and create the “Jua Kali” performance, which was presented in Berlin in December 2021. On commission for KLAART Festivals in August 2018, he created the project “Jua Kali Pedestrian” for the public spaces within Kampala, Uganda, which was performed at Kampala Road and Nakasero Market in the city. His works include “Body In A Box,” a multimedia project performed at the Goethe Institut Nairobi, Kenya, in 2018, and “Steps and Traces, a continuous, research-based practice that explores body movements initiated from stepping and various concepts of movement, space, rhythm and musicality.” Onyango has interest in themes touching on the body, alternative forms of spectatorship and urban spaces.