The first fact about Head Peace is that Niki “Awandee” Tsappos does not dance it herself. She made the work, shaped its choreographic world and led its creative team, but its two bodies onstage belong to Kelly Bigirindavyi and Claudio “Comics” Fernandes. The distinction matters for a choreographer whose name is widely known through her own dancing. In this piece, she gives an audience her vision through someone else's movement. It is an act of trust that sits at the heart of the work.
The duet offers an unusually gentle proposition for an Afrofuturist stage. Its dancers enter a space guided by groove, rhythm and an inward voice that can be difficult to hear in ordinary life. They move through hip hop, freestyle and improvisation toward a state the title calls peace. Stars and the moon inspired the maker, but the future onstage does not depend on a prop spaceship. It depends on whether two people can listen closely enough to share a pulse while remaining themselves.
Tsappos is an Ethiopian-born choreographer and dancer who grew up in Stockholm after being adopted as a baby. Her relationship to hip hop began young and developed through dance battles, touring and teaching. With Martha Nabwire, she formed the first female duo to win the hip hop category of Juste Debout in 2010. The film Martha & Niki later recorded part of their working life. Those achievements made her visible as a performer. Head Peace, presented by Riksteatern in 2022, moved her into a full-length choreographic role. She had to decide how a lifetime of knowledge held in her own body could become a stage that others could inhabit.
The word she chose carefully
In a 2022 conversation with Kingsize, Tsappos described Afrofuturism as the nearest available word for Head Peace, then immediately complicated it. She had used the term to help other people understand the work, she said, rather than beginning with a plan to make an Afrofuturist piece. The performance was as much about the past and present as the future. She connected its atmosphere to looking at stars from her balcony and to a sense of contact with dimensions beyond the everyday. The admission is revealing. She does not treat a cultural label as a recipe. She starts from an experience and asks which language might carry it toward an audience.
The piece's own materials justify the word's usefulness without erasing her hesitation. Its artist description calls the setting an Afrofuturistic universe made through hip hop practices, freestyle and improvisation. The dancers' conversation is physical. Costume, light and music shift the sense of place. A touring programme described meditative practices and ritual dance inside the same production. The future is less a date than an altered quality of attention. The work lets a person feel what might become possible when rhythm is allowed to guide rather than merely entertain.
Tsappos's caution also protects the work from a narrow idea of Afrofuturist imagery. Stars and speculative space appear in the conversation, but the performance's principal technology is a dancer's capacity to listen, respond and invent within a beat. The body learns something through repetition and then risks doing something new. That combination of memory and invention is familiar in freestyle. It allows a future to emerge from a practice with its own history instead of pretending that originality begins when history has been left behind.
In the Kingsize interview, composer Ayesha Quraishi speaks about inspiration from Dogon cosmology and its relation to stars, and about metallic sounds in the score. The music is Quraishi's contribution to a production Tsappos directed. Their distinct roles allow the sound and choreography to meet without treating one artist's references as the other's biography.
From battle to a duet
Tsappos's path through hip hop matters because Head Peace is not a sudden change from competitive dance to art. A battle asks a dancer to answer another person in real time. It tests technique, timing, character and invention before a watching circle. Freestyle draws on learned vocabulary while making a response that cannot be completely planned. The circle is social: other dancers and spectators change the energy, even though one or two performers may occupy its centre. Those conditions already contain the roots of a theatrical encounter.
The duet translates some of that responsiveness into a different duration. A stage production can shape light and sound more carefully than a battle setting. It can let a quiet moment last without requiring an immediate winning reply. It can bring two dancers into conversation through tempo, pause and proximity. In Head Peace, the skills of freestyle are not polished out of existence by the theatre. They become part of its dramaturgy. The performers can carry individual styles while sharing the structure Tsappos has made for them.
The credits make the collaboration concrete. Bigirindavyi and Fernandes dance. Quraishi wrote the music. Angela X worked on set and lighting, Ellen X Elias on costume and mask, and Andreas Sanchez assisted the choreography. Riksteatern produced the show with Cipha64, the collective Tsappos founded with Sanchez. Each contribution changes what movement can mean. A particular light can turn a gesture inward or open it toward the room. A costume can make a body appear unfamiliar without hiding the dancer's skill. A sound can invite a pause where the eye expects speed. The duet's intimacy is built by many hands.
Tsappos spoke of the creative process as a space where intuition could guide decisions. That aspiration can sound soft until one considers the trust it requires in a production. Dancers, composer, designers and producers must make choices without knowing every answer in advance. There are rehearsal schedules and a tour to prepare, but the work asks its makers to remain responsive inside those practical demands. For a choreographer formed by improvisation, the process itself becomes an extension of the form.
The right to take the stage
The circumstances of the commission shaped Head Peace. Riksteatern first approached Cipha64. Tsappos told Kingsize that some members of the crew did not feel ready to appear onstage under the weight of her name. They also questioned what it would mean for a mostly white stage group to tour Sweden presenting hip hop. The conversation led to a different division of roles and to Tsappos taking the lead as choreographer. It was not merely an administrative adjustment. It addressed who could represent a dance culture in a national theatre production and how the people who had built the collective would participate.
A Krull interview with actor Andy Keetla also makes the scarcity of Black leading roles on Swedish stages explicit. Tsappos faced that question from dance, where the issue extended to who could choreograph and shape a touring production. She had toured with Riksteatern before, from 2006 to 2010, but described the return in a new role as a deeper responsibility. A performer must know what to do with her own time onstage. A choreographer has to see the whole work and make conditions for others. That shift gave her a chance to test how an institution could work with a hip hop community as creative partners. It also exposed the friction between a collective practice and a producing structure accustomed to assigning individual names.
Tsappos told Kingsize that she had missed seeing people who looked like her and dance forms she cared about on Swedish stages. Her hope was that Head Peace might encourage other dancers and institutions to make more room for hip hop without treating one production as a completed task. The point carries beyond representation in a publicity photograph. It concerns who directs, composes, designs, dances, teaches and returns for the next work. A future for a form is measured partly by the structures that allow it to continue.
The ambition of the duet sits beside that institutional question. Peace of mind can sound like a private achievement, a state an individual finds by closing out the world. The piece's making suggests something more social. Tsappos built a team with people whose artistic judgments she trusted, then put two dancers before audiences in cities across Sweden. The search for inner space travelled through a public network. A listener's ability to hear an inward voice depended on collaborators, venues and spectators being willing to make room for it.
Where rhythm lives
The later stage work Raised on Rhythm makes Tsappos's long interest in rhythmic intelligence even clearer. Premiering at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in 2023 and later presented at Dansens Hus, it examines rhythm in daily life, history and future through an interactive performance. The work invites an audience to use its own bodies, a different invitation from watching a duet reach toward peace. It makes the spectator's sense of pulse part of the event.
The Dansens Hus programme quotes Tsappos saying that dance and music have helped her navigate life and find a centre. “The rhythm never lies” is her compact formulation. It does not mean a rhythm tells everyone the same truth. Rhythm is felt through a body, and bodies arrive with different histories. But a beat requires a response, even if the response is to resist, wait or listen. In her choreographic practice, that requirement can become a method for discovering what a group knows together.
Raised on Rhythm also widens the cast of making. Participating and cocreating dancers included Damon Frost, Amalie Sasha Schanke, Yared Tilahun Cederlund and Rebecca Wolete. Mr Erik Hjärpe provided music, Ellen X costume, Jesper Larsson light, Moa Hedberg wig and mask, Anna Kölén dramaturgy, and Mr Björn Lönnroos sound. A rhythm may seem to begin in a footstep or drum, yet the stage experience depends on a coordinated field of people. The production's very structure makes collaboration visible in the credits and audible in the event.
The relationship between Head Peace and Raised on Rhythm is not a simple progression from speculative fiction toward pedagogy. Both works take dance knowledge seriously as a way to think. The earlier duet tests what an interior future might feel like through a pair of highly individual dancers. The later work asks an audience to notice its own relationship to rhythm. One offers an imagined world to enter; the other asks people to help produce the experience in real time. In each, the future is a capacity practiced in bodies before it can be described in a manifesto.
Learning within a crew
The collective background of Tsappos's work is part of its aesthetic. She has described dance crews as places where people teach one another. In the Kingsize interview she recalled a period when her group wanted Sweden to see dancehall and there were no regular classes for it available in the places they knew. They learned collectively, trying and sharing what they found. That history gives the idea of a crew more substance than a social label. It is an informal school, a source of artistic challenge and a structure of mutual recognition.
She also spoke about the importance of peers who can assess one's work from inside a shared practice. Praise from a fellow maker lands differently because it contains knowledge of the effort, risk and craft. That sense of accountability can travel into a theatre production. The team around Head Peace was not assembled only to fill departments. It was made of people with overlapping histories of dance, sound and performance, capable of arguing for the shape of the work.
This collaborative method complicates the familiar story of a dance champion becoming a choreographer. Tsappos's 2010 victory with Nabwire was significant and remains part of her public biography. Yet a title won in a battle cannot explain how to make a sustained theatrical work with two other dancers, a composer and designers. The new role asks her to transform competitive responsiveness into an environment that other people can inhabit. She draws on authority earned through practice while distributing the means of expression across a team.
The result is a different kind of virtuosity. Technical excellence remains necessary, but the choreography also has to know when to let a dancer's personal style lead. It has to create space for quiet without losing rhythmic force. It has to welcome an audience unfamiliar with freestyle without turning the work into a lesson about hip hop's legitimacy. Those are formal challenges, and Head Peace addresses them through the relationship of its two performers rather than through a lecture from the stage.
The present inside the future
The strongest part of Tsappos's Afrofuturist proposition may be her insistence that Head Peace belongs to the present. Looking up at the stars can open an imaginative distance from daily routines. Yet the piece returns that distance to a person hearing a groove and another person answering it. Its meditative world is made out of dancers whose craft was learned in actual communities. The space it proposes may feel otherworldly, but it is assembled from real practices of listening, improvising and making with others.
That grounding gives the work political force without reducing it to an argument about policy. A national touring stage can carry a hip hop duet shaped by an Ethiopian-born Swedish choreographer, performed by two freestylers and supported by a collective team. Its presence changes the possible image of what such a stage can hold. The change is not complete because one tour occurs. It becomes meaningful when more makers can follow, when institutions learn from the process, and when the community retains authorship over its forms.
Tsappos describes an inner voice that “always knows” as a guiding image for Head Peace. A duet cannot make that voice audible in a literal sense. It can let a viewer watch two skilled people make decisions within time, trust their rhythmic knowledge and leave space for a surprising answer. The future in her work begins at that point of response. One movement calls; another arrives; the room hears a possibility that neither dancer could have delivered alone.