Finding the right dancers to fit your company’s ethos and style is an important business. Most artistic directors devote a reasonable amount of time to it, but Qudus Onikeku takes the process to a whole new level. Five of the ten dancers currently touring the UK in QDance Company’s vibrant work Re:Incarnation have been newly recruited. But it took a whole year for Onikeku to select the people who were just right for his movement and philosophy.

‘We did a year of training from Monday to Friday, 9am to 3pm, with 32 artists,’ he says when we meet at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. ‘Then, gradually, we chose five. And we did something similar with the other dancers in the company. In fact, it took five years in different dimensions with different kinds of training, and at the end of that process I eventually selected the dancers.’ Watching the performers on stage later that evening, it becomes evident why Onikeku spent so much time cherry-picking. Yes, they are all competent dancers, but there’s something else, an energy and individuality that allows them to wear the show’s subject matter (birth, death and rebirth) as comfortably as their brightly coloured costumes. Accompanied by two live musicians on guitar and drums, their bodies move with a compelling earthiness, exuberance and almost spiritual intensity.

So, what was Onikeku looking for during that lengthy selection process? ‘I don’t believe so much in styles, in forms, or even in formal training,’ he says. ‘I’m looking for people who have their own dance. I’m also looking for people who are very intelligent in their body, and who understand space and time. Collaboration is something I’m excited about too, so sometimes people say “this guy was one of the best dancers, why didn’t you select him?” But I’m not looking for the best dancers, I’m looking for people who can understand why what we’re doing is important. Individually, they might be better than everybody else, but maybe collectively they’re not there yet.’

Born in the Nigerian city of Lagos, Onikeku learned the dance styles of his native land before moving to France aged 20 to study contemporary dance and circus arts. After a period creating his own shows and dancing the work of others including Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Boris Charmatz, Onikeku returned to Lagos in 2014 and founded the QDance Center. Ten years later, the performance wing of his organisation has finally made it to Britain, blending everything Onikeku absorbed during his time in Europe with influences form the traditional Yoruba culture.

‘I realised that the bodies I was seeing in France . . . we don’t speak the same language,’ says Onikeku of his return to Nigeria. ‘We might be speaking French or English together, but there is another language in the body, and I couldn’t find those bodies there. So, for me to get to the next level of my work as an artist, I needed to literally change space and start meeting these other kinds of bodies; people who have a similar archive to mine, because we experience colonialism together, and what it means to formulate a nation at the end of that.’

While Re:Incarnation touches upon Onikeku’s personal fascination with body memory, philosophy and how we celebrate our cultural differences, the action we see on stage is very much a group effort. ‘I don’t usually call myself a choreographer,’ he says, ‘because I don’t choreograph, I teach. I lead the dancers into a certain kind of depth within themselves. And it’s so important to me for each individual in the piece to find their own language, their own original way of moving and dancing. So, my work is more like composing with an orchestra, with all of these differences in the space; it’s a co-creation with each of the dancers.’

QDance Company: Re:Incarnation tours until Saturday 19 October.