Timothy Fagbamila’s: Awakening: A Bulb, A Body, A Becoming 

Damodance’s “Awakening” — Utopia Theatre, Sheffield, 9th June 2026

Timothy Oyindamola Fagbamila opens his solo evening not with spectacle but with stillness, a single bulb held like a held breath, and it is this restraint that makes the eventual eruption of movement land with such force. Under the name Damodance, Fagbamila has built a two-hour work that refuses to sit comfortably in one genre. It borrows the grounded weight and polyrhythmic articulation of African contemporary dance, the risk and velocity of African acrobatics, the swagger and hip-forward pulse of Afropop, and threads them together with spoken word that never feels bolted on.

The bulb is the piece’s spine. As a prop it could easily tip into cliché, illumination as metaphor is hardly new territory for a dance-theatre work built around purpose and potential. What saves it here is Fagbamila’s refusal to let the symbol do the work alone. He carries it, hides it, dims his own body around it, lets it sit dark and unlit for long stretches while his physical vocabulary does the arguing instead. The light only becomes literal illumination near the end, and by then the audience has already been shown, through movement, what dormancy and hesitation look like in a body. That sequencing is smart dramaturgy.

The narrative arc, a young man wrestling with whether to answer the call of his own gifts, is not subtle, nor does it pretend to be. This is a work aimed squarely at the youth and young professionals in the room, a piece with an agenda: rise, contribute, shine. Some will find the didacticism heavy-handed, spoken word passages occasionally state what the choreography has already made clear. But there is an honesty in that directness that reads as conviction rather than lecture, particularly because Fagbamila is performing his own testimony. He is not choreographing an abstract everyman. He is dancing his own reckoning, and that specificity keeps the message from curdling into platitude.

Technically, the acrobatic sequences are where the evening takes its biggest risks, floor work and aerial transitions executed with a control that never sacrifices the storytelling for the trick. The Afropop finale, arriving as the character’s answer to his own awakening, is where the room came alive. It is unapologetically joyful, a release earned by everything that preceded it, and the standing ovation it drew felt less like polite applause and more like a room recognising itself in the dancer’s arrival.

“Awakening” is not a flawless work. Its message-first structure sometimes crowds out ambiguity, and a two-hour running time asks a lot of a single mover carrying both narrative and choreographic weight. But as a piece of culture-shifting performance, one built to move a room toward action rather than simply admiration, it succeeds. Fagbamila has made a case, in Sheffield, for dance as exhortation. Let your light shine, indeed.