Batalo East links traditional and urban arts to encourage innovation, preserve culture, and develop young people rooted in identity — with the confidence to engage a borderless world.
To build a sustainable creative industry where Uganda's traditional and urban dance forms are documented, taught, and performed at a world-class standard — before the knowledge, and the dancers who carry it, are lost.
To link traditional and urban arts, encouraging innovation, preserving culture, and developing young people rooted in identity.
A generation of artists who move fluently between heritage and the contemporary world — confident, connected, and unmistakably themselves.
Uganda's traditional dance heritage is disappearing faster than it's being taught — and the numbers make the urgency plain.
UNESCO listed Busoga's Bigwala dance and music as intangible cultural heritage in urgent need of safeguarding.
UNESCO, 2012students are currently enrolled in Makerere University's dance programme — the country's leading academic pipeline for professional dancers.
Makerere Universityyoung Ugandan dancers are working almost exclusively in imported urban styles, with little connection to the traditional forms of their own communities.
Batalo East was registered in Uganda in 2013 as a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee. It was formed by members of Tabu Flo Dance Company, Breakdance Project Uganda, and a number of freelance dancers who shared one conviction: that Uganda’s traditional and urban dance forms belonged on the same stage, in the same bodies, in the same future.
Everything Batalo East runs — the festival, the academy, the outreach programmes — serves one of three aims.
To develop world-class dancers, choreographers and dance educators through rigorous training, mentorship and exposure to international practice.
To provide a safe environment where dancers can experiment, fail, and find their own voice — free from the pressure of a finished product.
To link Ugandan dancers to regional and international collaborators, opening doors to festivals, exchanges and opportunities beyond Uganda's borders.