Sarakasi Dancers

 Over the past eight years, Sarakasi has built a solid platform for developing East Africa's natural performing talents into a world-class school for the performing arts. From its base at Sarakasi Dome in Nairobi, the trust runs daily training programs for over 50 dancers, covering a range of disciplines that include traditional dance, cabaret, salsa, hip hop, street dance and other contemporary dance forms.

 
In 2005, our dance training program was rolled out to 15 community centers, schools and children's homes in Nairobi's poorer slums - taking the joyous expression of dance to hundreds of young people in some of the city's most downcast neighborhoods. In 2009, our outreach program expanded to 40 centers in various slums in Nairobi and thus reaching over 2,000 trainees on a weekly basis.

Sarakasi Trust is also on the forefront of providing exchange opportunities with our international partners.
For more information on training, exchanges and performances, please contact the Sarakasi Trust Office situated at the Sarakasi Dome, Ngara area in Nairobi, Kenya or on the contact information provided.

Sarakasi Acrobats

When you walk the slums of Nairobi these days, you'll often come across a troupe of acrobats practicing their pyramids in the small grassy areas that serve as public parks between people's homes. In these places, people no longer write off these artists with the derogatory terms once common to their trade: 'street entertainers', 'dropouts', 'artists of the poor'. Much of this attitude change can be attributed to the success of various acrobatic troupes, whose professional success on the festival circuits of Europe and elsewhere has led to a re-evaluation of the potential of acrobats in modern-day Kenya. As one of Sarakasi's trainers says, 'A lady came up to me in Korogocho the other day and told me she'd told her son, 'If you want to get ahead, you'd better become an acrobat'. I'm sure she wouldn't have said that eight or nine years back!'

Over the past ten years, Sarakasi's training program has become a prominent force in at least 10 of the city's largest informal settlements - including Korogocho, Mathare, Dandora, and East Africa's largest slum, Kibera where our acrobatic trainers provide a program of free weekly training in local orphanages, community halls, public grounds, and five primary schools that have made performing arts a regular fixture on their syllabuses.

According to latest estimates, at least 2,000 young people have either been directly trained or influenced by Sarakasi's trainers since the program began in 2001, including homeless families, unemployed youths, and children working at dumpsites close to the training grounds. Once these youngsters join Sarakasi's formal training programs, they also benefit from open-door 'classes' in practical life skills such as reproductive health and income-generating activities. In 2005, Sarakasi began an innovative program with Kenya's Ministry of Gender, Sports and Culture and the Chinese Embassy to send seven promising young acrobats from Nairobi's slums to China for a year-long exchange with the famous China Hebei Wuquaio Acrobatic School. Now back in Nairobi, the teenagers have become full-time 'ambassadors' in Sarakasi's residential program, passing on their unique knowledge of the Oriental arts to other young Kenyans.

The Sarakasi Dancers and Acrobats can be seen on national, regional and oversees international Platforms. Sarakasi’s in-house training and choreography team develops dance and acrobatic shows on client’s creative specifications as well as Sarakasi shows involving and fusing all performance disciplines.