Cheikh Tidiane Niane

... was born and grew up in Dakar, Senegal. Since his childhood, his deepest passion has been the traditional African dance.

During his education at the "Ecole des Beaux Arts", he already started travelling around Africa to study the different styles of traditional dance.
He became a soloist at the Senegalese national ballet and, on the recommendation of Maurice Béjart, started performing and teaching traditional African dances at the international school LaMudra.

For more than 10 years, Cheikh Tidiane Niane has been enjoying a good reputation as an excellent dancer, teacher and musician in Germany, Switzerland, Austria and throughout many other European countries.

In his workshops, Cheikh does not want to impart perfection of dancing technique, he emphasizes the instinctiveness of movement. His dancing - as well as his music - is full of natural vitality, lightness and vigor. "When Cheikh dances the Bird, you can see it majestically gliding through the air .. he fills us with the desire to share the bird's expressiveness and freedom."

For him, dance is a synonym for life itself: A never-ebbing source of vitality he makes accessible to his students, making them achieve an expressiveness of movement they haven't even dreamt of before. His high sensibility, along with his extraordinary intuition, allows him to adapt to each of his students in just the ideal way.
The dances he teaches in his workshops are derived from traditional motives from his home country's everyday life, such as the wedding dance, the poor people's dance, the slaves' dance, the working dance, the bird dance and many more ...

Cheikh, who accompanies the classes himself on the drum, has the ability to make his workshops a deep, moving "African experience" for everyone!