Founders

Dennis Karpes and Ilco van der Linde are the founders of dance4life. Two business men who decided to quit their jobs and start dancing to fight back HIV and AIDS.

Dennis Karpes
For many years Dennis Karpes (38) had been brooding over the idea of a big international cultural event where the borders between the classical and modern are blurred and visitors are overwhelmed by the ultimate form of experience. As a DJ he noticed how much dance has become the language of youth worldwide. As a marketing manager of international clothing brands such as Big Star, Kuyichi and Levi-Strauss, he learnt how culture and perception can make people receptive to information. And as a fanatic wind- and kite surfer he had been traveling to South Africa for ten years, where he saw how happy people were when apartheid was abolished.

In those years of travelling, he became more and more aware that the latest enemy of South Africa has no color and hits whoever is within reach, counting 2,000 new cases of infection a day in this country alone. It has always been Dennis' wish to combine the event he dreamt about with 'something good', which had to wake up the world. Now he knew: that event had to break the silence and taboos around HIV and AIDS. “If nothing is done to accomplish this, any development aid will be useless.”

Ilco van der Linde
Ilco van der Linde (43) had been organising events for 23 years. He started at the age of sixteen with Bevrijdingspop, the music festivals celebrating Dutch Liberation Day. In the space of fifteen years, Ilco succeeded in turning the event into the largest youth project in The Netherlands: the Liberation Festivals on May 5th, with some 800,000 visitors in twelve Dutch cities. The first Racism Beat It Festival, held on the outskirts of Amsterdam, which attracted 80,000 visitors, was also organised by Ilco. For six years, he organised the final, classical concert on Dutch Liberation Day in front of the famous Carré theatre on the Amstel river, watched live by the Dutch queen and 20,000 visitors and by many more on TV.

As the director of a large 'event marketing' company in The Netherlands – Music Trends Events (MTE) – he received an increasing number of commercial assignments: from business events and city marketing to brand events or stimulating drinking ‘Milk, The White Engine’. At the beginning of 2002 he took six months off to travel with his wife and two daughters through South America. It was then the news of the gang rape of a baby in South Africa by men, convinced that this would rid them of infection with HIV, hit him like a sledge hammer. How could something like that happen?
It reminded him of the events he organised for ANC and Radio Freedom. Had his activist past and all that (volunteer) work been for nothing?

It suddenly became clear to Ilco that making difficult social issues more appealing was far more important to him than pure commercial work. Breaking down his commercial company and rebuilding it into dance4life, he asked all the hundreds of artists, designers, sports personalities, sponsors, advertising agencies, clients, journalists and politicians he knew to work with him on a cultural project that would become the ultimate form of effective conscience awakening. An international ‘statement of hope’. To open the eyes and hearts of the world. To improve the future chances for young people.

Ilco was Director of dance4life international until January 2007. After 4.5 years of building this international initiative he decided to travel again with his family. Ilco is currently travelling with his wife and three daughters through Africa, Middle East and Southern Europe for two years. He is hoping to be involved from 2009 onwards in supporting dance4life Egypt in developing their event, next to the Pyramids, to become the biggest anti-AIDS and pro-Millennium Development Goals Event ever, by 2014, together with the other dance4life countries. In the meantime he has become an International Ambassador for dance4life, and will always remain its co-founder.