Bintou Dembélé

What form would a “maroon” dance take? Historically, the term “marroonage” referred to when African slaves escaped from the masters who held them in captivity. In art, the term has come to designate the conquest of a space of freedom in response to the constraints imposed by a system. Bintou Dembélé, who honed her craft through hip-hop before developing her own transdisciplinary aesthetic, is now pursuing her research into this idea through this new solo, devised for the dancer Michel “Meech” Onomo. After intense collective adventures, including Les Indes galantes at the Paris Opera, Rite de Passage – Solo II, developed in particular during a residency at the Villa Medici in Rome, is centred on the memory of a body, meditating on questions such as time and death. In the aesthetic landscape that shaped this work we find the choreographer Alain Buffard and the dialogue he developed with Anna Halprin in the early 2000s, as well as the musician Charles Amblard for the sound design.

Acknowledged to be one of the pioneers of hip-hop in France, Bintou Dembelé began dancing in 1985. A co-founder of the groups Ykanji and Ladyside, she also worked with Aktuel Force and at the Théâtre Contemporain de la Danse in Paris before founding her own structure, Rualité, in 2002. In 2019, she made her début at the Paris Opera, where she choreographed Les Indes galantes, an opera-ballet directed by Clément Cogitore and directed by Léonardo García Alarcón. She is an associate artist at the Ateliers Médicis and one of the ten international artists invited to the 10th anniversary of the Centre Pompidou-Metz. In 2021, she will inaugurate the Villa Chicago.