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In December 2010 and September 2011, at the invitation of Seydou Boro and Salia Sanou, I ran some workshops for dancers, including the course, « Je danse donc je suis » at the Centre for Choreographic Development, « la Termitière » in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Despite their difficult geopolitical and economic situation, these young performers had an energy, an open-mindedness and a creative intelligence that moved me and made me want to share an artistic experience with them.

I would like to develop this encounter with a new creation, entitled Objet principal du voyage with 4 dancers from the course, two men and two women. I would like to get as close as possible to what these four people are in their imagination, their way of dancing and existing on stage but also through confronting my background with theirs, being receptive to their individual life-stories and their personal realities. Their dance is enacted out of necessity and with a certain sense of urgency, as if it were raw, temporarily possessed by, which deals simultaneously with youth and seriousness, with force and fragility. With them, I would like to compose a communal repertoire of gestures by putting the accent on finger position and the expressiveness of hand and arm movements. The gestures replace discourse and language and incite the dancers to embody a variety of states and presences imbued with their very essence. Together, we are searching for movements that express constraint but from where unpredictable energy and humour can emanate at any moment. We are going to try to create a ‘listening territory’ and focal point where dance can be experienced both as an ‘elsewhere’ and a place to assert one’s self. I am not looking for African exoticism.  What interest me is transcribing in an abstract way, through the individual and collective stories of these four performers, an overflowing dance that crosses the very idea of a frontier.  A dance that brings us closer together, a dance which contains existential questions and which experiments with other ways of connecting and seeing one’s self.

Herman Diephuis