RE-COUNTING AFRICA

Impassioned, engaged modern-day storytelling drawing inspiration from the african diaspora

Ceci n'est pas noire
Alesandra Seutin | Vocab Dance (Royaume-Uni)
30 minutes
Alesandra narrates the journey of an Afropean woman through dance and physical theatre, spoken word and song. She plunges us into personal memories of her upbringing through the winding roads of Africa and Europe, investigating the complex experience of identity. Like the dancer, the expressionistic dancing is a hybrid of urban, African and Euro-contemporary. While playing with masks, roles and attitudes through the distinct perspectives of four figures – herself, that of a club girl, Michelle Obama-like politician and dance hall reggae singer – the performer enters the space of the audience. Shifting the mood from amusement to menace, we are kept on the edge of our seats. She wants us to know that what you see is not always what you get.


The Sleepwalker
'Funmi Adewole
25 minutes
“Where is home?” This is the story of a young girl who was never certain if she was asleep when she walked or awake when she slept. With The Sleepwalker, the artist brings us into an emotional and poetic journey between lucid dreams and nightmares. Through fragments of children’s games, spoken word, social African dances, and day to day gesture, a story unfolds about the disorientation of living in various temporalities and territories. This choreographer, born in the UK, and raised in Nigeria, took inspiration from her personal life experiences. In this unconventional folktale, she embodies both the narrator and all the characters, speaking to us intimately and directly.


Skinbox
Ghislaine Doté | Virtu'O
25 minutes
In these turbulent times of identity politics and fervent international conversations on race, Ghislaine questions us, sometimes directly, “How does the colour of our skin create our perception of others”? She is an ebony-skinned multi-lingual cultural hybrid: French-born, raised in Ivory Coast, an emigrée to Canada. This artist always yearned to be a Disney princess in a cartoon universe of white beauties, having auditioned for the role of a blonde. Skinbox seeks at last to reconcile musical theatre, contemporary dance and new African dance in a single aesthetic form containing spoken word, song, percussion and movement. This expressionist performance, of powerful emotional intensity, opens the possibility for each of us to believe (once again) in the utopia of universalism.