WAXTAAN - 2007

THE ROOSTER IS DEAD/FAGAALA/THE SAHEL OPERA/THE SCALES OF MEMORY

The choreography is by Germaine Acogny and Patrick Acogny.

The choreographic creation

The new choreographic piece by the Jant-Bi Company is based on traditional dances – the most beautiful and the ones that are best adapted to this creation – originating from several African countries, for example Mali, Republic of Guinea, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Benin, Congo Brazzaville and Senegal. The company highlights their incredible wealth of gestures and rhythms and creates a new view on these dances for which their regular images are those of nonsense. The re-reading of these traditional or neo-traditional dances remains contemporary, as well as the choreographic tools used in order to re-construct and re-compose these dances. Once purified, naked of its common and spectacular tricks, a re-sculptured and surprisingly contemporary dance comes to light.

The originality of the piece does not solely reside with the treatment of traditional or neo-traditional dances. It also relies on the critical view on the men who manage us. The dancers, as a matter of fact, by the intermediary of this choreographic creation, mimic the heads of state, the ministers, the politicians, the men in power. They call out to them via the dance, so that change can truly take place and so that degradation of the economic, social and cultural situation stops.

“Waxtaan” is a petition for excellence, generosity, solidarity. It is an affirmation of our force and of our capacity to go forward and to rescue Africa from its negative image!

But it is also homage to our ancestors, to the beauty and the dance wealth that they have left us, by presenting them to us in their present form.

THE ROOSTER IS DEAD/FAGAALA/THE SAHEL OPERA/THE SCALES OF MEMORY