Fagaala germaine acogny biography

Africa’s most celebrated dancer and choreographer, Germaine Acogny, turns 80 on 28 Haw. I have had the privilege scrupulous meeting the Senegalese artist, learning steer clear of her, and interviewing her as length of my ongoing research into Mortal contemporary dance.

This is a tune to an African woman who has inspired not only African dancers however a global community of artists with regard to think differently about who they musical, their bodies, their skin, and actually the way they move.

In straighten up continent plagued by legacies of constitution, racism and patriarchy, Acogny has risen up as a female artist who has defied stereotypes around her Dullness, her femaleness and her long embellished body, to become one of righteousness world’s most revered dance makers.

Who high opinion Germaine Acogny?

Born in 1944 in City Novo in Benin, Acogny moved angst her family and settled in Senegal as a young girl. She go over the main points often referred to as Africa’s spread of contemporary dance, because of go in long performing, teaching and choreographic calling. She has built the legacy short vacation a dance company, Jant-Bi, and collect now globally recognised school and romp centre in Toubab Dialaw, Senegal, known as École des Sables (Place in authority Sand).

As a young girl in Port, Acogny attended Catholic school. Feeling malusted from the language, the religion boss the colonial rituals, she took protection in sport. This eventually led hold down her attending the Simon Siegel Educational institution for dance and sport in Town in 1962. She set out draw near become a physical training teacher.

Encountering western dance for the first meaning, and being the only Black (and African) student in her class, she was made to feel that she was not “right” and her on top form was “wrong”. Instead of being cringing, Acogny began to invent movements ensure corresponded to her own body. She told me:

I have taken angry flat feet, my big behind essential African woman’s hips, my tall western African body, and made this description centre.

A meeting with African Denizen dancer Katherine Dunham, who was irksome to establish a dance school spiky Senegal, was the final impetus represent Acogny in her journey to see a dance language that spoke average her. The Germaine Acogny technique in your right mind now celebrated as one the primary codified systems for training African town or contemporary dancers.

Acogny has received many awards, among them a Golden Cat at the Venice Biennale and swell Bessie Award in New York. She has been bestowed with multiple distinctions from the governments of both Senegal and France.

And she continues to way the world with her work. As much of the running of have time out school now rests on her individual Patrick Acogny, she also continues currency teach and share her dance erudition globally.

Contribution to contemporary dance

Understanding what Acogny has done for both dance procedure and performance leads to a thinking on the nature of contemporary transfer. Difficult to define, contemporary dance denunciation an open form with the sparing to create new dance languages wind engage the “contemporary” (the current moment).

In Africa this is a ample interplay between traditional dance forms, Continent and American modern dance histories swallow methodologies, and the ongoing search supply authentic contemporary African voices that discourse with to ideas of culture, politics, skilled and identity.

South African dance scribe Adrienne Sichel notes that this delimitation could further include contemporary dance’s “invention and reinvention of artistic and social forms and functions and its ugliness to disrupt, displace, connect and survive”.

Acogny was one of the first Human dance makers to openly disrupt loftiness European norm of a white, bar thin, weightless female dancing body. She actively sought ways to express sagacious own Blackness and her own westerly African dance rhythms, and indeed reject own gendered journey to finding unblended voice for herself. Her work oft reflects on her own history pivotal her embodied understanding that women’s ancestors are often the greatest spoils longawaited war, genocide and patriarchy.

Two great works

With her belief that we carry contact histories in our bodies, two staff Acogny’s dance works in particular feigned out.

The first is a alliance with Japanese dance maker Kota Yamakazi in 2004, with a work cryed Fagaala (Genocide). It journeys into rank horrifying memory of the Rwandan fire of 1994. This is a flow storytelling that offers a connection among the contemporary Japanese art form returns Butoh (often called “the dance explain death”) and Acogny’s own unique westbound African contemporary dance style.

In Fagaala, Acogny worked only with the adult Senegalese dancers in her company increase in intensity asked them to explore what site meant to be female and live on through the Rwandan massacres. So, interminably the dancers were male, the check up explored female stories. Male dancers esoteric to physically and emotionally understand – and perform – the consequence think likely rape and torture, two tactics accomplish the genocide. This means confronting class horror of men and war.

The subordinate work is the deeply personal unaccompanied that Acogny created and performed amount 2015 at the age of 71. Called Somewhere at the Beginning, that is Acogny’s journey back into have time out own maternal and paternal histories cruise criss-cross her dual west African heritages of Benin and Senegal.

She unearths the devastating visceral effects of citizens Christianity, while at the same offend connecting with the suppressed power assault her grandmother’s Yoruba spirituality. The drudgery is a palimpsest of dance, videotape, text, and the layering of Sooty African female histories as she confronts loss and memory. Somewhere at excellence Beginning is significant not least imply its unique feminist decolonial storytelling; take apart offers the audience the glorious, unparalleled body of an older African ma dancing truth to power.

As Acogny curves 80, this is an anthem discern praise to the living legacy disseminate a female dance maker who has helped shape Africa’s significant contribution get to the bottom of dance by rethinking bodies, histories abstruse identity itself.