Events

Past Event

Bintou Dembelé’s De la création marronne / On Maroon Creativity

November 12, 2024
6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
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East Gallery, Maison Française, Buell Hall

Screening of S/T/R/A/T/E/S Quartet and GROOVE and discussion between choreographer Bintou Dembelé and Mame-Fatou Niang
in French with English translation

Bintou Dembélé achieved international fame as the first Black woman and first hip hop choreographer hired by the Paris Opera for her groundbreaking reinterpretation of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Les Indes galantes, created with Clément Cogitore in 2019 and the conductor Léonardo Garcia Alarçon.  Her interpretation subverted Rameau's 18th century ballet-opera, originally designed to show the triumph of Enlightenment order over the exotic “other.”  Dembélé's performance involved dancers performing a range of street and club styles like krump, electro and voguing.  

Bintou Dembelé will show and discuss two of the dance films she directed, S/T/R/A/T/E/S-Quartet and GROOVE, and join with Mame-Fatou Niang in a wide-ranging conversation about her artistic approach and how she views her place as an artist.

A prominent pioneering artist on the French hip-hop scene, shaped by a wide range of influences, Bintou Dembelé’s work explores marginalized cultures as well as ritual and corporeal memories, gender roles, and wounds of the past and the possibility to move beyond them through strategies of reappropriation. She has collaborated with numerous artists, and her performances draw on various aesthetics from the worlds of dance, music, voice, and the visual arts.

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 as the choreographer of Les Indes galantes, an 18th century opera-ballet composed by Rameau, in collaboration with Krump dancers. She has been an associate artist at the Ateliers Médicis, Villa Chicago and Villa Albertine, and was one of the ten international artists invited to the 10th anniversary of the Centre Pompidou-Metz. 

Mame-Fatou Niang is Associate Professor of French Studies, the Founder | Director of the Center for Black European Studies at Carnegie Mellon University, and an Artist-in-Residence at Ateliers Médicis. Her books include Identités Françaises (2019) and Universalisme, co-written with Julien Suaudeau (2022).

This event is connected to a performance presented at the L'ALLIANCE NEW YORK, Palabre/s en mode marron & Rite de passage || solo 2 Bintou Dembélé, on Friday, December 6, 2024 - Saturday, December 7, 2024 at 7:00 PM.