Matière(s) première(s) (8+)

A ballet of urban African dances!

Through the simplicity of the dance and the bodily presence of the dancers, Matière(s) première(s) unveils the post-colonial mechanics of cultural and mental domination as well as the military violence that enable the plundering of natural resources, prompting us to question the power struggles underpinning the relations between Africa and the Western world.

From sheer impotent rage to prayers for ancestors, from the reassembly of broken identities to the visceral need to dance out of a refusal to submit: six dancers with convergent paths and issues come together to exorcize their demons and to summon life.

Their dance, subtle and explosive dance, reveals the timeless beauty and underlying brutality of the world. Urban African dances, such as coupé-décalé from Ivory Coast, ndombolo from Congo or mbolé from Cameroon, originate from the African continent. Today, they resonate with the youth across the world. Anchored in multicultural traditional roots, they are the fruit of modernity and of population displacements, connecting us with the primordial language of the body itself.

Matière(s) première(s) is an initiatory trip into the world of urban African cultures and at the heart of the political context in which they evolve.

About the company

Dancer, choreographer, writer and theatre director Anna Nguyen founded the par Terre Dance Company in 2005. She has created about twenty dance and theatre-dance shows, several interactive installations and one short film, Épicentre. Coming from the world of breakdance battles and influenced by scientific studies, she combines a raw, virtuoso gestural vocabulary with a geometrical, pure, de-structured choreographic expression that exalts the power of abstraction. She draws from the observation of gestures, danced as well as ordinary, individual as well as collective, to turn urban dances and popular cultures into a support for a reflection on tradition, on social markers, on diversity, on cultural appropriation and on the tensions between multiculturalism and cosmopolitism.