You came from hip hop, and have broadened your artistic approach by adding other street cultures as well as a reflection on the colonial fact. What do you make of your career thus far?
I came up within hip hop when it was still an anti-establishment culture, which over time found its place in the cultural landscape. This mode of survival became a passion and allowed me to move from the streets to the stage, rewriting the codes and showcasing the social skills and know-how of the underground, with an awareness and echo of the past. What I wanted to do was assert our foundations, a different way of building history, while taking constant care not to lose sight of where I came from. Because I’m always reminded of the constant risks of assimilation, instrumentalisation, and misrepresentation. My goal is to find the place where I belong, my language, my vocabulary. Broadly speaking, to find a personal way to move within a history that isn’t static, within a necessary back-and-forth which gives me the opportunity to create a path of possibilities, a space that would be a haven. To that end, I’ve met with field workers, academics like Mame-Fatou Niang and Isabelle Launay, or artists from other disciplines such as Alice Diop and Denis Darzacq.
Those experiences allowed you to create your own Maroon thinking and dance?
Yes. A work of transmission that took place over fifteen years in French Guiana allowed me to understand the power of the Bushinengue, the Surinamese Maroons. We all know the figure of the Neg’ marron who fled the plantations to create new societies, creole gardens allied with Native Americans, in order to provide for themselves. In those experiences of deportation and enslavement, there were modes of trickery necessary to survive. They took on the forms of rituals which were reinvented, adapted, and adjusted according to the times and to the language spoken in the region, be it French, Portuguese, or English. Those forms are what became what we know as street cultures. I’m thinking of the Léwoz in Guadeloupe, the Moringue in Réunion, to Jamaican sound systems. With that Guianese journey in mind, it was important to me to find the rhizomes and strata of street dances, to launch a new rebellious charge. I wanted to conceive and create a Maroon dance, inspired in part by the thinking of Dénètem Touam Bona. I worked on the relationship between dance, music, and voice, with a polyrhythmic voice, a cyclical dance, and repetitive music.
Did that imply a different approach to the body?
I’d say it’s more a different body/soul/spirit conversation, which seems more accurate, respects the idea of a rite, and brings the idea of the sacred to mind. Above all, I let myself experience vulnerability. The question of queerness found its place very naturally. My solo was a crucial step in my journey. I favoured moments of silence, of stillness, of suspension, to undo tensions. The idea was to break away from a relationship to the body which had become self-destructive, and to welcome a different way of telling our stories, to see how spiral movements would unfold through space. I had to slow time down, lengthen the music, find a different, more circular configuration. Only the dance/music/voice relationship could bring me such creative freedom.
The name of your structure, Rualité, founded in 2002, brings together the words “rue” (“street”) and “réalité”. Your show G.R.O.O.V.E. is a consecration of its spirit, after the experiment that was Indes galantes at the Opéra de Paris in 2019.
G.R.O.O.V.E. allows me to celebrate 20 years of Rualité. Its duration allows me to orchestrate a long ritual, a journey filled with emotions, meaning, and different sensibilities. This performative project came out of the Opéra-ballet Les Indes galantes, directed by Clément Cogitore and orchestrated by Leonardo Garcia Alarcon, for the 350th anniversary of the Opéra national de Paris. Originally, this opera-ballet was commissioned from Jean-Philippe Rameau to celebrate colonial trading posts in 1735. I used my own story as a springboard to find commonalities and differences between voguing in the 70s, hip hop in the 80s, electro in the 90s, and krumping in the 2000s. We came in through the back door, to find those who make this institutional space, encountering a world of artisans on and around the stage, as well as a world of soloists, musicians, and choristers with whom we entered in a conversation. I gained access to the baroque thanks to the very foundation of music, voices, and dances: the beat. G.R.O.O.V.E. was created in the same state of mind. What we can develop individually and collectively, we bring to the audience, who become witness to a rite of passage
G.R.O.O.V.E. takes the shape of a public stroll to the Opéra Grand Avignon, where you will then be presenting different sequences. What are those?
Before that, the screening of a few short films at the cinéma Utopia invites people to learn how our cultures were built, what we mean by protest culture. Then, we start in the street with artists who “show off” in front of the Opéra, all very “underground,” with different biker cultures, rock and hip hop together. The audience is split in two groups to begin the journey, one in a performative mode, the other in a concert mode. Excerpts from the choreography of Indes galantes return in a subverted way. Benjamin Nesme, who brings the light of the street into the opera, gives this baroque architecture unexpected nuances. Singer Célia Kameni takes over the libretto and pays homage to Nina Simone. Musician Charles Amblard plays and subverts tunes with his lap steel guitar. We reprise excerpts from Indes galantes on stage, to highlight their reception—some called us the “Ballet des sauvages” (“ballet of the savages”). Well, those who call us “savages” (a colonial invention to justify French conquest) can bugger off, as Aimé Césaire would have said: “le nègre vous emmerde !” As in an open form, the audience is finally invited to join us on the stage, as on a dancefloor, to enter this space in turn.
G.R.O.O.V.E. is a testament to your approach to Maroon culture, to the queer spirit, as much as to your desire to bring together different street cultures, including krumping…
My research on deported populations and on their renewed cultures, born of successive periods of globalisation, shows the cyclical mechanics of history, and how we never stop encountering oppression. This ambulatory performance is a flamboyant celebration at the Opéra, a homage to black cultures, to those cultures of the margins that have made me who I am. The first time I saw krumping, I was brought to tears. If I had been part of that community in the 2000s, that’s what I would have done. Krumping is a cry of the body. The soul expresses itself through winces and hand contortions, which bring to mind the baroque. It’s got nothing to do with beauty. But it’s nonetheless a fully embodied gesture, it gives you goosebumps! It’s hard to repress the desire to join the circle, to hype up the dancer in the middle of the community. I respect the ritualised codes of the fame (family), with its sometimes harsh rites of passage. Voguing, krump, or electro, are new initiation rites, which gave meaning to my research and confirmed that what we’re doing has little to do with entertainment. It’s a long road off the beaten path that goes straight to what matters most. Institutions don’t seem to understand our cultures. Their power of reinvention. They provide an entirely different point of view on history. I agree with philosopher Seloua Luste Boulbina when she says “the decolonisation of knowledges is an imagined future, a way to lose the world and to find one’s own world.” I invite everyone to learn, unlearn, and relearn, facing oneself and the others. To accept spaces and moments of silence, stillness, and suspension. From the micro to the macro in a regular back-and-forth. Cultural places can be places of conversation. But not only that. There, we can unfold this idea of movement, of disorientation, of subversion, to create new gestures, new artistic movements in step with our time—other ways to create projects, to be an artist and a citizen. I’m thinking of Senegalese writer Ken Bugul, who uses the image of the spiral. Beyond the ritual implied by the circle, the unfolding of a spiral allows negative energies to exit so that positive energies can enter. More than ever, I want to be a part of that dynamic.
Interview conducted by Marc Blanchet and to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach