Seydou Boro, for a while an interpreter for Mathilde Monnier, is also a choreographer and a director. He dedicates here a documentary to one of the figures of African creative dance, Irène Tassembédo, like himself from Burkina Faso, where the entire film was shot. This portrait, where Germaine Acogny also appears, helps restore an entire part of the history of dance, around the ties and tensions between two continents and two cultures.

Irène Tassembédo has been living in France for twenty years. In 1978 in Burkina, she was selected to follow the classes at the Mudra-Afrique school that Maurice Béjart set up in Dakar and that Germaine Acogny would direct. A meeting with Irène Tassembédo, leads to a vital subject: the issue of the body, its values and its imaginary world, as well as the special meaning it assumes for African dancers confronted with learning Western contemporary dance. By accompanying her career with numerous interviews, work sessions and journeys, this film evokes an approach based on genuine convictions: Irène Tassembédo believes that African dance must take its place in a changing world, without denying its own gestural technique and without its being frozen in a traditional scheme often synonymous of folklore. Her experience covers two generations of artists and their questioning of contemporary creation and cultural mixing.

Source : Irène Filiberti

Originally from Burkina Faso, Irène Tassembédo has been developing a new approach to African dance in Europe since the early 1980s, one that is in tune with the times and constantly reinventing itself while drawing on its roots. An eclectic artist, she has worked with director Matthias Langhoff since 1993. Returning to Burkina Faso in 2007, she set up the ÉDIT (Irène Tassembédo International Dance School) with the aim of developing a high-level professional training programme for African dancers and choreographers. She is artistic director of the Ouagadougou International Dance Festival (FIDO), which she set up in 2013. Since 2015, she has directed several films. An artist resolutely committed to the issue of women in culture, she sees the development of this sector as one of the keys to combating the rise of radicalism and building the resilience of African peoples in the face of the violence of poverty and armed conflict.

Source: Centre national de la danse