In Le Havre, where at least half its population are immigrants, Cécile Raynal-Diarra’s African dance workshop finds a special echo. This young French woman lived in Africa for a long time, then deciding, on her return to France, to pass on what she had learnt there. Designed in four parts, Christian Zarifian’s film testifies to the attraction of cultural exchanges that are expressed through this experience of movement.

Allers-Retours is filmed in a single place: the dance studio. Every Wednesday, students of varying origins learn African dance to the beat of the percussions played there. This class is, as often, solely attended by women. Each part of the documentary corresponds to a specific moment in the workshop filmed over the year. With time, the camera is forgotten and the students speak, explaining why they chose to follow these classes. Each one gives their impressions: seeking another state, losing control over your body, being in the music or dancing for others, all these form part of the discoveries of dance. But this learning process also shows the interest each student takes in questioning their own roots, by confronting a different culture or by seeking to regain their own.

Source : Irène Filiberti

Joséphine Baker loved her country and Paris. Cécile Raynal-Diarra loves dance and sculpture. A free electron in perpetual rotation around two centres of interest that are different in texture but both centred on the body, Cécile Raynal-Diarra, steeped in European and African cultures, likes to play on paradoxes and complementarities to encourage encounters. 

A veritable benchmark in African dance, this 37-year-old from Château-Thierry in the Paris suburbs is also a talented sculptor.  A graduate of the Beaux-Arts, this nomad of the arts, who lives in the countryside around Le Havre, has a slim yet solid athletic figure. She devotes herself to the pleasure of clay, her favourite material, which she tempers, soaks, works, kneads and models according to the people she meets. Grave, serene, enigmatic, Cécile's busts are very characteristic. Firstly, because they ‘undergo’ a very specific firing process at 900°C, which gives them a black, burnt appearance that evokes the strange, an almost ghostly presence; and secondly, because they all seem imperceptibly real, frozen of course, but still somewhat alive, a little like the trapped figures of Pompeii, but without any morbid connotations.

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