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La danseuse d'ébène
(with subtitles)
Choreographer and film director Seydou Boro, Mathilde Monnier’s former performer, delivers a documentary about Irène Tassembédo. This figure of african creation was born in Burkina Faso, like Boro.
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
