Rachelle Agbossou
Born in Natitingou, northern Benin, Rachelle Agbossou took a liking to dancing under the aegis of her father, who took her to the “Bal poussière” and enrolled her in dance competitions. In 1999, as she was finishing her fourth year of English at the University of Abomey-Calavi, she joined the Ensemble Artistique et Culturel des Etudiants (EACE). In 2000, she entered the National Ballet of Benin with which she performed in Africa, Europe and China until 2004. At the same time, she was introduced to contemporary dance with the SACAM collective led by Clément Kakpo and Medard Sossa. She also trained with Irène Tassembedo (Burkina Faso), Rokiya Kone (Ivory Coast), Joan Vand Der Mast and Féri de Geus (Netherlands), Erick Kaiel (United States) and Francesca Pedulla (Italy) . In 2003, the Franco-Algerian choreographer Heddy Maalem selected her for Rite of Spring, which toured internationally until 2008.
In 2005, she founded the company Walô, (“behaviour” in the Fon language) driven by the conviction that dance promotes a change in mentalities. With her company made up of a dozen dancers, she is involved in the training of young dancers, secondary school teachers and in education programs in schools around sexual and reproductive health, early pregnancy and unhappy childhood. From 2007, through the Embassy of the Netherlands in Benin, she began a close partnership with the Fondation Le Grand Cru for educational and artistic projects. She created Les Tresseurs de Cordes (a duet with Awoulath Alougbin), Léwé or the childhood of art (with 60 schoolchildren), Gendarme écrasé, Nontchiovi, A Corps et à Cri (with the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers -BFK du Mali), Ondulation (2010) and Foliphonie Mobile (co-production Zinsou Foundation, 2012).
In 2015, she played the lead role in the short dance film Le Son du Serpent directed by Tami Ravid (choreography Féri de Geus), awarded at the Communidanza Festival in Mexico City in 2017. In 2013, with the financial support of NUFFIC, a Dutch institution, she created Touch my Body, Don’t Touch my Body, which denounced the sexual abuse suffered by young girls as well as the taboos surrounding sex education in Benin. Many performances are given in colleges and high schools until 2018. Associated in 2018 with the Multicorps Choreographic Center of Marcel Gbeffa, she opens in September 2020, thanks to the RePaSoC program of the European Union with the support of the Ministry of Culture of Benin, a choreographic training center, the Walô Dance Center, in Calavi, in the northern suburbs of Cotonou. Her solo Sika, created in 2015 at the end of a residency in Dakar which evokes the incarceration of a young Beninese, toured in Senegal (Festival Duo Solo, Saint Louis, 2015) in Burkina Faso (FIDO, Ouagadougou, 2016), in Mali (Danse Bamako Danse, 2016) and recently in France (Festival Bam Bam, TU Nantes, 2021).
Source: Compagnie Walô, https://walo-benin.com
Interviews by Anne Decoret-Ahiha, Cotonou: August 11, 2015, January 7 and June 21, 2021.
