DeLaVallet Bidiefono

Born in Pointe-Noire in the Congo in the early 80s, in a neighbourhood where the word ‘contemporary art’ did not exist, DeLaVallet Bidiefono heard the word for the first time at the age of fifteen. Nothing predestined him for dance, apart from the extraordinary tenacity that made him a hard worker, an adventurer of movement and a researcher. In 2001, he moved to Brazzaville and began his career as a dancer, taking part in the Ateliers de Recherches Chorégraphiques organised by the Centre Culturel Français, before setting up the Compagnie Baninga, which gained international recognition in 2008. DeLaVallet Bidiefono has increasingly opened himself up to new worlds, nourishing his work with influences from Africa, Europe and America. He has worked with many artists, including David Bobbée, David Lescot and Dieudonné Niangouna. Invited to the Festival d’Avignon in 2013, DeLaVallet Bidiefono has been a guest artist at a number of leading cultural venues, and now lives between Paris and Brazzaville. Since 2015, he has been giving Brazzaville a major boost with the construction of Espace Baning’art, the first independent space dedicated to artistic creation in the Congo. It’s a way of affirming and going further in his fight to support artistic creation and the emergence of artistic projects in a country where cultural policies are virtually non-existent.