Carmelita Siwa
Carmelita Siwa started dancing as she was very young. At the age of 17, she joined the group Dance or Die (DOD) for two years and collaborated with the groups K-Letas and Bloodmighty. While continuing her studies in management, she participated in competitions and danced in music videos. In the early 2010s, she discovered contemporary dance thanks to the Ivorian dancers of the Jasp company, exiled in Benin. She followed the teaching of Beninese Awoulath Alougbin, Koffi Kôkô, Richard Adossou, and of Frenchman Pierre Doussaint, who regularly gave workshops in Cotonou. As she wanted to become a professionnal dancer, she left in 2015 to the Ecole des Sables, in Senegal, from which she graduated in 2017. She also validated a training in “Art of Teaching” completed at the Termitière, Choreographic Centre of Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso). In the meantime, she is a performer in Issewo, by Richard Adossou, presented during the festival “Dansons Maintenant!”, in Cotonou, in 2012. She also participated in Souvenirs de la rue Princesse, a choreographic project in the public space led by Salia Sanou, which brought together some fifty dancers in a square in Cotonou.
In 2017, Carmelita Siwa created her first solo, Entre être et ne pas être, which was performed at the French Institute in Cotonou, at the Rencontres Chorégraphiques d’Abidjan, and with which she will be selected in 2019 for the “Africa Simply the Best” competition, organised by Serge Aimé Coulibaly, in Bobo Dioulasso. The same year, she joined the group of 32 African dancers who performed Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring (Pina Bausch Foundation, Ecole des Sables, Sadlers’ well). The premiere in March 2020 was cancelled due to government restrictions because of the Covid epidemic, but the show will tour worldwide from 2021.
In 2020, Carmelita Siwa, who created and directs the company Arts Ca’Danser, created Gbemiton (“our voice” in Fon), a piece for four performers, including herself, in which she evokes the difficulty of being a dancer in Africa, particularly for women. Winner with Kadidja Tiémanta of the Gninini programme, an artistic research residency at the Don Sen Folo-Lab 2021, she co-choreographed (In)Secure, presented in November 2021 at the French Institute in Cotonou. At the end of 2021, the duo will be part of Salia Sanou’s play, Demoiselles d’Afrique, which will tour in France until 2022. Selected to represent Benin at the Games of La Francophonie in August 2023 in Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo), the piece Gbe miton won the bronze medal in the cultural competition, creative dance section.
Sources: Programme of the show, Interviews by Anne Décoret-Ahiha, 7 January and 11 June 2021, in Cotonou.
