Coupé Décalé

Documentary on Robyn Orlin and James Carlès’ production ‘Coupé Décalé’, in which they examine in turn the place of this popular African dance in the contemporary world.

About coupé-décalé: the project ‘Coupé-décalé’ is a choreography in two acts.

In the first, entitled ‘I Am Not A Sub-Culture, Rather A Gallery of Self-Portraits with A History Walking in Circles’, Robyn Orlin creates a solo with and for James Carlès, a dancer and choreographer and the initiator of this project on coupé-décalé.

The second act, ‘On Va Gâter le Coin !’ (We are going to rip it up!) is dedicated to a stage performance of coupé-décalé by James Carlès and his five dancers.

[The term coupé-décalé comes from a type of traditional dance from the Ivory Coast, the Akoupé, of the ethnic group the Attié. A cross between Congolese rumba, hip-hop, Caribbean music and French folk songs, coupé-décalé appeared in Ivorean communities in Paris in the early 2000s.]

Programme extract

“From the very beginnings of the project, I had wanted an artistic collaboration with a very experienced choreographer/director who was interested in the subject of otherness. I devised this project only through dialogue, discussion and a combination of different perspectives. I really wanted to get as much distance as possible from these societal questions, about which I knew a great deal and in which I felt very involved.” So it was only natural that Robyn Orlin was contacted, and just as natural that she agreed to throw herself into this project.

Act 1: Making the invisible visible…

For Act 1, after numerous discussions and workshops, Robyn Orlin chose to draw inspiration from my personal history (familial and cultural) to ‘construct’ the solo. The images are real, but the stories and characters are fictitious. The solo examines otherness in Europe (France), intercultural relations and the issue of territorial legitimisation. What do we really know about ‘Afro-Europeans’ (or Afro-French)? What readings can we make from them, from their expressions? Can we relate to each other’s common history? These are just some of the various questions that led us to come up with this first act, with a lot of love and humour. The act is built around the SAPE (Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes – Society of Ambiance-makers and Elegant People), and the character of the ‘SAPEUR’ (the name for members of this society), as they are one of the key elements of coupé-décalé.

Act 2: ‘Textepublic’/’Textecaché’ (Public Text/Hidden Text) and polysemy…

In Act 2, I wanted to put real coupé-décalé dancers on stage, using their own codes of movement, their costumes, their language, etc. My journeys and research into the social dances of African descendants allowed me to discover the eminently political meaning of all these dances. They are born, develop and flourish from well-defined social and (geo)political contexts. Our reading of their movements shows us the extent to which these dances are real traces or markers of our societal history (dissent/assent).
When I first encountered coupé-décalé, I didn’t understand it. In fact, I was rather hostile towards it. It wasn’t until several years later, after a discussion with young pre-teens from a school in Nantes, that I realised that something real was happening. I carried out some ‘research trips’ to French cities such as Marseille and Paris, followed by some time in the Ivory Coast. I discovered the ‘dual language’ of the coupé-décalé dancers. What is said in public or shown to most people is not at all the same as what is shown to the initiated. This process reminded me of the resistance dances observed in slave-owning or colonial societies.
On the other hand, I also noticed that the semantic field of coupé-décalé dancers is – entirely voluntarily – contradictory. Indeed, a single movement or gesture can have several different meanings.
This reality inspired me to write the quintet. The video images are real. Charles Rostand and I filmed them ourselves in Abidjan. They were then ‘recreated’ abstractly and applied to choreographic scenes. These images evoke the urban world, the maquis (a type of restaurant), the glo glo (shanty town). women and the numerous projections made onto them, colonial history, and many other hidden readings to be discovered in coupé-décalé which the video image metaphorically evokes.
Acts 1 and 2 constitute the two sides of the same one card.”

Source : James Carlès