Les Écailles de la mémoire [transmission 2014]

Extrait chorégraphique remonté par le groupe Koroll (Ploénour Lanvern), directrice artistique Soaz Jolivet, coordinatrice Émeline Marchand, dans le cadre de Danse en amateur et répertoire (2013)

Choreography by Germaine Acogny and Jawole Zollar
A choreographic extract remodelled by the group Koroll (Ploénour Lanvern), artistic director Soaz Jolivet, coordinator Émeline Marchand, as part of the “Danse en amateur et repertoire” programme (2013) (a programme created to assist and promote amateur dancing).

The group

Koroll was set up in 1990. Since 2010 the current group is made up of students from the Tamm Kreiz school and of young adults who have participated on several occasions in choreographic projects. The group already knows what it’s like to perform on stage as it has participated in cultural events and shows proposed as part of solidarity actions, music festivals and dance days. In the scope of the cultural projects that Françoise Jolivet, the director of Tamm Kreiz, develops to promote cultural awareness and the discovery of different aesthetics, in 2012 the association signed a partnership agreement with the association Jallore, which has the project of building a cultural centre in Saint-Louis-du-Sénégal focusing on three areas: training, creation and dissemination. For fifteen years, Ciré Béye, the Jallore project leader, was a dancer in the company Jant-Bi directed by Germaine Acogny.

The project 

This was the context in which the work Les Écailles de la mémoire by Germaine Acogny and Jawole Zollar was chosen. The result of a long collaboration between the choreographers and their companies – the six women from Urban Bush Women (New York) and the seven men from the company Jant-Bi (Senegal) – it explores the themes of memory, resistance and love. Ciré Béye participated in the creation of the piece, he followed the entire collaboration process between the two companies, and was the interpreter of the piece on its international tour. He chose the extracts and adapted the work by a choreographic decoding. The Koroll group is made up of eight female dancers. The aim is to respect the parity that structures the piece. The female dancers carry out a specific work on the interpretation of the sequences danced by men in order to respect the meaning of the work.

The choreographers

A Senegalese and French dancer and choreographer, in 1968 Germaine Acogny set up her first African dance studio, before carving out a path that took her from Europe to the United States. “I have taken the essence from the traditional dances of West Africa and from the dances that I have learnt in Europe, and I have created my own technique”, the choreographer explains. In 1998, it was in Toubab Dialaw, south of Dakar, that this artist, passionate about dance, founded her École des sables, where hundreds of dancers from all over the world have been trained. A way for her to bring back to life Mudra Afrique, the short-lived dance school founded in 1977 in Dakar by Maurice Béjart with the support of the president Senghor – and that she directed for a while.

A dancer, pedagogue and choreographer, Jawole Jo Zollar is the founding director of the African American company Urban Bush Women (New York).