Betty Tchomanga

Born in 1989 to a Cameroonian father and a French mother, Betty Tchomanga began her artistic training in 2004 at the Conservatoire de Bordeaux and with Alain Gonotey of Cie Lullaby. She then trained at the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine (CNDC) in Angers in 2007 under the direction of Emmanuelle Huynh.

Her career as a performer began in 2009. She has collaborated with artists including Emmanuelle Huynh, Alain Buffard, Fanny de Chaillé, Gaël Sesboüé, Herman Diephuis, Marlene Monteiro Freitas and Nina Santes.  

Alongside her artistic practice, Tchomanga pursued literary studies at Université Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle, earning a master’s degree in modern literature in 2014.

Since 2019, Tchomanga has focused primarily on writing and research as a choreographer. Her pieces explore the notion of transgression, understood as the act of crossing or exceeding both physical and aesthetic boundaries.  

Tchomanga is drawn to hybrid forms in which bodies transform and mutate. Through an intense engagement with breath, body and voice, her work seeks to test the limits of body and mind. Since creating the solo Mascarades in 2019, she has focused on the Vodou tradition and its associated representations. She is especially interested in narratives that connect Africa and the West, particularly through colonial histories.  

Tchomanga has choreographed and staged the works Madame (2016), Mascarades (2019), Leçons de Ténèbres (2022), the choreographic series Histoire(s) Décoloniale(s) (2023-2026) and The Sea is History (2026).

Betty Tchomanga is an associate artist at Théâtre de la Bastille in Paris and Danse à tous les étages, an itinerant CDCN in Brittany.