Résonances var. 2

Résonances is, first and foremost, a series of encounters in space and time: with Penda Diouf in Ouagadougou, Zora Snake in Bobo Dioulasso, and Ibukun Sunday in Lagos. In 2021, Dorothée invited them, along with the dancer Yinka Esi Graves, to invent a space together in which each story and each practice, from dance to song, and from music to text, combined to build something shared, restorative, and a source of joy and power. Two intensive days in the studio led to a performance at the Festival d’Automne in Paris in July 2021 that has resonated with Dorothée ever since. Five years later, she has once again summoned Ibukun and Penda, along with Naomi Schoutens, whom she met in Bergen in 2024, and Awa Joannais and Marie-Khane Tomei, using the 2021 performance as a new starting point. The bodies have changed and moved, new stories have been written, others erased, paths have been taken, and others forsaken. Covid is now part of the past. Once one accepts these changes, how does one create a diasporic space, how does one celebrate personal narratives shaped by history, colonization, departures both forced and chosen, broken lineages and forgotten ancestry? 

Based on their practices—Naomi and Awa’s virtuosity, honed in ballets and large dance companies, Ibukun’s compositions, blending the viola, electronic sounds and the rhythms of Nigeria, and Penda’s words and acts of resistance—each artist has been asked to inhabit their liberty with an acute awareness of the others, to saturate the space with presences. A form of audacity, of stubborn engagement with life in the face of existences silenced and erased for centuries constitutes a quest for reparation. Lines on the floor and walls demarcate territories and continents between which the artists move, their fluid bodies connecting different lands, vibrantly and dissonantly. Résonances Var. 2 confronts dispersal to celebrate the beauty of possibilities.