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About
The company, based in Montreal, where it has its offices and studios (the Center de Création Danse Nyata Nyata), operates at 3 levels, multidisciplinary, involving creation, training and research, locally and internationally.
With regard to artistic and global development and the ability of art to anchor itself in the diversity of knowledge and communities, Nyata Nyata represents a model of its kind.
We recognize the works of Zab Maboungou/Compagnie Danse Nyata Nyata by this strong and manifest alliance between the physical and intellectual levels: even spiritual, which have made their mark. Driven by an artistic and cultural action inseparable from the choreographic works that propel it, the entire organization as well as the activities of Zab Maboungou/Compagnie Danse Nyata Nyata in terms of research, transmission of knowledge and creation contribute today to form a breeding ground for the creation and renewal of art and thought.
A CHOREOGRAPHIC ART
For more than three decades, Zab Maboungou/Compagnie Danse Nyata-Nyata has traced the trajectories of a revised and corrected contemporaneity. Through his renewed art of rhythms and vibrant space, Zab Maboungou, who assumes the general and artistic direction of the company, founded in 1987, and is its choreographer, creates works with powerful gestures that stage the bodies committed artists of dance and music, both active and meditative, who transform our relationship to time and life. For this contemporary and futuristic dance, the rigor of the approach in the musical and danced movement, with proven technicality, is inseparable from the strength and freedom that emerge from the works whose poetics rhyme with the philosophical spirit that characterizes the choreographer and author. All the works, choreographed, didactic or literary, musical or visual, represent this unspeakable movement that is body and thought.
With “INCANTATION”, presented in 1984 ——at the Kennedy Center, in Washington, and at the Montreal International Festival of New Dance, in—— , the choreographer and performer will be described as a “finely cut diamond” by the New York Times. , ushering in a new era in the way we look at art forms from Africa.
PIECES
“No thought is active without the movement that carries it. A choreographic approach is not a simple arrangement, but a redefinition of meaning. »
Zab Maboungou
Anchored and articulated bodies, both united and autonomous in the multidimensional space, sound and vibrating scenography, with movement as a corollary in its dynamic and deep relationship with the music, these are the characteristic features of the work that the artists and performers of Zab Maboungou / Compagnie Danse Nyata-Nyata.
Zab Maboungou, whose life spans 3 continents, Europe, Africa and America, whose languages she speaks, draws from the diaspora experience her ability to bring together bodies, identities and diverse formations at the heart of 'an artistic enterprise where the rhythm is masterfully led to structure the space to be redefined and support the awareness-raising actions linking the stage and the off-stage which make the prestige, of great international significance, of the company.
A DISTINCTIVE CAREER AND INFLUENCE
These testify to the asserted desire of the choreographer and philosopher to forge an imaginary that can participate in the "recovery of history", she says, and which, freed from neocolonial representations of the performative body in dance, knows how to take into account ancestral practices and knowledge, here inherited from African dance and music traditions in the world. All this with the LO.KE.TO* as a principle of rhythmic alignment, which engages and articulates the body in space, redraws its gesture and redistributes its energy.
Launched from its beginnings on the stage of the Lincoln Center in New York, with the solo Réverdanse (1995), the company was invited to present the work at the Festival Panafricain de Musique, in Congo-Brazzaville (1996), where its choreographer and dancer grew up and learned dance and where she enjoyed resounding success. It will be the same with the solo Incantation, described as a "finely cut diamond" by Anna Kisselgoff of the New York Times, invited on the main stage of the Kennedy Center in Washington (1998), then, for the first time as a company coming from Quebec, to Korea, at the Taegu International Dance Festival, in Taegu, and at the Pusan International Dancing Festival, in Pusan (1998); in Montreal, at the renowned Festival international de Nouvelle Danse (FIND, 1999), then in Yaoundé, Cameroon (1999**), where Zab Maboungou has already received a tribute for “his exceptional talent in promoting theatrical art; in Africa and America.
ART AND TRANSMISSION
A RHYTHM AND A WAY OF DOING ITwhich will not be denied over the years and which justify the honors that the great artist continues to receive on a regular basis.
Present on the international stages of the 4 continents, Zab Maboungou/Compagnie Danse Nyata Nyata holds, in parallel – and thanks to its artistic director – the role of a company committed to the renewal of dance training.
Zab Maboungou co-directs, with Alphonse Thierou, the first major inter-African seminar on contemporary research in dance, organized by MASA (Marché des Arts vivants de la Scène Africain), in Bouaké, Côte d'Ivoire (1997) , after which she will be appointed by the Minister of Culture, artistic advisor to MASA, for several years.
She continues her own work in Montreal, where she founded, in 2003, the PEFAPDA (Training Program and Artistic and Professional Dance Training), an unparalleled program, thanks to which she puts forward what her research has extract from the fundamentals of African rhythmicultures (a term of your invention), in the world.
All this DEVELOPMENT aroused a lot of interest and she was invited to present another solo, De/Liberate Gesture, at HARVARD University, USA (2011), to comment on her somatico-cognitive approach to movement, then, with the same work, to inaugurate a new department, Center for Performance Philosophy, at the University of Surrey, England (2016).
This recognition, which is coupled with a strong TRANSNATIONAL IMPACT, makes Zab Maboungou/Compagnie Danse Nyata Nyata a pioneer and leader in more ways than one (the first of which was granted to her in 1993 by Dance Immersion, the only broadcaster to the Afro-descendant diaspora in Canada).
The African, Afro-descendant and Diasporic communities, in America and in Africa, recognize in Zab Maboungou a FIGUREHEAD of this artistic development associated with international reflection in the arts, as evidenced by the very recent tribute that has just been made to him in Togo. by the International Festival of Theater and Plastic Arts (FITAP; 2022). And for the second time, Zab Maboungou will assume the role of keynote speaker at the next meeting of the one and only International Black Dance in the world, an organization based in the United States.
KNOWN FOR ITS SOLOS*, the company is also famous for its iconic PIECES DE GROUPE*, such as MOZONGO or MONTRÉAL BY NIGHT (the latter which renews the presence of the cello, noticed then in the solo DÉCOMPTE, in 2007).
Zab Maboungou organizes the creation according to a “QUESTION/ANSWER” MODEL, characteristic of many traditional music and dances of the world. The solos, therefore, are the questions, and the group pieces the answers. The works, thus, participate in this reflexive movement so dear to the choreographer and MOZONGI (created in 1997 and which was revived on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the company and which will soon be the subject of a new version), of the fact of its longevity, thus rubs shoulders with several generations of "responses".
She is the one who co-directs, with Alphonse Thierou, the first major inter-African seminar on contemporary research in dance, organized by MASA (Marché des Arts vivants de la Scène Africain), in Bouaké, Côte d'Ivoire. (1997), after which she will be appointed by the Minister of Culture, artistic advisor to MASA, for several years.
She continues her own work in Montreal, where she founded, in 2003, the PEFAPDA (Training and Artistic Training Program in DAnse), an unparalleled program, thanks to which she puts forward what her research has extracted from fundamentals of African rhythmicultures (a term of his invention), in the world.
All this DEVELOPMENT aroused a lot of interest and she was invited to present another solo De/Liberate Gesture, at HARVARD University, USA (2011), to comment on her somatico-cognitive approach to movement, then, with the same work, to inaugurate a new department, Center for Performance Philosophy, at the University of Surrey, England (2016).
This recognition, which is coupled with a strong TRANSNATIONAL IMPACT, makes Zab Maboungou and her company pioneers and leaders in more ways than one (the first of which was granted to her in 1993, by Dance Immersion, the only broadcaster in leadership of the Afro-descendant diaspora in Canada).
The African, Afro-descendant and Diasporic communities, in America and in Africa, recognize in Zab Maboungou a FIGUREHEAD of this artistic development associated with international reflection in the arts, as evidenced by the very recent tribute that has just been made to him in Togo. , by the International Festival of Theater and Plastic Arts (FITAP; 2022).
And for the second time, Zab Maboungou will assume the role of keynote speaker at the next meeting of the one and only International Black Dance in the world, an organization based in the USA.
A RHYTHM OF CREATION
Zab Maboungou/Compagnie Danse Nyata Nyata is also a MUSICAL SENSE OF GREAT REFINEMENT, contrasting with the sonic power that emerges from the works, and which characterizes the way they are constructed, at the heart of rhythmic scenographies from which emanate the expert, autonomous and combined conversations, dance and music artists.
It is also for this musical sense that Zab Maboungou will be invited to choreograph and dance L'Oiseau de feu, by Stravinsky, during a tour of the Orchester Métropolitain in greater Montreal, with Yannick Nézet-Séguin. .
Crew
Zab Maboungou
Artistic and General Director
Angela Cardona
Assistant Director
Leonora Moncada
board of directors
Sheila Kavanaght
president
Zab Maboungou
vice-president
Abdou Malique Ouedraogo
president
Mariya Moneva
administrator
Frantz Voltaire
administrator
Francis Martel
administrator
Yvette Mbogo
secretary
Francis Martel
administrator
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