>>PREVIEW
NSAMU
Compagnie Danse Nyata Nyata
Choreographed by Zab Maboungou
Runs until April 1
Dancers Studio West (DSW Theatre)
Zab Maboungou invites you into the world of Nsamu — The Subject of Debate.
Her Montreal based Compagnie Danse Nyata Nyata will be exploring a rhythmic journey in dance, gesture, sign and sound. "Nsamu – it’s in Kikongo (the language of the two Congos) – it means debate," says Maboungou, who is of Franco-Congolese origin. "So what we’re debating is what we do not necessarily completely understand."
Nsamu, a solo work Maboungou created in 2003, originally premiered in Montreal, and has been presented in Dakar, Senegal and Ottawa. Due to an injury, her company cancelled their performances at the Vancouver International Dance Festival earlier this year.
Maboungou’s dance background relates to her childhood in the post-independent Congo-Brazzaville.
"I started before I knew I was dancing," she says. "I was in Africa, and when you start dancing it’s part of living, so you don’t really identify a specific activity, just the one that you see around yourself. But (when I was) 14, I knew I was going to dance and that was going to be specific to me."
Dance has taken Maboungou across Africa, Europe and North America as a performer, teacher and choreographer.
"When I arrived in Europe, I started dancing with people that were from all over Africa, which allowed me to really get a good grip on the different traditions of Africa. And that’s how I really developed my dancing – I started looking at what I wanted to do, started digging a little bit further, at the culture itself and the different type of dance forms, and the evolution, historically speaking. And this is how I came up with my own research on movement and perspective," she says.
Her research can be found in her work as a performer, particularly in Nsamu, and in her book HEYA: an historic, poetic and didactic treatise of African dance.
"Going from rhythm to gesture to language – articulated language – to me was a way to organize a debate. How rhythm challenges gesture, how gesture challenges language – always with the idea of articulated language, not just general language as a form of expression, but really articulated language which goes against the idea of rhythm as being a very simple and vague expression of pulsating instinct. We’re talking about rhythm here as something that is very codified and articulated," she states.
Maboungou’s company was the only dance company invited to perform for Nelson Mandela’s historic visit to Montreal in 1990. Her next engagement after Calgary will be in Yaoundé, Cameroon as part of the Festival Abok I Ngoma. |
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