RECIPROCITY
Equipped with unrivalled subversive power, choreographer and performer Nadia Beugré began her artistic career studying traditional dance in the Ivory Coast. She was a founder member of the Tché Tché company in 1997, ultimately moving to the Germaine Acogny’s Ecole des Sables in Senegal, where she began to mix different approaches to dance and further her choreographic journey. Then came a move to France, where she studied at the Ex.e.r.ce – Danse et Image, part of the Montpellier Choreographic Centre. It was here that she began her collaborations with Seydou Boro, Alain Buffard, Dorothée Munyaneza and Boris Charmatz.
Quartiers Libres (2012) is the performance that launched her on the international scene as an interpreter of undisputed strength. For Short Theatre 2021, she returns to this material in order to create a site-specific version for the Galleria della Pelanda. A female figure appears, intent on confronting the taboos that constrain her, engaging in an intense struggle in order to tame the space around her, searching for a zone of freedom, one without limitations. Inhabiting this controversial terrain means coming up with new tactics, where forms of expression, revelation and independence are negotiated.
What paths do we dare not cross?
How do we react when, as black women, we enter into forbidden spaces?
How do the spaces that we are excluded from exploring inform us?
A body cocooned in a sort of repurposed plastic chrysalis collides with a world of representations based on surveillance and control. An overbearing universe of sound and light is the point of departure for an unrelenting struggle between the body and those inorganic remains that want to merge with it.
The performance will be punctuated by the ghostly movements of a group of young people who met at Rome’s RECIPROCITY workshop.
