About coupé-décalé...
The project Coupé-décalé is a piece of choreography in two acts.

In the first part, entitled I Am Not a Sub-culture, Rather A Gallery of Self-Portraits with A History Walking in Circles, Robyn Orlin creates a solo with and for James Carlès, a choreographer and dancer and the initiator of this project based on coupé-décalé.

The second part, On va gâter le coin ! is dedicated to a stage performance of coupé-décalé performed by James Carlès and his five dancers. 

[The term coupé-décalé comes from a form of traditional dance from the Ivory Coast, the Akoupé, from the Attié ethnic group. Combining Congolese rumba, hip hop, Caribbean music and French folk songs, coupé-décalé appeared at the start of the 2000s in Paris in Ivorian communities.]

Programme extract 

“Since the origins of the project I had wanted an artistic collaboration with a very experienced choreographer/director and one interested in ideas of otherness. I only came up with this project through dialogue, discussion and shared views. I really wanted to take as big a step back as possible from this societal issues that I know well and in which I feel very involved. It was only natural that Robyn Orlin was contacted and equally so that she agreed to throw herself into this project.

Act 1: Making the invisible visible...

For Act 1, after numerous discussions and workshops, Robyn Orlin chose to draw inspiration from my personal history (familial and cultural) to 'construct' the solo. The images are real, but the stories and characters are fictitious. The solo examines otherness in Europe (France), intercultural relations and issues of territorial legitimacy. What do we really know about 'Afro-Europeans'? (Afro-French?) How do we read them and their expressions? Do we find connections in our common (hi)stories, etc? These are just some of the questions that led us, with a great deal of humour and love, to this first act... The act is built around the SAPE (Society of Ambianceurs and Elegant Persons), and the character of the SAPEUR, as this is one of the fundamental points of coupé-décalé.

Act 2: 'Textepublic'/'Textecaché' (public text/hidden text) and polysemy...
In act 2, I wanted to put some real coupé-décalé dancers on stage, using their own codes of movement, dress, language etc. My travels and research into the social dances of African descendants caused me to discover the eminently political meaning of all these dances. They are born, develop and flourish in well-defined social and (geo-)political contexts. Our reading of their movements shows us the extent to which these dances are real traces or markers of our societal history (dissent/assent).

When I first encountered coupé-décalé, I didn't understand it. In fact, I was rather hostile towards it. It wasn't until several years later, after a discussion with young pre-teens from a school in Nantes, that I realised that something real was happening. I carried out some 'research trips' to French cities such as Marseille and Paris, followed by some time in the Ivory Coast. I discovered the 'dual language' of coupé-décalé performers. What is said in public or shown to most people is not at all the same as what is shown to the initiated. This process reminded me of the resistance dances observed in slave-owning or colonial societies.

On the other hand, I also noticed that the semantic field of coupé-décalé dancers is – entirely voluntarily – contradictory. Indeed, a single movement or gesture can have several different meanings.

It was this reality that inspired me to compose the quintet. The video images are real. Charles Rostand and I filmed them ourselves in Abidjan. Theywere then 'recreated' abstractly and applied to choreographic scenes. These images evoke the urban world, the maquis (a type of restaurant), the 'glo glo' (shanty town), women and the numerous projections made onto them, colonial history, and many other hidden readings to be discovered in coupé-décalé which the video image metaphorically evokes.

Acts 1 and 2 constitute the two sides of the same one card.

Fouka-fouka!'

James Carlès

Updating: September 2014 

Robyn Orlin was born in 1955 in Johannesburg and obtained bursaries to study in London (London Contemporary Dance School) and then in Chicago (School of Art Institute).

Since her first performance in Johannesburg in 1980, she has attempted to redefine choreography and the art of theatre in her country and has become one of the most committed anti-apartheid choreographers. She starts from the principle that “dance is political”, and in her pieces she examines the social and cultural situation in South Africa: its influences, its history, its rifts and its disintegration. The choreography then creates “an iconoclastic dance which puts its foot in it”, a dance-chronicle of today's South African society, skilfully handling irony and derision; a dance that shamelessly stirs up references and identities, blending traditional popular culture with the radical avant-garde, a dance that is capable of breaking down the artist-audience barrier by putting the audience at the centre of the event.

Robyn Orlin came to France for the first time in April 2000 at the invitation of La Filature Scène Nationale, Mulhouse, with “Daddy, I've seen this piece six times before...”

She achieved immediate recognition: Rencontres Chorégraphiques Internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis, Montpellier Dance Festival, Théâtre de la Ville, Paris, followed by tours all over the world.

In 2004, Robyn Orlin took part in the inauguration of the Centre National de la Danse, Pantin and composed a solo for Sophiatou Kossoko as part of “Vif du Sujet”.

In 2005 she created “When I take off my skin and touch the sky with my nose, only then I can see little voices amuse themselves...”, a piece with 6 singers from the South African Opera, then, during the summer, “Hey dude... i have talent... i'm just waiting for god...,” a solo for the dancer-choreographer Vera Mantero.
  From September 2005 Robyn Orlin was in residency for two years at the Centre National de la Danse, Pantin. In April 2007 her “L'Allegro, il penseroso ed il moderato” was premièred at the Paris National Opera.

Source : 

Digital resource - Médiathèque du Centre national de la danse
http://mediatheque.cnd.fr/spip.php?page=mediatheque-numerique-ressource&id=PHO00003887

 More information :  robynorlin.com

Since 2001, the National Center for Dance (CND) has been making recordings of its shows and educational programming and has created resources from these filmed performances (interviews, danced conferences, meetings with artists, demonstrations, major lessons, symposia specialized, thematic arrangements, etc.).