What form would a “maroon” dance take? Historically, the term  “marroonage” referred to when African slaves escaped from the masters  who held them in captivity. In art, the term has come to designate the  conquest of a space of freedom in response to the constraints imposed by  a system. Bintou Dembélé, who honed her craft through hip-hop before  developing her own transdisciplinary aesthetic, is now pursuing her  research into this idea through this new solo, devised for the dancer  Michel “Meech” Onomo. After intense collective adventures, including Les Indes galantes at the Paris Opera, Rite de Passage – Solo II,  developed in particular during a residency at the Villa Medici in Rome,  is centred on the memory of a body, meditating on questions such as  time and death. In the aesthetic landscape that shaped this work we find  the choreographer Alain Buffard and the dialogue he developed with Anna  Halprin in the early 2000s, as well as the musician Charles Amblard for  the sound design.
Source: programme of the CND

Acknowledged to be one of the pioneers of hip-hop in France, Bintou  Dembelé began dancing in 1985. A co-founder of the groups Ykanji and  Ladyside, she also worked with Aktuel Force and at the Théâtre  Contemporain de la Danse in Paris before founding her own structure,  Rualité, in 2002. In 2019, she made her début at the Paris Opera, where  she choreographed Les Indes galantes, an opera-ballet directed  by Clément Cogitore and directed by Léonardo García Alarcón. She is an  associate artist at the Ateliers Médicis and one of the ten  international artists invited to the 10th anniversary of the Centre  Pompidou-Metz. In 2021, she will inaugurate the Villa Chicago.

Source: programme of the CND

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.).