 Let's let's let's move. Good morning. Do you want to do you want to I can pass off to some introduction. This is this is my provocation to let's get going because we have the amazing Dorothea when she is in the house and she needs to get some rest for tonight's show. But a round of applause for Dorothea's performance last night thank you. Yeah so I mean I think you know it's this this moment is called a provocation but I think all the provocation happened last night at Nyla in your work Le Mai. So thank you for you know obviously bringing your artistry and this incredible ensemble of performers to to New York and and and to LA next week. I've been a longtime fan of you as an artist we worked together with Anna Bouffar in Baron Samedi years ago and your work has just continued to wow me and and just kind of manifest so many incredible approaches to the question of history and how history is lived out and crafted in performance. So I the first question is you know your your this ensemble of performers I want to hear about how you found them how you came together and what what the sort of you know initial proposition for the performance was to them how did you bring them in. Thank you Will. Hello everyone. We started talking in English yeah shall we continue in English. Okay okay good. So yes I'm so happy to when when I had this invitation and I realized that my partner was gonna be Will Crow Will I was like of course I will wake up early earlier than usual to be here and last night performing at Nyla was actually very emotional for me because the last time I was on stage there was with Will, Rose, David Thompson, Llingwim, Nadia Beugre and Olivier Normand we were performing in Baron Samedi this piece. So coming back felt like a like a return and felt like another portal into this other work that is called my and to answer your question yeah for the past few years I've been touring both in Europe in France particularly as well and across the sea so coming to America going to Brazil Chile I went to Africa as well and I met incredible artists and that's why it's so good to when one has the opportunity to to travel one has a passport that gets either visas or even the American visa is hard to get but when one is able to come over and perform there is this encounter with phenomenal creative beings and every time I performed it really felt like I was entering another realm and I met so in America had met one performer actually I met her in Lagos in Nigeria but she's from Chicago her name is Kiera Collins and then I met another artist who is based in Belo Horizonte in Brazil Zora Santos who was much much older than I because I really cared about this whole generational aspect of the piece how is knowledge transmitted how is our craft able to travel from the young guest to the oldest among us and then I met I had met many many years ago Yinka Esi Graves who is the flamenco dancer for those who were there yesterday not just very good as about she's a flamenco artist and let's say multi-disciplinary I had met her in school in secondary school in London we went to the lycee francais together so I've known her for many many years and when I found out that she had become a dancer of course I was drawn to her craft and I invited her as well as my drama who is the poet in the piece I met her in Bristol in England and I was really moved by her work and her words and she moved me also because she's the youngest among us but the maturity of her work and her sensitivity also really resonated with me so I wanted her to be part of the piece and if a day I had met in Haiti in Port-au-Prince when I was there for a workshop and had been invited by Ketli Noel there so I guess that's how the journey began and at one point my former production manager was like are you going to stop because I think I would have continued in the with the many artists I was meeting I kept coming back I was like oh my god it's incredible dance like it was like we don't have a budget we don't have the budget for that so maybe we should just like stop he wanted he wanted me of course he was there to encourage me and you know not sort of tell me I have to think money-wise but to encourage the artistic dream but it's good that he was there otherwise you would have had a crowd on stage a bigger crowd and the title of the piece of course Le Mai is mesh for those who are translating from French which of course brings up the image of just like a weaving together of stories and histories and also practices you have you know this performer who's trained in flamenco dance you know who and your some of your barefoot and she's wearing flamenco shoes and so also like the practices that you all are bringing into the room are allowed to be present as your modes of communication so I'm just curious yeah how like in terms of then pulling out stories and because this because of course the piece is thinking through histories of violence as well as kind of loving transmission and support and I'm curious how you how you start to cultivate those conversations and and decided to not all sort of work in the same methods of dance you know but try to allow preserve that individuality that's like a four questions in one it's more than four okay how did you make the piece so the piece so I had I mentioned all these wonderful African and Afro-descendant artists that had me meeting and I forgot to mention Nido Owera who is also on stage born in Burundi but she's Rwandan and the reason why I almost didn't mention her and also Elsa Mulder Ashley who was in there yesterday on stage normally with six on stage and yesterday were five is Ethiopian she's moved back to Ethiopia and I really cared that their names also are mentioned but because of the pandemic in 2020 that's when the idea Ashley of creating the piece that was the year I had wanted to create the piece but of course we know how things changed drastically in those months so Zora Santos from Belo Horizonte and Kiera Collins from Chicago were no longer able to come to France to to rehearse with me and to rehearse with us so I I had to rethink the work and to but to keep to keep the the the stories that I wanted to transmit or I wanted to share between us again this question of like coming from a generation of Nido which is older than myself and the generation of asma drama who is younger than myself and how does history and stories move through from the youngest to the oldest of us because Elsa no Zora would have been the oldest member but she couldn't make it so I began by asking them questions since we couldn't gather physically I sent out a number of many questions sometimes four questions in one good strategy yeah yeah and I really wanted to know various simple things I guess like how are they taking care of themselves what what how do they take care of their body the mental health because I know that all of us have gone through different trials and tribulations and the question of ruthlessness or being uprooted or exile or self-imposed exile too sometimes it's not all from coming from outside but how this movement from one place to the other what is the question what is our relationship to land ancestral land our current land because some of us you know are living where we were not born what is that new land of birth of belonging let's say so I had many many questions like that and you know how do we take care of our hair our nails like just like non superficial things because it's good to take care of one's hair and one's nails you know like taking self-care is part of the resistance right and and in those days of COVID I think we were also afraid of each other and and this distance created in us in sending these questions I think I reduced the distance that existed between us and this the I felt like this work was about gathering the dispersed because that was the whole idea the the African or the African descendants I wanted to gather on stage for my were dispersed you know across continents and so the stage for me was that space of attempting to gather the children of the dispersed or the dispersed and so the the idea of of joy as a tool of gathering you know when we gather we gather for banquet so we're me for Ashley Zora Santos who couldn't join us was a chef and an actress I would have had food on stage you know so what this idea of of a gathering of gathering yes the dispersed because there's a book by the other mobile in the rest she's a French wrote an author and she wrote a book called toutes des enfants dispersés all your dispersed children again translated us and and I felt like borrowing this idea of gathering dispersed and gathering the stories of the dispersed and in so doing finding joy in that and strengthen that and come thinking about provocation the way that you've talked about this work is not as an author that is signing the work and kind of you know that there is a there's a there's you make it kind of in insistence on the idea of collaboration can you talk more about the choice to sort of foreground that yes it's true that this this piece really is like I had the yarn the yarn and you know that the thread it's like each one of us is a part of this thread because when you look at the thread it's made up of many little other threads so Mia just was there to loop the movements to loop the the poetry to loop the words and the voices and the music and it's true that each one of them be it the dancers and the poet on stage the music the musician it was a collaboration also with two composers along my with whom I've been collaborating for many many years as well as Ben Lamar gay who's a wonderful phenomenal composer musician from Chicago and I keep coming to America you hear this yeah and as well as a costume designer called Stephanie Kudder who has truly understood the way that I want to create space for the body to move or the volumes within which we can explore and inhabit it's like the clothes themselves become another layer of the story so each one of us was answering questions sometimes four questions in one sorry I'm gonna come back to that sorry about that and they and in the answers are far the answers they gave me what I used in order to to create this work so it's really a collaboration and you know although in the end is true that I I decided I decide what is what it becomes or what it is but it's also a space that they contributed to absolutely and I mean I without you know without this sort of spoiling what is in the show I think this you use this word Tricoté you know and that you know when you Tricoté something it is all about you know the yarn itself but also the spaces in between right and in in the design of the stage there's all this kind of empty space there's a there's a flamenco stage is kind of installed on top of the stage and then there's these fabrics and costumes hanging from the ceiling and microphones kind of dispersed throughout so there's a kind of consciousness about the space between you that is kind of palpable and maintained and I just thought that choice is really really powerful and also in insisting on kind of gathering the disperse like both the dispersal and the gathering are happening kind of all the time in the work yeah I mean I think I'm curious about also as you like what are some of the before we kind of open it up for questions for the room like what are some of the responses you're getting from people who are coming to the work that you find are where there are moments of identification with the work or where that you know how do you how do you interact with the audiences we're seeing the work and do you have an opportunity to kind of talk to people who are identifying with the work in some way or it's always curious about that that like the specificity of your experience and also the desire for the public to you know identify as I was saying so we've created we premiered during the year of 2020 so actually even premiering the work was in itself a miracle you know it felt like something quite exceptional it was in October just before the second confinement in Belgium so it really felt we passed through something like a loop we had space to create and then boom they shut the borders again and we were locked in in our homes so every time we come onto the stage it feels like like a special gift or like a special moment that we dedicate both to the ancestors that we dedicate to our fellow dispersed beings around the world and with like it's an intention like that's what we do before we get on stage and and at the same time it's it feels like a celebration truly because I really wanted to tap into that into that aspect of finding joy in being together in moving together and resonating with each other even with the absent because it's true the absent are also present or become accompanied by by them and the audience members I guess I guess you know some some young people for example asthma is visibly hijabi young woman though she's she has a hijab right visibly Muslim and in places where we've performed I've had or she's had some really wonderful feedback from other hijabi young girls like I didn't know I could get on stage and rap I didn't know I could get on stage and sing and I couldn't I didn't know I could get on stage and like shout and I was like yes that's what this piece is also about inspiring one one that feels or like they couldn't or wouldn't or were kept to the margin of this space what it allows as a what what plant what seed is possible has the possibility to grow so that that's one of the feedback we get like a lot of enthusiasm from young people particularly young people I find that they really really resonates with them and also at times when there's a lot of upheaval and political how do I say unrest I feel it in this in the piece also I feel that the people come in that fully charged of what's happening in the world and of course what's happening on stage somehow also reflects it but in the poetic or another form and that and that form is somehow healing even though we are there screaming our rage and if we are there screaming our pain we that we are there moving through joy and through beauty because it was so imperative for me to have us looking so beautiful and we are aren't we surely we yes I really thought that beauty is also a form of resistance and beauty is a form of resilience and and existence and Stephanie could air again I insist on her work is is is creates sublime sublime I don't know how to create to say this it's sublime look and the way she the colors that she she put together for our costumes and it's all part of her journey because she was born in Baghdad grew up in France she's French and and even the orange the orange color that you see is like this sunset or this this light you know so yeah every time I wear her things I also celebrate who she is and what her journey is in the world yeah I guess there is a few enthusiastic people after the performance they are moved by it I was very moved okay other question wait let's talk about you no this is hold on hold on what is this quick what is this what's the meaning of life this is let me provoke this whole situation wait a minute this is how it's been to stay will tell us tell us about what you're busy with and how's how yeah what's your busy with at the moment I'm making or I permitted work this spring with five performers that is looking at the question of filmmaking and the photographic capture of black gestures and black bodies so it's a work in which there's a camera on stage taking a photo every three seconds and the performers are moving in the sort of stop motion kind of a suspension and then find ways to sort of navigate away from the camera and in and out and it was also work that premiered or was supposed to premiere before the pandemic then during the pandemic and I'm not sure if the pandemic's over it's yes and no it's also absent and present with us like so many other people and spirits so yeah so it was you know stop motion animation you know it was very slow form of filmmaking and arduous and grueling and this is kind of a staging of that but also a lot of joy like the labor of becoming a moving image and the joy in exchange between performers when you're kind of stuck inside of a role that is laborious how do you kind of animate it in ways other than the animation that you're being used to produce anyway so but the pandemic kind of turned it into this also this question of care and how the performance and a choreographic process is greater than just the the grant proposal and even the sort of aesthetic evolution I'm trying to go to go through you know it's a deeply collaborative project and yeah and it's also spanning a time period where there's been so much loss like in everyone's life involved in the project and so it's become a container for more than just you know performances and performativity and questions of choreography it's sort of like a container whose edges keep expanding as the time that we're called sicker you seen it has anybody seen it in the audience no one in this room is seen oh yeah oh yeah oh yes yes actually a few people here seen it Tara Willis presented it at the MC Chicago and Ashley Farrell Murray it's a performance that tours with a video installation so I also film the performance and make a video installation and Ashley Farrell Murray and her former role at experimental media and performing arts center produced the film shoot that then became the video installation and John who we are one side in Portland anyway hey nice nice and do you feel like today performing this work has a how does it they board oh my god bypass or like overflow yeah how does it overflow the space and and and continue beyond what what is this space that you have created um it's a good question I think it's the kind of piece that because it's made in a certain way and was unmade and and kind of undone by so many challenges along the way that it's something that I can never put down you know what I mean like it's both something I hold dear and I want to get rid of and so there's but there's no clear end in sight even when the project is over I won't be sure that it's over that I've done what I said out to do which is true of all works you know I think but but the performers are I said this yesterday the performers are aging their bodies are changing their jobs are changing they've lost parents I've lost a parent they've you know they've got new jobs everyone has lives in a new city than the city they were living in when we started the project so I so those those kind of stories had to be incorporated into my understanding of them as performers as we collaborated and therefore I've invested in them and their lives beyond you know how they're useful for the work you know so I think it's a reinvestment in their lives and collaborating as a colleague and friend yeah yeah yeah thank you that's a good question and it was just one question which I appreciate questions from the room it's a microphone hi I want to ask Dorothea about your relation to black joy compared to the phenomenon of black joy in America can you speak to that in your work and also role well can you talk about Sao Paolo a little bit yeah so I'm an African right it doesn't mean I'm not American in a way that I can relate to black joy in America but I will speak from a point from my standpoint of an African Rwandan creative artist living in Europe it's true that joy has always been there even through the darkest of times it's as though it was there before it was even named what it is it's like it's been there even when you ask me the question my grandmother's just appeared like this came to me because they are the ones when they welcome me they into their home for example she would just get up and dance you know as she sings in Kinyarwanda and that is for me the most joyful and the most joyous and the most loving way of of being in her arms and she was a healer one of them was a healer like physical healer spiritual healer she was constantly singing and dancing and I guess this joy is what she was transmitting without naming it without saying that's what it is but it's carrying me even to this day to share with my African and Afro-descendant communities dispersed around the world and when I come into a space I know that I'm equipped with that joy because it's somehow deeply rooted in me and I need to now consciously pull it up or bring it to the surface and use it as a tool again of resisting this at this situation that all these situations that make me want to literally fall and disappear and no longer be here you know so I get I do I do feel connected to to black joy wherever it is because I'm connected to the people wherever they are I'm part of this fabric if you come back to to my I'm part of this diasporic fabric now I'm part of this the it's bigger than I am just I'm one of the threads and in in this thread like I can hang on to the joy that I had already but that is expanding and and and and growing and becoming thicker and brighter and and stronger as I engage politically in this of black joy I am presenting an installation and a performance in the Sao Paulo Biennial right now I work a lot with language and dance and the transitions between the two the project I just spoke about is like my first foreign to film and video and that project is whoa how's it's like a long story in the 70s my dad and Tina Turner met and so so and they both passed away this year and so heading into Brazil Tina Turner also gave the largest concert in history in Rio de Janeiro in 1988 to 180,000 people so she has a deep there's a deep kind of love and kind of wonder about her in Brazilian cultural memory and you know so I was thinking about how to think of Tina as a way into Brazil as a context and what's love got to do with it as a song that was her comeback song and kind of a revival song so this project is there's a wall and I've printed an alphabet there's like a QWERTY keyboard on the wall and the performers undo the keyboard and spell out the lyrics to what's love got to do with it but because it felt ethically wrong to have Brazilian performers working only in English I we also talked about the sort of long tradition of Brazilian love songs and songs of pain and joy very much from an Afro-Brazilian perspective as well and so we could they kind of weave together a script of the lyrics of what's love got to do with it and other Brazilian love songs and so they're kind of deconstructing both of these colonial languages and and leaving a kind of hypercoded trace so when the performance is not happening you have this kind of riddle which fills to me like what love is meant to leave us with and unsolvable but constantly engaging riddle so yeah it's both a memorial and a love song yeah other questions thank you both I wonder if you would like to share a little bit about the experience of meeting each other when working with Alain Bufar coming you know with different backgrounds I imagine different trajectories and then meeting Alain who was working in France then right a particular environment and yeah the process of meeting each other but also Alain Bufar's choreographic process at that point when was that 2013 yeah sure I mean I was broke and Alain Bufar came to New York and did an audition I was like I want a European dance job and I got it so that was like that was and that caused many transformations in my life but chief amongst which was being put into the room with Dorothea, Lengue, Lushaba Matlala who's based in Johannesburg, Nadia Becret who's Montpellier, David Thompson who's over there, Olivier Normand and then two musicians Sarah Moussia and Seb Martel scenography by Nadia Laureau so just like a like superstar awesome group but I was but it was interesting because I think Alain was also then asking us to perform Kurt Weill songs but kind of transposed to sort of a blues and sort of like and very black musical aesthetic and and kind of in this sort of trans Atlantic kind of black ensemble it was the first time where I was asking some of these questions that I was asking in my own work but in relationship to other experiences that I hadn't had but that there was this kind of yeah my you know this kind of fabric that preceded us in a way that allowed us to collaborate with a lot of joy and seriousness and then the project was also I mean the project was about Baham-Sandy who's a figure in Haitian Voodoon so like not a casual figure to make a work about and what's interesting about that project is that it was also surrounded by a lot of birth and death and so I think we both got a lot from it and sort of paid the price of working with such a I think kind of complicated and powerful figure as Baham-Sandy invoking him in our work like and you know in the summer of 2011 right when we started Dohote comes and and you were pregnant with your first child and and another performer had just given birth two months before and then you were pregnant with your second child by the time our tour was over so there was three births that were associated that's what that's why I'm sharing that information okay and then there are also three deaths so Alain's nephew died in the car accident I think the year that we started rehearsing and then Alain's partner Alain passed away and then Alain passed away so that project kind of was you know speaking of spirits in the room I think it's also we were bound by these kind of portals between life and death and to have had the honor of working on a project that had that kind of depth and I'm sort of eternally grateful for that so yeah for me meeting David and Will and Nadia and Shingi Wei and Olivier and all the collaborators was truly life-changing because Alain when he invited me for this I guess he it was an audition but he had already made up made up his mind but it was nice that I went through that process because I also got to engage with Good Vile's song for that audition and Alain has really changed me in a very deep way even yesterday again I was thinking of him and being in that space and and the questions that he asked us the first one I remember I remember very clearly he we were in nim rehearsing and he invited us to to share a story an intimate story or fictional one and David went up Will went up Shingi Wei went up everybody went up and then I was last to go up on stage and when I spoke about my my journey I was really talking about Rowanda the whole pre-colonial era until 1994 the 6th of September which is the date that the president at the time his plane was shut down and when it was shut down it provoked the beginning of the genocide of the Tutsin Rowanda so that's that's when I stopped my monologue and Shingi Wei got up and she went to the bathroom to weep and I found her and I was while I was consoling her I asked myself what were people doing when my people were being massacred in 1994 and that question is actually the same one I'm still asking myself whenever I see atrocities going on around the world I'm still like what are we doing how we're engaging with the world how we're engaging with the different situations that that should actually strike us in the heart you know and move us to action and and I started writing a text at that moment which became the material for some did it don't which is my first work and so meeting Alan I also got to engage with this question of the diasporic body because at the time I was quite preoccupied with Rowanda France Europe this binary relationship and then with him I met these wonderful performers from the America that I had been to but not engaged with the artist right and that journey brought me then back and forth I see Angela has come into the room as well we invited me wonderfully in a year that also changed my life 2016 when I came to perform and for a residency at TBA at that time pika and that also was another addition to how these journeys back and forth can truly change one's trajectory and Alan was one of those people that that has changed us has changed me I'm just like that your performance also that you're doing again tonight like there's a line and it was like is there a helping hand which really struck my heart last night and just appreciate your insistence on that question and posing in your work thank you for that I think that's good right okay add one thing I'm so happy to be here thank you thank you all of you for really for making it work I know it's a lot of work to make us come all the way to United States to perform and things like this I'm such as these so thank you thank you thank you