Bintou Dembélé Choreographer

Bintou Dembélé is one of the leading artists from the Hip Hop movement in France. She began her career by joining a number of groups including Aktuel Force, Ykanji (of which she wa a co-founder), the collectif Mouv’ at the Théâtre Contemporain de la Danse in Paris and the Käfig company. As a dancer and a choreographer, she has collaborated with artists such as MC Solaar (Paradisiaque), Grand Corps Malade (Roméo kiffe Juliette), Sophiatou Kossoko (Nuit des Musées), Stéphane Schoukroun (Construire), the photographer Denis Darzacq (La Chute) and film director Anne Cissé (BUCK). In 2002, she solidified her desire to be a choreographer by creating the dance company Rualité. Re-examining street dance through the prism of repetitive music and rhythmic polyphonies, her choreographic works explore ritualistic and corporal memory, marginal cultures, the nebulous aspects of colonial and postcolonial history, the strategies of reappropriation and the flight from slavery. She has created six productions with her company: L’Assise, LOL, Mon appart’ en dit long, Z.H (Human Zoos), S/T/R/A/T/E/S-Quartet and Le Syndrome de l’initié, which have been performed in France, Belgium, Burma, Chile, French Guyana, Italy, Macedonia, Mali, Senegal, Sweden, and Switzerland… Her creations, which build on a variety of aesthetics (from dance, live music and the visual arts), often forge links between artistic fields that are normally disconnected. In 2017, Clément Cogitore approached her to work on Les Indes galantes, his film for the Paris Opera’s digital stage the 3e Scène. She has developed numerous collaborative relationships in the academic world, notably with Sylvie Chalaye (an anthropologist of colonial representations and a historian of the performing arts) the SeFea laboratory (for French-language theatre and writings on otherness), and Isabelle Launay, a professor at the Dance Department of the University of Paris 8 Saint-Denis. She is regularly invited to speak about her artistic approach and her place as an artist. From 2020, she will be an associate artist at the Ateliers Médicis (ClichysousBois / Montfermeil), the Carnegie-Mellon University (Pittsburgh) and Columbia Reid Hall (Paris). 

Bintou Dembélé is making her Paris Opera debut.