Résonances Var. 2

Résonances starts with a series of encounters across space and time: Penda Diouf in Ouagadougou, Zora Snake in Bobo Dioulasso, Ibukun Sunday in Lagos...

In 2021, Dorothée Munyaneza invited them, alongside dancer Yinka Esi Graves, to imagine a space together in which each narrative, each practice, from dance to song, from music to text, would contribute to the construction of a common ground, a source of joy and power...

Two intense days in the studio gave rise to a performance as part of the Festival d'Automne in Paris in July 2021. A performance that has continued to resonate with Dorothée Munyaneza ever since.

Five years later, Dorothée Munyaneza invited Ibukun Sunday and Penda Diouf back, alongside Naomi Schoutens, whom she met in Bergen in 2024 to take over Yinka Esi Graves not available in the coming years, and Awa Joannais, to create a second variation of Résonances.

Bodies have changed, shifted, some stories have been written, others erased, new paths have been taken, Covid now belongs to the past.

In embracing these changes, Résonances Var. 2 seeks a diasporic space, a space to celebrate intimate journeys shaped by history, colonisation, forced or chosen departures, broken lineages and forgotten ancestry.

Each with their own practices — Awa's and Naomi's virtuosity shaped by experiences in ballet and ensemble, Ibukun's compositions blending viola with electronic sounds and Nigerian rhythms, Penda's words of resistance  —, is invited to inhabit their freedom with a keen awareness of others, to saturate the space with presences, bold and stubborn ones towards existences that have been silenced and erased for centuries. Like a quest for reparation.

On the stage floor and walls, lines trace territories and continents, moving spaces for the artists.

Both vibrating and dissonant, the bodies, liquid, are connecting visible and invisible lands and histories.

In the face of dispersion, Résonances Var. 2 celebrates the beauty of possibility.