Bintou Dembélé is a choreographer and performer, and considered one of the major artists of the Hip Hop movement in her native France. The paramount concern for Dembélé is African diasporic life. She creates to illuminate how personal and social forms of identity reconstitute outside of the Western gaze which invalidates and confines individuals in the margins. After fifteen years in artistic collaborations in French Guyana with the Businengue community (people of the forest), she started her current company Rualité in Morangis, a Parisian suburb. Rualité (wordplay for “Rue”, or street, and ”Realité”, reality) is a magnet for diverse artists and researchers working in new forms of political engagement and representation.

Dembélé’s time in French Guyana led to an enduring research interest in “marronage” (marooning), the strategy of resistance by enslaved people who escaped plantations to create independent groups and communities on the outskirts of slave societies. Maroon societies were created throughout the Atlantic world but did not exist in isolation. Societies lived in a perpetual state of war against colonizers and treaties were controversial. Relationships with native peoples, too, took a variety of forms. Dembélé is linking the ancestral knowledge in ways of liberation and invention of new societies to contemporary expressions, including Léwoz, a funeral vigil in Guadeloupe, and Capoeira in Brazil and Moringué in the Indian Ocean, dance forms evolved from martial arts.

The Project

The Bintou Dembélé Residency (5 August - 31 October, 2021) is curated and produced by HCL and her first in the US. Designed for quiet and reflection, it provides generous time and space to meet and share movement, voice and music practice with people embedded in the communities of Chicago’s South and West Side. It supports historical research, including engaging scholars and the archives of choreographers Katherine Dunham and Ruth Page, and Chicago Opera Ballet (known for its 1930’s casts of almost entirely Black American dancers.) In addition, it promotes her new research in the field of contemporary visual art, its codes, and its languages.

Dembélé’s interest in interdisciplinary performance began with Denis Darzacq, for his photo project La Chute (2007), and most recently with Clément Cogitore for an installation performance at the Centre Pompidou-Metz adapting her original choreography for his 2017 film and his 2019 production for the Bastille Opera of Les Indes galantes, by Rameau.

Accompanying her in Chicago is Amélie le Renard, researcher at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and co-editor of the academic journal “Genre sexualité & société”, and their 4 year old Neissam.

HCL’s Lead Partners for Bintou Dembélé Residency:

The Dance Center at Columbia College Chicago, Experimental Station, The Logan Center for the Arts at The University of Chicago, Arts & Public Life at The University of Chicago, Court Theatre, Theater and Performance Studies at The University of Chicago, and Hyde Park Art Center.

Major support for the Bintou Dembélé Residency:

The FACE Foundation, Cultural Services of the French Embassy in Chicago, Institut Français, the France Chicago Center at the University of Chicago. 

About the LabX Program

The Bintou Dembélé Residency is the second radical international exchange for a family unit High Concept Labs has organized.

It follows in the steps of choreographer-performer Dorothée Munyaneza (HL 2019 LabX resident artist, Marseille/Kigali), with Nicolas Détrie, Ashoka Fellow and director of Yes We Camp, and their two young children. The HCL residency supported her development of Mailles with Chicago collaborators Keyierra Collins (performance) and Ben Lamar Gay (music). Mailles premiered at Charleroi Danse Biennale 2020. The residency also supported her creative time with avery r young (poetry); Norman Teague, Folayemi Wilson (visual art), Raquel Monroe (dance); and with Nicolas Détrie a series of weekly talks and youth workshops over family-style meals they organized with HCL and partners Blackstone Bike Works, Invisible Institute, Experimental Station, the Egan Center DePaul University, and the Stein Gardens at Saint Sabina.

The Bintou Dembélé Residency is organized by HCL as part of Clichycago, a creative exchange initiative between Chicago’s South Side and Clichy-Montfermeil, a Parisian suburb, as part of a multi-year city-to-city program to collectively promote deep dialogues among artists, researchers, journalists, local groups and organizations around a variety of issues, from social justice to artistic innovation.

Clichycago is co-produced by Ateliers Médicis and Cultural Services of the French Embassy in Chicago with the support of the Ford Foundation, Étant donnés Fund for contemporary art of the FACE Foundation, and France Chicago Center at The University of Chicago. Clichycago 2021 is co-organized by High Concept Labs, Hyde Park Art Center, Experimental Station, and Invisible Institute.

About the Artist

Bintou Dembélé was born in Brétigny-sur-Orge, a suburb of Paris. She started in dance with groups such as Aktuel Force, Ykanji (of which she was the co-founder), and Mouv’ collective of the Théâtre Contemporain de la Danse in Paris. Her North American debut was at the Joyce Theater as guest performer with French-Algerian Mourad Merzouki and his Compagnie Kafig for the New York New Europe '99 Festival.

In 2002, she created the company Rualité, a producing structure for her original choreographic projects: L’Assise (2004), LOL (2008), Mon appart’ en dit long (2010), Z.H. (2014), S/T/R/A/T/E/S – Quartet (2016), Le Syndrome de l’initié.e (2018), which have been presented in France, Belgium, Burma, Chile, French Guiana, Italy, Macedonia, Mali, Sweden, and Switzerland.

Her interdisciplinary collaborations include projects with MC Solaar (Paradisiaque), poet-lyricist Fabien Larsaud aka Grand Corps Malade (Roméo kiffe Juliette), dancer-choreographer Sophiatou Kossoko (La Nuit des Musées), and photographers Denis Darzacq (La Chute) and Mohamed Bourouissa.