In 2019, Bintou Dembélé, a hip-hop pioneer in France, became the first black female choreographer to be hired by the Paris Opera. Two years later, during a residency in Chicago, she discovered an English word that has no equivalent in French: “tokenism.”
It helped her put into words what she “felt but couldn’t yet comprehend,” she said in an interview in Bagnolet, a Paris suburb. Outwardly all was well during and after her work at the Paris Opera on “Les Indes Galantes”: her troupe of fierce dancers, performing a range of street and club styles such as krump, electro and voguing, became a symbol of diversity in the heart of a venerable opera house.
Dembélé’s profile also rose. Invitations to contribute to film and stage projects poured in and this week she opened the dance section of the Avignon Festival, the most prestigious event on the French theater calendar, with her latest production, “GROOVE”.
Behind the scenes, however, her experience with the Paris Opera was bittersweet. Dembélé, 48, and her team “fought to get enough money to take care of the dancers,” she said. She also pushed to get them contracts for a documentary filmed during rehearsals and portray them accurately. Even worse, there was no ripple effect: despite the recommendations of a groundbreaking diversity report commissioned by the Paris Opera in 2021, the institution has not hired a single black choreographer for an opera or ballet production since “Les Indes Galantes”.
“It’s a battle on so many fronts, it’s exhausting,” Dembele said. In a phone interview, her friend Alice Diop, a French filmmaker who achieved international fame last year with “Saint Omer,” said Dembélé cares deeply about creating “a fair ecosystem” and called her “one of the most ethical people I’ve met.” know’. .”
In some ways, “GROOVE,” a sprawling three-hour show that premiered at Lille’s Opera in March, is Dembélé’s answer to tokenism. It culminates in exciting excerpts from ‘Les Indes Galantes’, but precedes them with a series of slow-moving scenes, outside then inside, that feel like a meditation on emancipation.
In Avignon, ‘GROOVE’ begins in a symbolic place: in front of the city’s Papal Palace, the imposing site most identified with the event. Ushers then lead the audience to the nearby Avignon opera house where three groups are formed. In different parts of the building, each group sees dance films inspired by the history of street styles; a ritual scene in which a corpse is hoisted up on a rope and floats over a campfire; and an intimate song and dance number led by singer Célia Kameni.
“Through us,” said Dembélé, “the street enters the opera house and undermines it.” Tiago Rodrigues, the new director of the Avignon Festival, said this was why he chose Dembélé to open this year’s edition: “It’s a show of the openness and spirit of diversity that we want for the festival. “
Producing independent work like ‘GROOVE’, Dembélé said, is also ‘a way of resisting’ superficial attempts to be included in French institutions. Race and racism have long been taboo subjects in France, with discussions of discrimination sparking culture wars in recent years. Just last week, the police shooting of a teenager, Nahel M., sparked riots over the mistreatment of French minorities.
The history of French hip-hop reflects the country’s uneasiness around race. Since its meteoric rise in the 1980s, hip hop has benefited from France’s state funding system for the arts and absorbed lessons from the more elite world of contemporary dance, from training techniques to expectations about dramaturgy. Yet, Dembélé said, hip-hop “has remained separate in people’s minds from ‘contemporary’ creation.” Instead, it fell under the umbrella of “urban dances,” a category many consider reductive.
“There is a lot of talk about inclusion, but there remains an invisible wall,” Isabelle Launay, a dance historian who has worked with Dembélé, said in an interview. The experience of artists who are second-generation immigrants like Dembélé, Launay added, “reflects the way the republic treats children of immigrant communities in France,” pointing to the death of Nahel M. as an example of the fallout.
In a show of solidarity, Dembélé changed the introduction of “GROOVE” to Avignon, with a group of artists, including Diop, paying tribute to Nahel M. “The rage is not new,” said one of them. The tears are not new. Police brutality is not new.”
Dembélé was struck by the differences between France and the United States during her three-month stay in Chicago in 2021, as part of a residency organized by the French cultural program Villa Albertine. Despite America’s deep history of racial discrimination, it seemed more acceptable there to celebrate the identity of black artists, she said. “There was so much respect and attention,” Dembele said. “I was immediately invited to the University of Chicago, while in France we have been seen as a subculture for the longest time.”
Dembélé’s parents came from the Soninke community in Senegal, where they worked in peanut farming. After emigrating to France, Dembélé was born in Brétigny-sur-Orge, a small town 30 kilometers from Paris. She grew up “listening to reggae,” she said, but dance came into her life through the small screen: Like many early hip-hop artists, she was immediately drawn to the moves showcased in “HIPHOP,” a 1984 program about the burgeoning style – and the first show on French television to feature a black presenter, known as Sidney.
She was just 9 at the time and by her late teens she was performing regularly with well-known French hip-hop crews such as Aktuel Force. In the 1990s, Dembélé went everywhere hip-hop was: in addition to battles and festivals, she performed in nightclubs, on television and in commercial music videos. Eventually, injuries led her to reevaluate her art and create her own productions.
“There was an urgency to our need to get together, and a lot of self-destruction,” she said of hip-hop’s early days. “It’s nice to see someone turn upside down, but it’s a very aggressive relationship with the floor.”
Dembélé, who founded the Rualité collective in 2002, began exploring colonial history and what she calls “maroon thinking.” Historically, Maroons were enslaved people of African descent who escaped from plantations and formed their own communities. Black artists who subvert existing hierarchies and tokenism to create freely channel that spirit, Dembélé said: “You have to find tricks, strategies.”
Nurturing the community has been a central part of that process. To prepare the 19 dancers of “Les Indes Galantes” for a professional career, Dembélé designed for them a one-year training program, Déter, in addition to rehearsals for the production. In the poor suburb of Bagnolet, where her collective is based, she offers a range of workshops from krump to music and English lessons.
Back in Avignon, ‘GROOVE’ pushes that idea forward with the backing of a powerful festival – and this time on Dembélé’s terms. “We’re not contemporary dance,” she said. “That’s not our history. We must allow ourselves to go back and forth between elite and popular culture.”
