An Daniel Buren’s art installation. A buckets of water-covered stage. Two bodies, supported one on top of the other, to move ahead on a chosen path. This Salia Sanou’s choreographic performance appropriates unkown aspects of life.
From above the water, a suspended moment and bodies looking for themselves.

creation 2004
time : 35 mn

Why always always want to look like the other?
Why the reflection of ourselves, constantly sent us back by the society, still and always incite us to look for our second self?
Why do we need so much this frantic race of the world?
The mirror. A self image and its unseenpart. The constant and unchanging combination of reality and our imagination.
The expression of his own reflexion immerses him deep down in his inner self.

«Some dancers close the stage curtain. Others need to look at themselves. Ordinarily, I include myself among those who forget to look in the mirror. That enables me to better internalize the movement. The danced gesture is first a feeling to me».

To change the perception of his image, he reveals some truth and some unforeseeable. The whole body discovers itself and is reflected in the alchemy between time and move. The relationship established between the danced body and the observed body questions the inner life and the «extime». This wish to make visible some aspects of ourselves, previously considered as a matter of intimacy.

Everything seems taken for granted. Suddenly, in a split second, everything is turned upside down. The ground we stand on falls from under our feet.
A devastating storm leave us helpless.
We are swept into a never-ending cicle of human violence.
We rely on body’s states which are affected by extrem stress and violence. On testimonies of bodies worn out by life. On our individual and collective memory of daily and historical tragedies which befall us. Very close to us or on the other side of the world.

On stage, «into the distance, bodies come to bear against the wooden wall. A reception space, which send them back over and over again as if to take charge of their destiny until the end, whatever the outcome.

A dance movement in the city, in the street. To remember this place in Abidjan. This nightlife district. A hangout for young people and a now-extinct space for freedom.

«A danced movement in the same direction. While highlighting the uniqueness and the individual’s performance, one component part of a group’s wealth».

To invest this public space, where the everyday life is told. A place where humans come and go, rub against one another and confront each other to generate ideas. A dance movement in the city to reach out to others. To examine the public space and to offer alternative glances.

To create an interaction between actors and members of the audience. Princess street memories is based upon the participation of all dancers. Beginners, professionals and laypersons, who are eager to get used to the bodily practice as a sharing moment with an inquiring or not public of all ages.

«Face the world, where everything starts all over again, to surrender an instinctive dance. Improvised moments. With no preset thematic approach. A state of being, swept along by the move. To lose all sense of time and space. To rediscover distant and present emotions».

To dare dancing for yourself. After dancing for so long with the others.
This resolutely intimate show is an introspection of memory, tlifting the veil on the Sanou’s childhood.

With Du Désir d’horizons, Salia Sanou picks up on his favorite themes. Namely loneliness and otherness, the individual and the collective but also the question of territory, uprooting, exile and borders.

He has found an echo of this reflection in the work of Nancy Huston. Thus we can hear in this show excerpts from the novel « Limbes,
Limbo / A tribute to Samuel Beckett ». A new show drawing from dance workshops he conducts in Burundi and Burkina Faso refugee camps, with the support of the African Artists for Development Fund.

According to Salia Sanou, Du Désir d’horizons is not a show about refugee camps, strictly speaking. It doesn’t have anything to do with a testimony or a documentary. It’s really more a composition with a choreographic vocabulary giving way to understanding and reflecting on the delicate situation facing refugees that echoes in us all.

Horizon is the future, a vanishing line, an open space. Therefore, Salia Sanou provides us with the performance of dancers. He calls us to examine the dimension of internal exile that everyone carries in itself, as an tiny and undying part of strength, struggle and desire.

Every political belief is related to a personal commitment. Beyond artistic borders, Salia Sanou opens this dialogue at the heart of his process of creation. All these barriers in us and between people. And all this technological advances in new means of communication and transport which are supposed to improve sharing and a genuine dialogue.

“To live both here and there, here and now, without considering borders and time. Disregarded frontiers. To be everywhere at once and to break the materiality of our body. To come out of our body, out of our corporeality. It appears to be one of the basic humanity’s quests, of our ambivalence.”

An increased dialogue, limited partitioning artistic disciplines and art forms to reveal similarities. Generated interactions and enhanced meetings to move ahead.

« It comes to violence. A matter that I have raised before with “Poussières de sang”. This time, brutality is embodied in what is regarded, in Africa, as a ritual cultural act. Setting up the body in a artistic installation, if we give it meanings.

On stage, fighting is in the place of honor.
Sport and ritual, mainstay of African culture.
Intimidation, display. Bodies clash.
Gracefully with velocity. In the heart of the arena.
The true area of an athletic, artistic and virtually mystic game.
Clamour begins long before the fight.
Staying in the background. As a reminiscence.
A little music, which has never left him. A souvenir. An ode to the struggle for freedom.