African Dance lead by Koffi Koko - Benin / France (April 2002)

Workshop on theatre and African Dance organised by Toaca Cultural Foundation, The French Institute Bucharest with the support of The French Embassy and AFAA

The workshop addressed itself to professional actors and dancers.
“The workshop focalizes the presence of the performer using gestures inspired by theatre, African expression and other techniques that tend to become universal. Through body language, improvisation and choreographic composition, we focused on the idea of metamorphosis.” (Koffi Koko)

Koffi Koko graduated from the National School of Dramatic Arts in Abidjan (the Ivory Coast), then he went on to study at Alvin Aley Dance School, in New York. He also studied with Katherine Dunhame and frequented the “Leslie Dance School.”
In 1996 he created the “Carmen-Koko Company”, together with Marie Carmen Garcia. He gave life to many roles in performances like To Nijinski, Faust, The Magic Flute, Medeea, The Maids. His international tours and teaching activities won him worldwide recognition.
The French Government granted him the title of Knight of the High Order of Letters and Arts.

“My background is that of ritual dance, assimilated in a very serious school in Africa. I think man acts in dance with three bodies: the physical body, the memory body and the spiritual body. When you dance, you inevitably get to a spiritual point. Memory mediates between the physical and the spiritual, because it carries human history since its origins, but also the influences of society and environment. The memory body is the bearer of these informations and, together with the physical body, it creates that specific personality of each dancer. The two bodies reunite and only after that, after taking the road together, the dancer can start asking himself fundamental questions. When the individual begins feeling from the inside, the things that come out have a similar density with what we find in ritual or ancient theatre.”
(Koffi Koko)
Fragment from an interview by Anca Rotescu in Letters, Arts &Ideas Magazine -Cotidianul