Le départ [The Departure], by Zora Snake

Zora Snake is not content to inhabit a heritage. The African roots of his dancing relive in his hip-hop dancer’s body and are expressed through a contemporary language.

Le départ is an act of insubordination, the explosion of ferocious anger at “our societies carbonised by an unfair system". Snake chooses not to flee but to stay in the place where he grew up, to give impetus to a new “beginning”. Drawing on tradition, he turns the stage into a boxing ring and engages in a hand-to-hand fight with the present. In the space he electrifies with his jittery dance, he uses satire to question the laws of the modern jungle and the big beasts that reign today.

Zora Snake (Cameroon 1990), dancer, choreographer and performing arts researcher, is the founder of Compagnie Zora Snake and the international festival Modaperf. A ground-breaking dancer and dreamer, he conceives of his works as laboratories for reflection, using dance to examine and operate on our society, our living conditions and the future of our existence. Zora Snake is revolutionising artistic creation in public spaces in Cameroon and Africa as a whole, displacing borders and imagining new collective spaces for gathering, sharing and pooling experiences. His boundless, socially-committed creations also intersect with the ritual practices of his ethnic group, where dance is a key component of the social structure and a repository of traditions.

With a strong political desire to change the way of looking at things, to create a more peace-loving, decisive, objective and supportive humanity, “Dancing to fight or boxing the situation” remains his motto and a matter of urgency.

In collaboration with the Togolese sculptor Clay Apenouvon, he created the 2021-2022 project Les masques Tombent, and he is taking part in Serge Aimé Coulibaly’s 2021–2022–2023 project Wakatt with Le départ 2021-2022 and Shadow Survivors (created 2021–2023). Zora Snake and his company are always active, running workshops and creating projects all over the world.

His creation Le départ won the first Acogny D'or at the Bobo-Dioulasso choreography competition, and Zora Snake won the best dancer and performer prize at the 2020 edition of the Golden Afro Artistic Awards in Brussels.

Show and artist information:

• Concept design, direction and choreography: Zora Snake

• Text and dramaturgy: Zora Snake and Alice Carre

• Video: Matt Serna

• Lighting design: Etienne Tak

• Musical creation: Pidj Boomboomdistortion

• Distribution: Zora Snake

• Production: Cie Zora Snake with the support of Faso Teatri (Laure Louvat)

• Co-produced by: Institut Français (Paris), Le Triangle, Cité de la danse (France), La Briqueterie Centre de Développement Chorégraphique (France) With the support of: Compagnie d’Acétés (France), Institut Français du Cameroun (Yaoundé), CDC La Termitière (Burkina-Faso), Ateliers Frappaz (France), Association sens interdits (Lyon), Studio Ankata (Burkina-Faso), Mantsina Festival on Stage (Congo-Brazzaville)