In this practical workshop students will discover both urban dance and traditional African dance, focusing on the musicality, perception and intention of the movement. Participants are encouraged to reflect on their relationship to the body and to others, while expressing their creativity in relation to the music they hear.
Dancer, choreographer, author and theatre director Anne Nguyen founded the par Terre Dance Company in 2005. She has created about twenty shows, several interactive installations and short films. She also wrote a collection of poems and several articles on dance.
Coming from the world of breakdance battles and influenced by scientific studies, she combines urban social dances with a geometrical, pure, destructured choreographic expression that exalts the power of abstraction. She derives her inspiration from mathematics, martial arts, utopia and myths. She draws from the observation of gestures, danced as well as ordinary, individual as well as collective, to turn urban dances and popular cultures into a support for a reflection on tradition, on social markers, on diversity, on cultural appropriation and on the tensions between multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism.
Regularly called upon for her expertise on urban dances and cultural issues, Anne Nguyen has participated in numerous debates and symposiums and gives conferences that put into perspective dance, culture, and society.
Mark-Wilfried Kouadio, aka ‘Willy Kazzama’, is an Ivorian dancer and performer born in Ivory Coast. He founded the Real Boy’s Dance Company, which won the prize for the best Ivorian urban Dance Company in 2021, he worked with multiple traditional and urban dance companies. He joined the distribution of Matière(s) première(s), and Behind the Line of the Anne Nguyen / par Terre Dance Company with whom he created the [Superstrat[ solo in 2025. This solo explores the relationship between the ancestral roots of dance and music and the inheritance of the Afro-American diaspora. It invites us to examine our relationship to cultures coming from immigration and to explore different possible harmonies between tradition and modernity.