Double Bill: Josephine and Bantu

Imagine witnessing, on one stage, the meeting of two towering voices of African contemporary dance in a historic double bill.

The Doyenne, Germaine Acogny, in her iconic solo Josephine—a work of memory, legacy, and freedom.

And Gregory Maqoma, premiering Bantu—a powerful invocation of humanity, dignity, and collective becoming.

This is more than a performance.

It is a double African premiere—a rare convergence of lineage and new fire.

Gregory Maqoma Industries (GMI) and the UJ Arts Centre are proud to present JOSEPHINE & BANTU, produced by Serfati.

THE DOUBLE BILL

JOSÉPHINE | BANTU

JOSE´PHINE

Germaine Acogny, Alesandra Seutin | Choreography

Germaine Acogny | Performer

Mikae¨l Serre | Staging, dramaturgy

Fabrice Bouillon-LaForest | Original music

Fabiana Piccioli, Enrico Bagnoli | Lights,

set design Paloma | Costumes

World Premiere | The´a^tre des Champs-Elyse´es, Paris – 24th September 2025

Josephine is a production The´a^tre des Champs-E´lyse´es - With the support of Chanel

BANTU

Gregory Maqoma | Concept and choreography

Yogin Sullaphen | Music Composition

Black Coffee Designs | Costumes Design

Denis Hutchinson | Lighting Designer

Shanell Winlock Pailman | Movement Analyst

Oliver Hauser | Technical Director

Stage Manager | Barry Strydom

Dancers

Rodolphe ALLUI, Anique AYIBOE, Profit LUCKY, Amy Colle´ SECK from E´cole des Sables du Se´ne´gal.

Nathan Attie Botha, Roseline Olga Wilkens, Noko Moses Moeketsi, Tshepo Neolan Molusi, Nkosana Mphumeleli Fakude, Monicca Ngwakwane Magoro, Gilbert Goliath, Thabang Albert Mdlalose from Vuyani Dance Theatre in South Africa.

ABOUT JOSEPHINE by Mikae¨l Serre

Germaine Acogny and Jose´phine Baker. Two women, two trajectories intersecting between flashes of golden light and stretches of shadow, between longings for elsewhere and the reinvention of the self. How can these figures be brought into dialogue, not through a gentle logic of lineage, but through a charged friction with history?

Jose´phine Baker, a paradoxical icon, embodied (sometimes in spite of herself) the colonial fantasies hungry for exotica. Born in the United States, celebrated in France, she navigated these cliche´s in order to subvert them, later becoming a central figure in antiracist struggles. Her body was both spectacle and strategy, a vehicle of seeming submission but also of disruption. Bell hooks might say she “occupied the gaze,” that she turned it back.

Germaine Acogny, for her part, dismantles. Her art is an act of choreographic defiance, a movement-writing that is grounded, not mythologized but lived. Her body is a political terrain.

Working with Germaine has always opened, for me, a nonlinear temporality: one of bodies that remember, bodies that refuse, bodies that generate. It means probing our own inheritances, our contaminated imaginaries. We will not seek to glorify, but to dig, to question, to disobey.

Through the prism of these two women, I hope to summon a broader reflection on alterity and on the possible futures of bodies. A stage as a critical arena, as the site of a ritual of repair.

This work is a necessary dialogue, an act of warrior disobedience, echoing the Amazons of Dahomey whom Germaine seeks to invoke—fighters who stood at the forefront of resistance to French colonial expansion. Germaine was born on this land (now Benin), an ancient kingdom whose reverberations shape her work of reappropriation. A point of intersection with Jose´phine’s struggles.

This creation does not seek to celebrate but to traverse, to dismantle the gaze. At the crossroads of colonial archives, myths of exoticism, and dances of reclamation, it attempts to reactivate what Bell Hooks called the “oppositional gaze,” and what Achille Mbembe names a “politics of the living,” for the stage here does not display : it summons. It does not reproduce: it resists.

ABOUT BANTU

The word Bantu (from the root meaning to be human) is more than linguistic origin; it is inheritance, revolution, bone-memory. It recalls a time before fragmentation, before the body was commodified, before the spirit was named and shamed into erasure. Bantu becomes a site of return — a re-threading of dignity, worth, liberty, and the irrefutable interconnectedness of people bound by ancestral echo.

Carried by a generation of dancers who recognise urgency, Bantu is danced with the weight of histories and the lightness of rebirth. Their bodies speak languages denied, severed, ridiculed, but never destroyed: languages stored in the spine, the skin, the breath. Through rhythm, rupture, and ritual, Bantu honours those who were extracted from themselves and yet remained profoundly human.

In Bantu, movement is testimony. The stage becomes a ground of remembrance and uprising, where each gesture insists on life, insists on humanity, insists on ubuntu* : I am because we are. It arrives to heal, to disrupt, and to restore the human being not as classification, but as cosmic inheritance.

* A concept from African cultures meaning “humanity” or “kindness”, referring to solidarity and brotherhood.