Joséphine & Bantu — A Double Bill of Memory, Resistance and Becoming Human

Gregory Maqoma Industries (GMI) and UJ Arts & Culture proudly present an extraordinary double bill bringing together two seminal voices of African and diasporic contemporary dance: Germaine Acogny’s Joséphine and Gregory Maqoma’s new creation Bantu. Produced by Productions Sarfati with the support of CHANEL and Muse Art Foundation, this programme stages a powerful encounter between legacy and futurity, memory and resistance, and the archive and the living body.

This African premiere follows the world premiere of Joséphine at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris on 24 September 2025 and launches Bantu, a major international co-production created in 2026.

This double bill is a rare convergence of African and diasporic brilliance — a ceremony of memory, defiance and return, offered through two towering figures of contemporary dance.

JOSÉPHINE

Choreography: Germaine Acogny, Alexandra Seutin

Performer: Germaine Acogny

Staging & Dramaturgy: Mikaël Serre

Original Music: Fabrice Bouillon-LaForest

Lights & Set Design: Fabiana Piccioli, Enrico Bagnoli

Costumes: Paloma

Technical Director: Oliver Hauser

Stage Manager: Barry Strydom

Communication Manager: Isabelle Deville

Visual Content Creation (Video & Photo): Maxime Dos

Producer: Vony Sarfati

World Premiere: Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Paris – 24 September 2025

Joséphine is a production of Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.

Joséphine summons an electrifying dialogue between two iconic women: Germaine Acogny and Joséphine Baker. Through choreographic friction rather than lineage, the work interrogates the colonial gaze, exoticism, resistance and reinvention.

Joséphine Baker — born in the United States and canonised in France — embodied colonial fantasy while simultaneously subverting it, later becoming a figure of anti-racist struggle. Germaine Acogny, born in what is now Benin, dismantles those same imaginaries through a grounded, lived, politically charged body. Her dance is a terrain of memory, refusal and becoming.

In the words of dramaturg Mikaël Serre, the stage becomes “a critical arena, a ritual of ”repair”—activating what bell hooks called the oppositional gaze and what Achille Mbembe names a politics of the living. This is not a celebration, but a traversal; not a reproduction, but an act of resistance.

BANTU – Creation 2026

Concept & Choreography: Gregory Maqoma

Music Composition: Yogin Sullaphen

Costume Design: Black Coffee Designs

Lighting Designer: Denis Hutchinson

Movement Analyst: Shanell Winlock-Pailman

Technical Director: Oliver Hauser

Stage Manager: Barry Strydom

Communication Manager: Isabelle Deville

Visual Content Creation (Video & Photo): Maxime Dos

Producer: Vony Sarfati

Dancers:

• Rodolphe Allui, Anique Ayiboe, Profit Lucky, Amy Collé Seck – École des Sables, Senegal

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

Bantu is a co-production with The Joyce Theater New York, Théâtre de la Ville de Paris, and Théâtres de la Ville du Luxembourg.

The word Bantu — from the root meaning to be human — becomes more than origin. It is inheritance, revolution, bone-memory. In this new creation, Gregory Maqoma offers a choreographic reclamation of humanity itself, danced by a generation who feel the urgency of remembering what was denied yet never destroyed.

Here, the body is archive. Movement becomes testimony. Through rhythm, rupture and ritual, the dancers speak languages stored in the spine, the skin and the breath — insisting on dignity, on interconnectedness, on ubuntu: I am because we are.

Bantu is not classification but cosmic inheritance — a work that heals, disrupts and restores the human being as a living, breathing force of possibility.

Performance Dates:

Friday, 30 January 2026 - 19:30

Saturday, 31 January 2026 - 15:00

Venue: Keorapetse William Kgosietsile Theatre, UJ Arts Centre, Auckland Park

Produced by Productions Sarfati with the support of CHANEL and Muse Art Foundation.

ABOUT JOSEPHINE by Mikaël Serre

Germaine Acogny and Josephine 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?

Joséphine 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 clichés 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 mythologised 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 Joséphine’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.