Faso Danse Théâtre Productions
NEW CREATION
TOLON KE
2024
A danced concert by Serge Aimé Coulibaly & Faso Danse Théâtre
Life is too short and too precious to spend it distracting ourselves and accumulating perishable treasure. Instead, let us seek to understand its true meaning and enrich our souls.
Maxime attributed to Socrates
With his new performance, Serge Aimé Coulibaly invites us to a jubilant ‘danced concert’ – a performance in which dance, music, and the rhythm of the human heartbeat pulsate in unison, creating an experience of jubilant togetherness. The title is a festive imperative: Tolon kè! – Let’s rejoice! Let’s celebrate! Let’s create a moment where our souls meet! An ensemble of four dancers accompanied by a singer-guitarist performs a precise yet powerful and exuberant choreography that leaves the audience no choice but to joyously accept the invitation extended in the title of the piece.
Tolon ke! is a versatile piece that can be presented not only in traditional venues, but also in places such as public squares, open-air festival terrains, and small cultural centres and a variety of other alternative spaces. The leading idea behind this new form is to open up to the possibility of direct interaction and co-creation with the audience.
The technical requirements of the spectacle are rudimentary, which makes it adaptable for different spaces, including open-air locations. Depending on the context, it can be played in a30 minutes-, 45 minutes- or 60 minutes version.
Africa Simply The Best
2023
The three best African dance solos, selected by a jury headed by Serge Aimé Coulibaly, will be touring in Africa and Europe in 2024 and 2025.
In 2015, Serge Aimé Coulibaly organised the first Simply The Best, a competition for the best dance solo, which was open to young dancers and choreographers from all over Burkina Faso.
in 2019, the third competition was open to the whole African continent. Which explains the reference in the new title: Africa Simply The Best. This new step creates a unique meeting place and confrontation between young creatives in their artistic progress, which is already so rich and varied.
- The competition
The fifth edition ofAfrica Simply The Besttook place in December 2023 at Ankata, the residency space of Serge Aimé Coulibaly in Bobo-Dioulasso (Burkina Faso). The jury, headed by Serge Aimé Coulibaly, chose the three best solos from a preselection of 14. - Coaching
The three winners will then be invited for a period of intensive coaching with three choreographers. - The tour
As from May 2025,Africa Simply The Best, the three best dance solos from Africa, will go on a tour in Europe.
The laureates of 2023:
Koffi-Kégou Afiadegnigban – La Quatrième
Aziz Zoundi – Chute Perpétuelle
Kadidja Tiemanta – BANBALI 100 fin
Faso Danse Théâtre Productions
ON TOUR
C LA VIE
2023
With C la Vie Serge Aimé Coulibaly takes his place in a rich tradition and creates a new contemporary initiatory story to explore life and our way of being in the world in 2023.
The 9 performers join on stage – a public square where anything can happen, and nothing is lost. As they embark on this initiatory journey, they invite us to witness the disappearance of the old world. No initiation is possible without experiencing – however temporary – the instability of the world.
In this story, there is no long series of various obstacles and no hero who must overcome them, but one single great challenge: how to be together? At the heart of the initiatory journey that is C la Vie is the Encounter – with music, with the other, with reality, with time, with the planet, with the loved one, and so on. The only thing that matters is the event of the encounter and the quest to connect oneself to the world.
KALAKUTA REPUBLIK
2017
Short of breath, panting, bodies shaken by a unconquerable pulse, over a music that spreads from one coast to another and tells us about the world, lucid, whole, with an astounding beauty.
Animal, lascivious, warlike, sensual, contemplative, this energy is, above all, the energy of the revolt and of absolute commitment. It catches emotions, upsets beliefs, reveals our depths.
Fela gives us, with his breath and his respiration, a chaos that you need to cross to explore in ourselves the strength of our own individual liberty.
What do we have to say, what do we have to refuse, today, in this world that is quaking with fear and that is closing itself off more and more ?
FITRY
2020
Fitry, the newest solo performance of Serge Aimé Coulibaly, with Jean Robert Koudogbo Kiki is a sequel to Fadjiri (2013). It is the vulnerability, moving and at the same time powerful, that gives Fitry its full meaning, and encourages us to meet people in this post-Covid-19 world.
Faso Danse Théâtre Productions
FORMER
WAKATT
2020
WAKATT, the new creation by Serge Aimé Coulibaly, is part of a body work that examines daily reality and social changes through a dance language that starts from internal violence, human instinct, urgency and the need to express oneself, to say something concrete through the body. WAKATT is a reflection on the fear-filled contemporary era we live in. At a time when nationalism is on the rise in most parts of the world, the starting point of this new creation is “the fear of the other“. The one who is arriving, the on who is here, the one that they tell us will take our place, our job, our house.
KIRINA
2018
From the past forever reverberates the present. Kirina draws from the source of the Mandingue epic tales, and gets its strenght from the song of Soundiata. From these myths emerges the all-encompassing modernity of a universal artistic language. As we follow the destiny of a people that marches towards a collective future, Kirina takes us on a journey that speaks of exile, displacement, hope, and of the incomparable wealth that comes out of confronting different worlds and experiences
SLEEPLESS NIGHTS IN OUAGADOUGOU
2014
The revolution is there, omnipresent, in the electrified bodies of the dancers, in the raised fist rap by Smockey, in the hope of the street, in the premonition of an artist who dreamt this play two years beforehand. Combats, suffering, humiliation and hardships find their release in the will to live and the urgency to speak out and recapture the voices.
FADJIRI
2013
There is a time at night, just before dawn, where evil demons come out of hiding and push around men they meet for fun.
Doubts that torture into trance, the need to find solidity in a time where every footstep encounters nothing but incertitude, a loss of bearings travelling to the terminus on a private journey… then coming back stronger with an instinctive animal energy and absolutely assured of a will to live.
This is the way of the man, swaying, shaky, but always finding his verticality.
KOHKUMA
7°SOUTH
2011
A place, precise, unknown. Six characters, battered, shattered, far from their share of trampled humanity, crushed and scarred by violence, inequalities, wars.
They have to take difficult paths to find out how to live with themselves and go, finally, towards the other. Creating their own lives, new ones from patches of their past and freeing their demons to tame them. Finding inside themselves, this elsewhere, which allows them to rise up again and to hope once more
BABEMBA
2007
What do you hang your dreams on when all around you, everything is in ruins ? How do you reignite and let a youth shine that has been extinguished through apathy, that has been absent from its history ?
Africa is not only a land of massacres and desolation : there have always been islands of upright men, lucid, passionate, who left behind all fatalism and decided to change.
LONELINESS OF AN HONEST MAN
2005
How do you stay standing when you have lost hope and the past full of passion, confident, serene with the political sense of Thomas Sankara, is a painful reminder of the decline of the present ?
A man in exile, uprooted from his land, his culture, his engagements, precarious in his insecurity. He tells you his story, fights his sorrows, between revolt, rage and despair, to try and bring back the broken pieces.
In looking to find himself again, he calls to this other that he misses so.
A BENGUER
2006
There are those who left, who tried to cross over to this fantasy elsewhere and who met with a vicious reality.
They come back, sometimes, not for long, for some rare holidays, and meet in the bars those who dream of going, leaving behind unemployment, leaving difficulties and horizons with no hope. Moments of sharing and confrontation, in a place where they can let it all hang out, a place where dreams and alcohol numb the real.The troubled daily life, the painful integration in that beyond, will not be said, as exile remains for those who would flee misery and a lightless life, the only hope to create themselves a future.