Decolonizing dance (1): Filling in the gaps in history from France and Belgium

Marie Pons

What should we do about the gaps in dance history? How do the personal and the political coexist in choreographic traditions and the way they’re passed down? For this first installment devoted to decoloniality in dance, choreographers Soa Ratsifandrihana, Betty Tchomanga, and Mohamed Toukabri analyze how their artistic research deals with cultural legacies steeped in colonial history. From France and Belgium, they take a critical look at their training – imagining new movement vocabularies and new modes of intergenerational transmission.

“There is a hole in my language, just as there is a hole in history,” says Soa Ratsifandrihana in the radio production Rouge Cratère¹, in 2024. In the “documentary fable addressed to young people in the diaspora, searching for a sense of belonging”, the choreographer explores the links between her own history and that of Madagascar. “What I wanted to do was to examine the contexts in which my body has evolved, having experienced different types of dance,” continues Ratsifandrihana. This exploration began with her 2021 solo g r oo ve, in which she questioned “what I had absorbed, what I wanted to keep or give back from what had been passed on to me. What does my body reject, what has it lost, what has it not yet found? How do I want to dance today?”

Questioning the legacies that make up a dancing body was also a starting point for Mohamed Toukabri when he began creating the solo Every-body-knows-what-tomorrow-brings-and-we-all-know-what-happened-yesterday in 2025. By bringing together whirling breakdance figures, elongated body lines, and spiral movements on stage, the dancer questions the driving forces behind his movements and, as a result, his conflicting impulses.

“I needed to question 23 years of dance practice,” explains Toukabri. “It’s kind of like archaeology, I’m digging through the archives of my own body, in a triangle between Tunis, Brussels, and New York, the cities that have marked my journey with their dance cultures. I realize that the movements I make are shaped and transformed by everything around me.” The famous insistence by Audre Lorde, a black lesbian feminist American essayist and activist, that “the personal is political” reminds him that “our bodies don’t entirely belong to us.” 

This decolonial archaeology of the self also underpins the dramaturgy of the show Fampitaha, fampita, fampitàna (three Malagasy words meaning comparison, transmission, and rivalry) created by Ratsifandrihana in 2024. The choreographer and the two other dancers on stage, Audrey Mérilus and Stanley Ollivier, wearing an accumulation of layers of costumes, each alluding to eras and geographies that constructed colonial power: “At first we wear gloves, showing how civilized we are. Gradually, we remove layers of clothing in order to shed the pressures to conform imposed by colonial institutions. Our movements then arise from the relationship and contact between us, transcending an imposed system that trains bodies to comply to expectations.”

Finding one’s own mode of expression under superimposed layers means “to return to the body to speak about ourselves as subjects in history,” as American black feminist theorist and activist bell hooks states in Teaching to Transgress (1994). And embracing the complexity of her practices can become a driving force notes Ratsifandrihana: “Even when questioning the hierarchy of dances, everything is so intertwined that it is difficult to break free from what is inside us. There are residues that we can never completely get rid of.”

“Embracing the complexity of one’s creative practices can also become a driving force, a way of sidestepping the essentialization imposed on artists of color by the contemporary art world. “I feel a kind of hybridity in my body, like I’ve cultivated a kind of multiplicity more than a specialization, because my body has an appetite for exploring very different practices.,” says Betty Tchomanga, referring to her connection to krump, to the festive social dances of her father’s native Cameroon, and to the works of contemporary choreographers for whom she has danced. “I think it suits me to stay on the edge, to never become a complete expert, so that I have the freedom to transform.”

Both Ratsifandrihana and Toukabri have also encountered what Tchomanga refers to as the “blind spots” of dance history as taught in European conservatoires, often narrowly focused on Western and white references. Toukabri noticed this when he joined the P.A.R.T.S. dance academy in Brussels in 2008. “The history of American postmodern dance was taught, but at no point were any links made with hip-hop culture, even though the two coexisted in New York from the 1960s and 1970s onwards. Dance cultures could be more interconnected within such a training program.”

Tchomanga also refers to a hierarchical system, whether insidious or overt, that classifies dance practices. “After two years of studying contemporary and jazz dance at the Bordeaux Conservatory, I went to the National Center for Contemporary Dance in Angers, where jazz was implicitly frowned upon. This led me to question the notion of the center and to realize that the absence of other dance histories produces implicit value judgments and a false objectivity. And this despite the fact that there is a significant proportion of foreign students in the program, which reminded me of my presence as a dancer of African descent in a predominantly white environment.”

By exploring the intimate repercussions of dominant historical narratives, Tchomanga created the performance series Histoire(s) Décoloniale(s) in 2023. This series of portraits uses the personal histories of the artists on stage – Emma Tricard, Folly Romain Azaman, Dalila Khatir, and Adélaïde Desseauve – to address issues that shape lives marked by diasporas and diverse cultural heritages. The four solos were presented in classrooms before being performed in theaters, evolving “through discussions with students and the experience of interacting with the different contexts,” she explains Being in a classroom allows “for a more direct form of transmission,” she adds. More than anything, says Ratsifandrihana, decoloniality offers the possibility of opening new paths, “so as not to fall back into imposed patterns, but to write the stories we want”.

^{1. With Chloé Despax, in which she performs a text by the author Sékou Séméga.}

Marie Pons is an author, critic and dance researcher. Narratives, testimonies, investigations, imaginary landscapes and encounters are at the center of her work. She is editor in chief of Les Démêlées, a publication which focuses on dance in the Hauts-de-France region. She regularly writes for Journal de l’ADC in Geneva, and she is associate editor with Springback Magazine (UK). She has also directed audio documentaries with Forêt Noire.

Every-Body-Knows-What-Tomorrow-Brings-And-We-All-Know-What-Happened-Yesterday
Choreography: Mohamed Toukabri
From February 17th to 20th at the Théâtre de la Bastille
as a part of festival Faits d’hiver

g r oo v e
Choreography: Soa Ratsifandrihana
Form March 11 to 12 at the New York Live Arts
as a part of Dance Reflections Festival

Histoire(s) Décoloniale(s) #Autoportrait
Choreography: Betty Tchomanga
March 20 at the Triangle, Cité de la danse, Rennes

Rouge Cratère 
documentary by Soa Ratsifandrihana and Chloé Despax
to listen to

En terrain décolonial
sound creation by Charlotte Imbault
about Histoire(s) décoloniale(s) by Betty Tchomanga
to listen to

Une écologie décoloniale, penser l’écologie depuis le monde caribéen.
Malcom Ferdinand, Éditions Seuil, 2019

Apprendre à transgresser
bell hooks, Éditions Syllepse, 2019

Que peut littérature quand elle ne peut ?
Patrick Chamoiseau, Éditions Seuil, 2025

Essia Jaïbi
Tunisian artist and author
author of the text for the solo piece
Everyone-knows-what-tomorrow-brings-and-we-all-know-what-happened-yesterday
by Mohamed Toukabri

​​Audre Lorde
The Personal or the Political - II / Conference on Feminist Theory, 1979,
Lesbian Herstory Archives AudioVisual Collections
learn more

Mémoires de la plantation, Épisode de racisme ordinaire
Grada Kilamba, Éditions Anaconda, 2021

Franchir les frontières, vers une scène artistique transnationale Sud-Sud
Kmar Douagi, 2025
to read