Germaine Acogny is a Senegalese French dancer, teacher, and choreographer, known as the ‘mother of contemporary African dance’ and a respected emissary of African Dance and Culture. She studied at the École Simon Siegel in Paris and established her first dance studio in Dakar in 1968. There, she developed her own technique for Modern African dance, combining the influence of dances she had inherited from her grandmother, a Yoruba priestess, with her knowledge of traditional African and occidental dance.
Between 1977 and 1982, Acogny was the artistic director of Mudra Afrique (Dakar), before moving to Toulouse in 1985, where she and her husband, Helmut Vogt, founded the ‘Studio-École-Ballet-Théâtre du 3è Monde’. In 1995, she returned to Senegal and established an international education centre for traditional and contemporary African dances, l’École des Sables.
In 1998, she started her own dance company, Jant-Bi, whose productions include Les écailles de la mémoire – Scales of memory (2008), a collaboration with Urban Bush Women, and notably, Fagaala, based on the genocide in Rwanda and winner of a Bessie Award (2007). Acogny’s other prominent works and credits include Sahel (1987), YE’OU (1988 – winner of the London Contemporary Dance and Performance Award 1991), Tchouraï (2001), Bintou Were - a Sahel Opera (2007), Songook Yaakaar (2010), Mon élue noire – Sacre no.2, choreography Olivier Dubois, (2014, based on the original music of The Rite of Spring, winner of a Bessie Award 2018) and A un endroit du début (2015).
Malou Airaudo was born in Marseille in 1948 and began dancing at the age of eight at the Opéra de Marseille. At seventeen, she joined the Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo, where she became a soloist working with Léonide Massine, before joining Françoise Adret and her Ballet-Théâtre-Contemporain in 1968. Airaudo moved to New York in the early 1970s to work with Paul Sanasardo and Manuel Alum, the latter choreographing the solo "Woman of a Mystic Body" for Airaudo. It was there that she met Pina Bausch for the first time.
In 1973, she was invited to Wuppertal, Germany by Bausch, newly appointed head of the Wuppertal Ballet, which she soon renamed the Tanztheater Wuppertal. Airaudo became one of the key figures of the ensemble, creating major roles in various productions, such as Iphigenie auf Tauris, Orpheus und Eurydike, Café Müller, and The Rite of Spring, among others.
Airaudo was also a founding member of the Parisian dance company, La Main, along with Jacques Patarozzi, Dominique Mercy, Helena Pikon and Dana Sapiro, and worked with choreographer Carolyn Carlson at the Teatrodanza La Fenice in Venice. Her choreographic accomplishments include works for the Folkwang Tanz Studio, Ballet de Nancy, Ballet de Geneva, Ballet du Nord, and the Venice Biennale. In the last decade, she has also worked with Pottporus Renegade Theatre creating work with break-dancers like Irgendwo and Verlorene Drachen.
