“AS WE ARE”

Germaine Acogny & Gregory Maqoma

JOSEPHINE
Germaine Acogny, Alesandra Seutin | Choreography
Mikaël Serre | Staging, dramaturgy
Fabrice Bouillon-LaForest | Original music
Alesandra Seutin, Jade Wheeler, Chris Brooker | Voices
Fabiana Piccioli, Enrico Bagnoli | Lights, set design
PALOMA, Maison d’art resident at le 19M | Costumes
World Premiere | Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris – 24th September 2025
Josephine is a production Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, with the support of CHANEL.
Paloma, a “Maison d’art” specialising in “flou” supported Josephine through the design and creation of the costumes worn on stage by Germaine Acogny.
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BANTU
Gregory Maqoma | Concept and choreography
Yogin Sullaphen | Music Composition
Black Coffee Designs | Costumes Design
Denis Hutchinson | Lighting Designer
Shanell Winlock-Pailman | Movement Analyst

Dancers:
– Rodolphe Allui, Anique Ayiboe, Profit Lucky, Amy Collé from École des Sables du Sénégal.
– 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.

World Premiere | Johannesburg UJ Art & Culture – 30th January 2026
Bantu is a co-production with The Joyce Theater New York, Théâtre de la Ville de Paris and Théâtres de la Ville du Luxembourg.

PRODUCTION CREDITS
The evening “AS WE ARE” : Josephine & Bantu is produced by Productions Sarfati with the support of CHANEL. In collaboration with Muse Art Foundation.

Vony Sarfati | Producer
Oliver Hauser | Technical Director
Denis Hutchinson | Régie lumières
Barry Strydom | Stage Manager
Isabelle Deville | Communication Manager
Maxime Dos | Visual content creation (video & photo)

Running time : approximately 1h25, including interval (Joséphine 30 minutes / interval 20 minutes / Bantu 35 minutes)

ABOUT AS WE ARE

Germaine Acogny, pioneer of contemporary African dance, returns to stages with a moving solo: in Josephine, she embodies Joséphine Baker as a symbol of Black female freedom, and a fighter against racism. lnspired by Acogny, choreographer Gregory Maqoma offers a choreographic response with Bantu, performed by the Vuyani Dance Theatre alongside dancers from Acogny’s École des Sables.

Side by side in the dance evening AS WE ARE, Josephine and Bantu create a dialogue on memory, exile, heritage and reclaiming identity.

«May you feel the pulse of ancestry and the electricity of the present. May you witness not only performance, but presence. May this evening remind us that to create is to remember, and to remember is to insist on our shared humanity .» Gregory Maqoma

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?

Josephine 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 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 Josephine’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 by Gregory Maqoma

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.