PORTRAIT PERFORMANCE

There are dreams whose sounds awaken longing.

Like wind swirling seeds, they send images and feelings from the stomach to the head.

Is this part of the diasporic experience? Benin, [ Beˈnɛ̃ ],

the sound of the word connected with the first bars of music the father put on at the weekend.

It connected with the history of the Agodjé, with the rare and delicious smell in the kitchen,

or the words heard on the phone.

In her portrait performance, dancer and choreographer Camille Badirou

follows the longing of her identity and the relationship to her blackness, inner-self.

It swirled in her body, in a poetic and resistant movement.

She didn’t know what she was referring too,

Not yet, until she set foot,

awakened and whole, to the land where wonder slept.

Camille Badirou searches for the links. The land existed as a puzzle whose pieces are faded or lost.

She develops her techniques of imagination and reconstruction, step by step,

in a new choreography interweaving sounds and images, across the sea.

Finding her resonance in the land. She finds and invents movement,

in a powerful echo she found the I and the we, the soundtrack for a new self-confidence.

Step-step-kick, the steps through

the not-yet-known form self-determined patterns.