Geneva Festival: dring, La Bâtie rings in the return!

A hustle and bustle in the courtyards. And in the vast courtyard of ideas too, to the point that they copiously infiltrate the scenes at the end of the lake. Gender identity, ecology, feminism or the fight against racism, The Built has been echoing the changes in mentality underway for several years now. For this 48^e edition that is starting, it focuses in particular on the inestimable debt of the West towards the peoples that it has colonized over the centuries. African or South American proposals abound, both in dance and in theater: an attempt at a compass for students – or dunces – festival-goers.

Pygmy skeletons

On September 1st and 2nd, the festival is teaming up with the Grand Théâtre and the Forum Meyrin to host an exemplary collective in that it exclusively produces projects that are half African and half European – hence its name, Group50:50. Created in 2022, filmed in Congo the following year, its «The Ghosts are returning» brings together a team of Congolese, Swiss and German artists to accompany seven remains of the nomadic Mbuti people deposited in Geneva in the 1950s towards an indigenous afterlife.

At the crossroads of narration, music and multimedia performance, the piece fits perfectly with the current MEG exhibition, “Memories – Geneva in the colonial world”In addition to attending a mass for the dead on stage, filled with pain and hope, the museum will be able to complete the immersion this Sunday with a guided tour and a round table on the theme of “Restitution of human remains in Switzerland: issues and perspectives”.

Tap your feet

On the dance side, let’s go back to the 1950s, when the townships of Johannesburg began to tremble under the steps of the pantsula. Having become synonymous with the fight against apartheid, the popular choreography consists of shaking your legs to frenetic rhythms and energetically stamping your feet. An international collective is now the ambassador of this protest movement, Impilo Mapantsula, to whom La Bâtie has issued a double invitation.

With «Wafa Wafa»on September 7 and 8, its performers will offer a virtuoso demonstration of this historic dance. On the following two evenings, five of them will rely on American choreographer Jeremy Nedd to enter into a dialogue with jazz music, the voice of the struggle for civil rights: «Blue nile to the galaxy around olodumare»or how to revisit the past to better dream of Afrofuturism.

Tutus torn off

To the solo “Hatched” which revealed her internationally in 2008, the South African choreographer Mamela Nyamza gives fifteen years later the increased scope of a «Hatched Ensemble» – which will be translated as “collective blossoming”. It is no longer just about freeing a singular identity from the constraints inherited from colonization, but about freeing an entire culture from Western influences. Ten dancers trained in classical ballet, an opera singer and a professional musician thus reappropriate their bodies, their codes, their traditions, their artistic creativity in full view of the public, who will go to the Théâtre Am Stram Gram from September 4 to 6.

Blackboard

Black and feminine bodies, again. Since the Renaissance, European painting has been full of these docile silhouettes, this ebony skin, this turbaned hair that have made the glory of orientalism in its various forms. The Centre d’art contemporain Genève thus stands out as the appropriate setting to host on September 4 and 5 the highly anticipated reading that Kayije Kagame will give under the supervision of the woman who directed her in the film “Saint Omer”, Alice Diop. It is at “Journey of the Black Venus” that the actress will lend her voice: more precisely to the epilogue of a collection of poetry by Robin Coste Lewis, in which the African-American author tracks down the occurrences of these women enslaved by our history of art.

Andean Ritual

From today until the end of the week, the interdisciplinary artist Tiziano Cruz, already programmed at La Bâtie in 2022, is coming to close his autobiographical trilogy at the Théâtre du Grütli. After a section dedicated to his sister and another dedicated to his mother, the Argentinian summons in «BROTHERS» all of his Andean ancestors and extended family to restore sovereignty to the dispossessed communities of his country. As he occupies the stage alone, his lecture turns into a collective invocation for a reconciliation between past, present and future.

Katia Berger has been a journalist in the cultural section since 2012. She covers current events in the performing arts, particularly through theatre and dance reviews, but also sometimes covers photography, visual arts and literature.More info

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