Black Belt spits out a magic ink that reveals the troubled and disturbed areas of living.
Black Belt looks at Africa in movement, into that which lives there and not that which is seen as a fantasised vision.
This work follows on like a poem moved by a passion for living and evolving forms.
This exploration provokes an inspiration of a multitude of forms, vehement in its roots yet serene in its fulfilment. Black Belt carries the cleverness of a being who has multiplied itself to feel and yet refute those preconceived ideas of the African reality.
The project pursues the possibility of breeding an active utopia that Felwine Sarr entitles Afrotopia.
According to the Senegalise economist « Africa has no one to catch up » and modernity has already well and truly arrived and therefore does not need to be reinvented.
Everything also indicates that the myth of development and scientific positivism, which projects a Western vision onto African societies as the unique way to describe them, should be questioned.
Black Belt recognises that our imaginary worlds, African as well as European, remain impregnated with history and capitalism.
Following « a mental construction » this postcolonial heritage continues to suggest a society of bedazzlement.
We are continuously bombarded by its machinations that dazzle and colonise our subconscious.
We can only see these capitalist screens that « kill our eyes » by dazzling us and by making us see the world as something different from what it really is. This machine of colonial light operates like a spell.
Preferring the reformulation of the black concept which according to Achille Mbembe does not necessarily refer just to colour, but which also concerns all the underdogs of all the countries, all the men-merchandise, and takes into full consideration the ensemble of the mechanisms of domination. It is thus just as much a criticism of neo-liberalism as it is of universalism.
We are called even more than before to live exposed to one another and to recognise that a part of our « subjectivity » finds its origin in our vulnerability.
Black Belt is about journeying, circulation and transfiguration, this work dreams of all the inheritances that also have nothing to do with birth. In some circumstances, it is connected to the Naval Ode by Pessoa and adds a taste of something foreign and excessive, a drunkenness that intoxicates one's self-awareness and unleashes a tumultuous and unleashed voice.
Travelling through a connected, urbane and globalised Africa, whose population is less than 30 years old, strikingly inventive and independent even if badly treated: this youth who replaces tracts with tweets and who creates its logos on the walls of the web, would it be showing the first signs of its right to reply for those whose expression is so often suppressed?


DISTRIBUTION
Choregraphy- conception and music Frank Micheletti
Dance Idio Chichava
Lighting Ivan Mathis

PRODUCTION
Kubilai Khan investigations

COPRODUCTION
Les Rencontres Chorégraphiques internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis, le Théâtre du Colombier-Bagnolet, le département de la Seine-Saint-Denis.
Remerciements au Théâtre des Salins SN de Martigues et au Conservatoire à rayonnement régional de Toulon pour leur accueil en studio.