Dance floor, space for requests

In front of a small audience, within a round table organized by the Music Media Library in Paris, artist Snake Ninja tells his story through dance. He returns in particular to his encounter with “voguing”. This dance originated in the 1970s in the Latino, African American, transgender and gay communities, and is inspired by fashion show movements. Today, Snake Ninja is one of his characters on Parisian stages. ” Vogue is a dance with a political nature because we reclaim spaces that were forbidden to us at a certain time, such as theaters for example. »

This roundtable is moderated by journalist, ethnomusicologist and DJ Renaud Brizard. ” In general, the music I’m talking about is produced by ostracized or marginalized communities. he is telling us. Often this music – and these dances – are political expressions because they express feelings, lifestyle, and human experience. People to whom we do not give the floor or to whom we do not make space. »

“Today, we make twerk’s predecessors invisible.”

That evening, dancer Patricia Badin came to talk about twerking, the kind that involves shaking your hips and buttocks. It appeared in the 1990s, and it was singer Miley Cyrus who contributed to its spread around the world in the early 2010s. But its origins are much older, as dancer Patricia Badin tells us. We have to go look for them in Africa. ” It was Americans who called this method twerk – a combination of twisting and jerking – but in fact, it was a dance that already existed in many African countries. In Ivory Coast for example, it is called Mabuka. There are also Lombole, Ndombolo, Soka. These are dances where the pelvis rolls and the buttocks jump. When I was little, we used to dance our butts off but we didn’t call it a dance, it wasn’t called twerking back then. »

The dancer teaches twerk in Paris and wants to deconstruct the image of this discipline which, for her, is not the hypersexualized dance to which it is generally reduced. ” Today, we make invisible the precursors of this dance, but also its liberation side, self-confidence, the dance of resilience, etc. It is also a rite of passage dance for women, a dance that distributes energy, which heals, Patricia Badin notes. Among the women who come to my classes, there are those in whom I see transformation.. » The transformation that has occurred in her also informs the 51-year-old dancer, who plans to continue dancing for several decades.