This emphasis on the hand as an agential source of movement calls up a particular term. From the Latin words for \u201chand\u201d and \u201cto let go,\u201d manumission refers to the enfranchisement of an enslaved person, a process codified in historical legal systems ranging from ancient Greece, to the French Code Noir, to American state laws. Such a transition from captivity to freedom is one of the passages that Demb\u00e9l\u00e9\u2019s title suggests. As its program notes detail, Rite de passage<\/em> asks what a maroon dance might look like\u200a\u2014\u200aa query that references communities established throughout the Americas by formerly enslaved individuals, beginning in the sixteenth century, who found freedom through escape or manumission. The choreographic logic of the piece launches the dancer into motion from his hands. Momentum travels down from the wrist, discharging the body into the open, yet viscerally effortful, terrain of expressive movement\u200a\u2014\u200aan allegory for a kind of self-directed manumission, which collects freeing and being freed into a single figure of dancerly force.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both a historical phenomenon and, as the scholar Adam Bledsoe puts it, a mode of enacting \u201can autonomous politics away from the anti-Blackness of society,\u201d marronage implies acts of fugitivity, resistance, and refusal. This is the register into which Rite de passage <\/em>moved next, transforming itself with a change of lighting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
\n
$\"Bintou$
Bintou Demb\u00e9l\u00e9<\/strong>
Rite de passage\u2014solo II<\/em>, 2022-2025.
Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Fluorescent tubes lining the bottom of the stage right wall flicked on\u200a\u2014\u200anow the only source of illumination. Onomo began a slow trek along the glowing edge. In the newly murky space, his figure appeared dimly outlined. As he reached the corner of the stage, another row of fluorescents along the rear wall lit up, and he continued his taffy-like parade in silhouette. The deliberateness of his stride and the starkness of his backlit form generated a sense of suspension\u200a\u2014\u200aan unrelinquished inhale at the centre of Demb\u00e9l\u00e9\u2019s choreography. This is the image that lingered most indelibly between two viewings of the work a year apart: a testament to the generative challenge posed by experiments in withdrawal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The writer fahima ife describes the \u201cunruly fugitive dances\u201d of artists Matthew \u201cET\u201d Gibbs, Wayne McGregor, taisha paggett, Honji Wang, and S\u00e9bastien Ramirez as staging \u201cslow minimalist progressions.\u201d The middle section of Demb\u00e9l\u00e9\u2019s work seems especially in step with this cohort. The shared compositional textures that ife identifies point to aesthetic restraint, and even recalcitrance, as tactics of which choreographers avail themselves when attempting to \u201cfree the body from capture, from social death.\u201d I was also be reminded, during this interlude in silhouette, of Kara Walker\u2019s black paper cut-outs, which, as art historian Darby English puts it, \u201care as opaque as the irreducible differences that put the politics in difference.\u201d This irreducibility is a key fact of Walker\u2019s work. Her oeuvre reveals the history of the transatlantic slave trade\u200a\u2014\u200athat crucible out of which marronage bursts\u200a\u2014\u200ato be both a structuring global cataclysm and, per English, something \u201cas susceptible to distortion as anything subjectively perceived.\u201d Put reductively: any historicizing framework will bear, and be borne by, the bodies it implicates differently. In Walker\u2019s images, the past \u201cshuttles between what it is in impersonal time and what it becomes in the mind.\u201d Demb\u00e9l\u00e9\u2019s choreography of shadows activates some of this slipperiness too. After all, this piece is, as the title reminds us, a solo. The passage it enacts is as much our collective passage through the time of performance as it is a personal ritual, weighted with history, and living irreducibly in the body of the dancer and of each viewer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
$\"Bintou$
Bintou Demb\u00e9l\u00e9<\/strong>
Rite de passage\u2014solo II<\/em>, 2022-2025.
Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Rite de passage <\/em>returns to transitions between containment and release in its final movement. Traversing a wide circle of illumination\u200a\u2014\u200athe stage and its capacity to reveal or obscure have once again been remade with light\u200a\u2014\u200aOnomo raised a folded arm. His elbow skimmed the shadow at the margin of visible space, and he reached his hand back around his own neck. Lingering in this posture, the dancing body crafted an optical illusion: Onomo appeared to be viciously held by a figure concealed in darkness. After a few moments, however, his left hand slid to the tightly gripping right and pushed it away. A smooth release. A little later, in the centre of the stage, he raised his arms overhead, hands clasped as if tied. They separated with a swirling of wrists. In these swift movements from gestures of capture to those of manumission, Rite de passage<\/em> points to the particular affordances of its medium. The fact that the positions of confinement the choreography generates are so expeditiously escaped shows the non-identical status of the aesthetic with social experience. So much the better; dance shows itself able to interrogate where history snags a body with special agility. Even as Onomo exerted himself to \u201cembody metamorphosis,\u201d as the program notes observed, his efforts also indicated choreography as a terrain for self-reflexive critical investigation. Put another way, Rite de passage<\/em> does not so much depict marronage as dramatize the space between its representation and enactment. The work performs the relative ease of escape within the stage, while also foregrounding the burdens that such a space puts on the solo body: to be visible, effortful, and to carry out transformations before the audience\u2019s fixing eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rite de passage<\/em> understands something about the stage as an architecture constituted by histories of racialized viewership. In her play Fairview<\/em> (2018), Jackie Sibblies Drury uses performance as a mechanism to investigate white surveillance of, and encroachment on, Black life. When one of the characters finally confronts the spectatorial frame of the theatre\u200a\u2014\u200athe audience itself\u200a\u2014\u200aSibblies Drury writes in her stage directions, \u201cKEISHA steps through the fourth wall. It\u2019s as simple as that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s as simple as that\u2026 There is, of course, nothing simple in the task of completing this dance. Rite de passage<\/em> requires an intense flood of effort, and tricky modulations through slowness, exactitude, and endurance. It\u2019s a profound accomplishment for Onomo. Simultaneously, by virtue of housing so many dynamics of transformation\u200a\u2014\u200aindeed, passage\u200a\u2014\u200ain a single body, Demb\u00e9l\u00e9\u2019s choreography astutely throws into relief just how unyielding the interrelations that make up the off-stage world can be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"La Maison des M\u00e9tallos,<\/strong> Paris
March 15\u201316, 2025<\/br>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":270099,"template":"","categories":[884],"numeros":[7549],"disciplines":[7890],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[1001],"artistes":[7581],"thematiques":[],"type_compte-rendu":[],"class_list":["post-270101","compte-rendu","type-compte-rendu","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","numeros-115-decay","disciplines-performing-arts","auteurs-fabien-maltais-bayda-en","artistes-bintou-dembele-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/compte-rendu\/270101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/compte-rendu"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/compte-rendu"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/270099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270101"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=270101"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=270101"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=270101"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=270101"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=270101"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=270101"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=270101"},{"taxonomy":"type_compte-rendu","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_compte-rendu?post=270101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}