Bintou Dembélé

Bintou Dembélé is one of the major artists in the hip-hop movement in France. She collaborates with artists like Denis Darzacq, Mohamed Bourouissa and Sophiatou Kossoko.

Her artistic approach is multi-influenced, combining repetitive music and rhythmic polyphony with street dance. She explores marginal cultures, ritual and corporeal memories, and questions gender. She also interrogates the wounds of the past, as well as the possibility of escaping them through reappropriation and marronage strategies. Her creations bring together a variety of aesthetics such as dance, music, the voice and the visual arts.

Bintou Dembélé founded Rualité, a structure in which she created L'Assise (The Foundation, 2004), LOL (2008), Mon appart’ en dit long (My Apartment Says a Lot about It, 2010), Z.H. (2014), S/T/R/A/T/E/S-Quartet (2016) and Le Syndrome de l’initié.e (The Initiate Syndrome, 2018).

Clément Cogitore called on her to choreograph Les Indes galantes (The Amorous Indies) at the Paris National Opera: a viral short film on the 3e Scène (2017) platform, followed by the complete opera-ballet by Jean-Philippe Rameau at the Bastille Opera (2019). She presented Les Indes galantes #3, a performance derived from a carte blanche invitation by the Centre Pompidou-Metz as an echo of the exhibition Opéra Monde (2020).

The Lyon National Opera invited her to choreograph a solo for ballet dancer Merel van Heeswijk (2020).

As an artist associated with the Ateliers Médicis (Clichy-sous-Bois/Montfermeil), she has been in residence at the Villa Médicis (Rome) and at the Villa Albertine (Chicago). She is one of the ten international artists invited for the 10^th anniversary of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, for which she designed the danced film -s/t/r/a/t/e/s-.