Dancing in the dark: an ambulatory performance at the Festival d’Avignon began on Wednesday with texts in tribute to the young Nahel, read by directors Alice Diop and Claire Denis, among others. On the esplanade of the Palais des Papes, in front of a few hundred people, the choreographer Bintou Dembélé opened her show G.R.O.O.V.E with dance steps, before several personalities took the floor, a sequence added after the death of the young man in Nanterre and the riots that followed.
At the Cour d’honneur, the opening show, Welfare, started on Wednesday after a minute of silence in memory of Nahel. “History repeating itself makes our lives commonplace. (…) What can we do ? Nothing”, says Alice Diop in her text. Another text read, signed by the duo Mehdi and Badrou, underlines that “mourning is not new, anger is not new, tears are not new, police violence is not new” .
This duo is notably composed of Mehdi Meklat, a columnist who in 2017 had been the subject of a lively controversy after the discovery of old racist and anti-Semitic tweets. “I saw the memories of my childhood, in Saint-Ouen, when a police car passed in front of us and we put ourselves against the wall, for fear that they would see us, when we had nothing. done”, says the text of the duo.
The performance, which began in this serious atmosphere, ended three hours later at the Opéra Grand Avignon with a lighter dance, with several excerpts from Les Indes galantes by Rameau, which Bintou Dembélé had choreographed in 2019 at the Opéra de Paris, mixing krump, voguing, and hip-hop. Performers on stage and audience standing in the room danced, accompanied by a DJ on the set. Before, the spectators strolled in the floors of the Opera, where they attended interpretations of musicians and a performance where one sees a young man suspended up to the ceiling. “We summon the street”, explained to AFP Bintou Dembélé, a pioneer of hip-hop who conceived this wandering as a “ritual of passage from the street to the stage”.
