Symposium: Palabre/s en mode marron

The Neilma Sidney Theatre
December 6 – 7 | 12pm
Free with RSVP

 
Performance: Rite de passage // solo II

The Keith Haring Theatre
December 6 – 7 | 7pm
Tickets

 
Artist Bintou Dembélé presents Palabre/s en mode marron, a gathering of artists, academics, activists, and more with connections to Paris and the French West Indies. This program will feature a day of exchanges and encounters with conversations, film screenings, readings, DJ sets, and workshops, culminating in a dance performance by Dembélé, performed by Michel “Meech” Onomo. Palabre offers a dedicated space for artists’ voices, conflict resolution and community engagement while cultivating diasporic exchange among scholars, stakeholders, and activists. Working collaboratively with Performance Space and L’Alliance New York to bring communities together, Dembélé demonstrates the multifaceted nature of performance.
 
Dembélé’s work explores ritual and corporeal memories, interrogates gender dynamics, and addresses both individual and collective wounds of the past. Palabre/s is an iteration of a series she has presented several times in the past, which, with the blessing of the Bushnengue elders of French Guiana, allowing her to invent a ‘Maroon Dance,’ a memory of marronnage – of descendants of Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean who created new, free societies on the margins of slavery and colonization.
 
As part of the invitation, Bintou Dembélé also presents a movement-based work, Rite de passage // solo II, that ends each day and blends together this ritual practice of palabre with the essence of Hip Hop. They assume the role of MC and orchestrate the flow of speech within the space, inviting vulnerability and fragility and enabling participants to find common ground and collectively reimagine new narratives. As an artist, Dembélé unearths the memories buried in bodies, souls and minds, as a living archive of another point of view on histories of French enslaved people and colonial histories more generally.