Back to Kidal

Serge Aimé Coulibaly / Faso Danse Théâtre & Brussels Jazz Orchestra

In his most recent creation Back to Kidal, Serge Aimé Coulibaly and the Brussels Jazz Orchestra go back to the origins of blues and jazz and the hometown of Afro-Blues legend Ali Farka Touré in the northern region of Mali, where rebel armies rule today. As usually, Coulibaly seeks to connect not only across disciplines, cultures and continents but also throughout history.

Back to Kidal fits within Serge Aimé Coulibaly’s oeuvre along the line that he introduced with Kirina (2019), a spectacle created in response to a devaluation non-European traditional cultures in the European mainstream culture, media in particular.

Back to Kidal is a choreographic exploration of our collective imagination, through our shared history of the last 100 years. Starting from the great jazz classics, Coulibaly questions the history of civil rights in the United States, Europe and Africa.

For Back to Kidal, Coulibaly once again takes up the challenge of holding up a mirror to Western, African and Afro-descendant cultures through music and by bringing them closer together by means of that renewed gaze. The starting point for the collaboration with the BJO is Jazz – via Afro-blues, the musical discipline par excellence that has its origins in African and Afro-American culture. The artist laid the basis for his new choreography by uniting an orchestra consisting of seventeen white Europeans with a seven-member mixed European-African dance ensemble, one African actress and one African guitarist around a selection of the great Jazz standards.

Back to Kidal, like all Serge Aimé Coulibaly’s other performances, is created partly on the African continent (in ANKATA) and partly in Europe with an international cast and crew. This working method is essential to the philosophy and practice of Serge Aimé Coulibaly and FDT and contributes to the unique artistic quality of the creations.

© Omar Badsha