Bintou Dembélé

Bintou Dembélé was born in the suburbs of Paris in 1975 to a family who emigrated to France after Sub Saharan Africa’s decolonization. Her interest in Hip Hop dance was in part influenced by the show H.I.P. H.O.P. on the French TV channel TF1. Around 1985, Dembélé and friends created the dance group Boogie Breakers and started dancing collectively in their neighborhood’s public spaces. She then joined the group Concept of Art, created by Steevy Gustave, which encouraged marginalized youth in the Parisian banlieues (in Paris' marginalized suburbs) to adopt Hip Hop dance as a way of fighting against delinquency. While in middle school, Dembélé also joined the dance groups 2Be3 (To Be Free), Mission Impossible and Aktuel Force in which she diversified her Hip Hop dancing by learning House Dance, New Style, Break Dancing... etc. With her dance teams, she started dancing in famous Parisian spots such as in the fr : Place Saint-Michel (Paris), the Place du Trocadéro-et-du-11-Novembre, the Parvis Notre-Dame - place Jean-Paul-II and the fr : Place Georges-Pompidou. She also participated in state-organized and/or state-sponsored Hip Hop festivals and battlessuch as the Rencontres Nationales de Danse Urbaines (National Meetings of Urban Dances) at the Villette (Paris) for instance. During the first years of the very popular rise of the Hip Hop culture in France, Dembélé also performed in famous concerts, clubs and discotheques including Le Palace (Paris), le Bataclan or Le Divan du Monde.

Dembélé's professional career began in 1996 when she was recruited by the Théâtre Contemporain de la Danse de Paris (TCD) as a professional dancer. In 1997, she joined the dance group the Collectif Mouv’ where she created her first show entitled Et si…! (What if...!) with the break dancer Rabah Mahfoufi. While dancing for the Collectif Mouv', Dembélé also collaborated with the French Jazz saxophonist Julien Lourau and with the musical organization the Groove Gang to create a show entitled Come fly with us. At the same time she also co-founded the dance group Ykanji and the female group dance Ladyside. Her participation in French popular TV shows such as fr : Graines de stars or Hit Machine enabled Dembélé to meet French rappers and dancers such as MC Solaar and fr : Bambi Cruz. In 1998, she danced for MC Solaar's concert in l'Olympia (Paris) in a show choreographed by Max-Laure Bourjolly and Bambi Cruz.

In 2002, as an interpreter for the dance company fr : Käfig, Dembélé performed at the Joyce Theater in Manhattan during the New York New Europe '99 Festival. The same year, she also created her own dance compagny, named Rualité. In 2004 Dembélé created and performed her third show entitled L'Assise (The Foundation), which recounted the creative journey of individuals who explored the Hip Hop culture in France. In 2010, she created her first solo show entitled Mon appart' en dit long (My apartment tells a lot about it), in which she explored the notion of femininity, spatiality and daughter-mother relationship. In 2011, she choreographed the music video of the song Roméo kiffe Juliette of the French slam singer Grand Corps Malade. In 2013, she created and performed in Z.H. (an abbreviation for 'zoo humains', which means in English human zoos). Z.H, which is one of Dembélé's major creations, was created for six dancers and explored the notions of memory, imperial gaze and voyeurism, racism and the dehumanization of people of color. In 2016, she created and performed in S/T/R/A/T/E/S - Quartet et le duo (S/T/R/A/T/U/M - Duo quartet), a dancing and musical performance for two duos mixing improvisation, dance theater, gimmick and 'corporeal poetry' to interrogate the notions of the transmission of traumatic memory, of feminism and of post-colonial identities. As a recognized dancer with both a street and professional background, Dembélé participates as a judge in various battles and other Hip Hop dance competitions and trains dancers as interprets for live performances.

Dembélé has presented and defined her work as being explicitly committed against the issues of racism, sexism and the neocoloniality of the power became especially more visible in the past 10 years. As a Black woman coming from the African post-colonial immigration in a country in which ethnic and cultural identities are marginalized, Dembélé refused to be considered as political referents and be invisible from public discourses and representations.As a black woman working in the field of Hip Hop dance, Dembélé considers her dance and her presence in public spheres to be inherently political and necessary in order to give the floor to the minority she originates from. In this perspective Dembélé qualifies her work as a dancer and as a committed artist as being a 'work of contamination'. Her creation of her compagny Rualité follows on from those political reflections and commitments.

Rualité 's aim is to explore new forms of political engagements and representations by gathering diverse artists and researchers. The photograph and video maker fr : Denis Darzacq and the political figure and scholar fr : Françoise Vergès are one of the personalities linked to Rualité. Organized around the ideas of creation, transmission and research, Rualité not only produces dance shows but also works for enhancing the access to culture and to cultural activities both in the French metropole (and especially in its most marginalized communities) and in its overseas territories (and more especially in French Guiana). In the context of her company, Bintou Dembélé frequently animates pedagogical and/or exploratory workshops aiming to gather people from different backgrounds and orientations in order to produce new insights on what being a committed artist means. Bintou Dembélé's engagements led her to work with students and scholars in schools and universities, with musicians and dancers from different backgrounds as well as with some of the Parisian suburbs' carceral population.

Bintou Dembélé's commitment to the development of the Hip Hop culture and to the recognition and legitimacy of its actors in the French public spaces and common discourse led her to integrate the SeFeA laboratory organized by Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3 in 2014. In July 2015, she is one of the invited speaker at the State-organized conference on Hip Hop dance at the Arab World Institutein Paris. In September 2016, she is hosted by the Gender and Women studies department of the University of California, Berkeley in a conference to talk about the video documentary of her performance Z.H. In the French and francophone contexts, Bintou Dembélé's work can be related to the one of Léonora Miano , Marie NDiaye, fr : Amandine Gay, Alice Diop, Isabelle Boni-Claverie... etc. Bintou Demélé is one of the spokesperson of the scholars Mame-Fatou Niang and Kaytie Nielsen recent documentary Mariannes Noires (Black Mariannes) whose aim is to give voice and make visible Afro-French female identities.