Columbia College Chicago was invited to participate in a summer intensive at the Centre National de la Danse in Pantin, just outside of Paris. In this blog post, student Kennedy Ward shares their experience of studying with dance legend Germaine Acogny.
Through my studies at Columbia College Chicago, I developed a serious, deep, rich love and appreciation for West African Dance which culminated to a point where I could not envision my future without it while studying the practices of Katherine Dunham and skipping classes to take the masterclasses of Jonas Byaruhanga of Keiga Dance before watching their life-changing collaborative performance with Chicago’s Red Clay Dance Company. After leafing through the program, I found that Vershawn Sanders-Ward of Red Clay and Jonas Byaruhanga of Keiga met at a workshop for African Contemporary Technique at a school in Senegal. Needless to say, my interest was more than piqued, my interest was disruptingly stimulated. (So stimulated I had to create a new conjugation of adjective.)
This brings me to connect this moment of divine intervention to my time at the CnD; and also to a prelude. I have to begin by stating my extreme bias, before my first day of intensives at the CnD, I had already known of and was a ludicrously large fan of Germaine Acogny, the creator of the previously mentioned Ecole des Sables school in Senegal. Such a fan that I was irrevocably nervous for our first day of intensives; the mumbling, can’t-stop-moving, shallow breathing type of nervous, the equivalent of meeting a celebrity type of nervous. So almost the entirety of the memories that I’ll be recounting will be heavily laced in adoration.
The first day, as I noticed in all days, was headed in very present activities with very little communication. Germaine’s presence is all encompassing of the space she’s in, and embraces your own as she guides the class through her Acogny Technique with such a familiarity and comfort that it feels like she’s family. For five days, she walked us through the basics of her technique and even provided for us the naturalist background in which her technique is based, most of which is based off of the nature and wildlife Germaine was surrounded by while she was growing up and experiencing dance through the breeze, the trees, and the birds.
Her teaching itself was revolutionary in the way that she pulled from the nature around her as well as the nature residing within her. The time and dedication Germaine has carefully folded into her craft is truly exemplary as she presents a being, no less and no greater than the footprint she herself leaves on the earth, walking along the unravelment of honest, earnest dance. If I could reference the works of Qudus Onikeku, a contemporary dance artist hailing from Nigeria, my time with Germaine felt almost folkloric, to have met such a woman of immense countenance, wisdom, and history, I find that her presence remains woven into my practices and approaches of dance and even in my thoughts toward my own nature. Germaine, to me, is an existence too big, too ever reaching for an amalgamation of words to ever cover. Especially not in English.
Kennedy Ward, fall 2019
