Nadia Beugré

The Ivorian dancer and choreographer Nadia Beugré delves into her family history with 'Epic ! (for Yikakou)'. In the now overgrown Yikakou, the village of her ancestors, she searched for the unique legacy of her great-aunt Gbahihonon, ‘the woman who says what she sees’.

In this solo performance, Nadia Beugré follows in the footsteps of her great-aunt and other powerful women. Women who built entire communities. Or disrupted them, as in the myth of Dô-Kamissa, the woman who transformed into a buffalo out of anger and ruined the fields of her own brother. Together with a musician and a singer, Beugré restores these forgotten voices, who wrote history from the shadows, to honor. She weaves personal memories and stories from the collective memory into an intimate testimony. 

Nadia Beugré challenges established perspectives in her work, sharply analyzing the codes of femininity, masculinity, and the Western gaze on black bodies.