Sawata – Nadia Gabrieli Kalati
SAWATA condenses the very essence of the piece into a single word. Sawa refers to the Bantu people of the Cameroonian coast from whom the choreographer descends, also known as the people of the water. Wata, in Cameroonian pidgin, means water.
Born from a double intimate loss — that of her adoptive father, then of her mentor — SAWATA takes the form of a rite of passage, a crossing where grief becomes movement, and movement becomes living memory.
For this creation, Nadia “Nadéeya” Gabrieli Kalati draws on the Ngondo, an ancestral ceremony of the Sawa people in which an initiate dives into the depths of the water to enter into dialogue with the ancestors and return bearing a message. In SAWATA, this dive becomes an inward one.
At the crossroads of house dance — of which she is one of the leading figures in France and internationally — and panafrican danced heritages, nourished in particular by her training at École des Sables, the choreographer develops an organic, deeply embodied writing.
Carried by a visceral physicality, the body (re)becomes a living archive. It summons buried memories, crosses through silences, converses with the invisible and transforms loss into the force of life. The voices of women from her lineage, woven into the sound world of Adrien Kanter and musical compositions spanning Cameroon and Senegal, create a sensory landscape where the intimate meets the collective, where the personal becomes universal.
SAWATA is an invocation. A descent. A crossing. A transformed return.
Choreography and performance: Nadia Gabrieli Kalati “Nadéeya GK” · Lighting design: Xavier Lescat · Sound creation and arrangements: Adrien Kanter · Composers: Cheikh Ibrahim “Chico” Thiam, Rass Nganmo, Adrien Kanter · Voice-over: Women of the Mbella family, Sharleen Eyoum, Nadéeya Gabrieli Kalati · Costumes: Caroline Fainke · Outside eyes: Wanjiru Kamuyu and Alesandra Seutin · Production manager: InHop
Production: PARADOX-SAL MOUVEMENT and cie. aKôT · Coproduction: Initiatives d’Artistes en Danses Urbaines (Fondation de France – La Villette) · FAIR-E / CCN de Rennes et de Bretagne – studio residency (DRAC Bretagne) · La Place – Centre Culturel Hip Hop · Département de Seine-Saint-Denis. With the support of École des Sables (Senegal).
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