Vertiginous human pyramids, bodies being thrown seven metres into the air, barely believable hand-on-hand acrobatics, combat, contortions and more – stunning circus skills, and all threaded through with a strong sense of place and a passionate exploration of pollution, power and control over a rare resource: water.
The show is Yé ! – which translates as ‘water’ in Susu, Yoruba and other West African languages – and it comes from Circus Baobab, a company of 13 talented young dancers and acrobats from Guinea and the diaspora. Circus Baobab works collaboratively to develop shows that blend traditional West African performance forms with contemporary circus skills and choreography. This is edgy, exhilarating performance art in the service of social messages – but boy, is it entertaining too.
Circus Baobab had a suitably visionary beginning. Back in 1998 French filmmaker Laurent Chevallier, who had done a number of films in West Africa, wanted to do a feature about an itinerant African circus in Guinea. Chevallier envisioned a circus company that would blend traditional African acrobatics and performance styles with contemporary circus practices. It would focus on their daily life, their travels, their performances in village squares …
Chevallier pitched the idea of a circus company to the country’s Ministry of Culture and got the backing of Bailo Telivel Diallo, then Guinea’s national director of culture, who established a National Centre for Acrobatic Art. Artistic input came from Pierrot Bidon, founder and former director of the pioneering French contemporary circus company Archaos; Bidon went on to direct several of the early Circus Baobab shows.
In the 1980s Archaos was one of a handful of companies that effectively reinvented circus, eliminating animal acts to focus on performances that still utilised the classic skills of acrobatics, aerial work and strength but features theatrical, avant-garde and sometimes downright dangerous stunts. Where Canada’s Cirque du Soleil developed a more polished, theatrical, and narrative-driven style with elaborate costumes and music, Archaos addressed social issues such as urban violence and religious oppression in bold and sometimes controversial shows that especially attracted a younger audience.
For the Guinea project, a group of French professionals were imported to train three dozen local artists, acrobats, and musicians in a gymnasium in Conakry. Archaos-style chainsaw juggling was never going to be part of the shows, but the team’s approach allowed the company that became Circus Baobab to both preserve and reinterpret Guinean cultural heritage – while delivering exciting performances and thrilling entertainment for both local and international audiences.
Chevalier made his film, an account of the troupe’s inaugural tour in Guinea over six weeks in 2000. The company took its name from the iconic baobab tree found all over sub-Saharan, widely seen as a symbol of strength and resilience; it’s first major show was The Legend of the Drummer Monkey, drawing inspiration from a Guinean folk tale and emphasising Chevallier’s commitment to rooting the circus in local stories and traditions.
Since then Circus Baobab has evolved through several incarnations, being reborn in 2021 under the direction of Kerfalla (Bakala) Camara and Richard Djoudi to revive the company’s original spirit while expanding its reach and its social remit. Camara, who joined the troupe when he was just 10 ten years old, is the current artistic director; Djoudi is a French producer and promoter who has served as executive producer for the company’s major productions, overseeing the international tours and helping to develop new projects. Both see a vital social mission for Circus Baobab alongside its artistic role, training and supporting young people in Guinea – many of whom lack access to formal education – and promoting the company’s ethos as a “social circus”.
Yé ! is directed by Yann Ecauvre (he’s also responsible – with Jérémy Manche – for the show’s music). An innovative, self-taught performer, Ecauvre is the co-founder of Cirque Inextremiste, a French circus company renowned for its high-risk performances and signature use of unconventional props.
He started working on the show that became Yé ! in 2021, collaborating with Bakala Camara and the company’s acrobatic specialist Damien Droin. The artists demonstrated their skills to them in the lively working-class Dixinn district and at the Centre Culturel Franco-Guinéen, and from that Ecauvre and Droin developed a story centred on environmental themes – particularly water scarcity and pollution.
Ecauvre’s direction for Yé ! has a pared-back, contemporary feel that probably breaks with more traditional, more exuberant African performance styles. And he has clearly taken inspiration from the everyday lives of the young acrobats, infusing the show with the kind of urgent environmental and social themes that impact their lives while also maintaining the essential sense of collective energy and physical virtuosity.
The result is true performance art: we can marvel at the strength, the dexterity, the sheer ability of the artists, and we can applaud the choreography that creates structures and patterns from the human body. But it’s easy to see that these have real purpose: the acrobats and dancers hold and support each other, the physical structures they create echo the social structures we need. As the handout puts it, “interpersonal relations are often the only comfort against the pull of nothingness. Immobility becomes synonymous with death”.
Circus Baobab’s Yé ! is in The Red Theater at The Arts Center at NYUAD on Friday 9 May at 7.30pm and again on Saturday 10 May at 3pm. Tickets are AED 105. The performance on 9 May will be followed by a post-show Q&A moderated by Chinasa Ezugha, Assistant Arts Professor of Live Art/Art as Social Practice and a Co-Director of Live Art Development Agency, London.
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