Münchner Kammerspiele, Munich
October 21, 2024
In his latest piece Balau, which had its premiere in Munich on October 12, choreographer Serge Aimé Coulibaly tows us through a sea of emotions, sometimes scooting above the surface, sometimes dragging us down as if drowning. ‘Balau’ means ‘stroke of fate’ in Coulibaly’s native Dioula, a language spoken in Burkina Faso, where he was born, but left in 2002 to work as dancer and choreographer, primarily in Europe.
Balau is about fate, but not about how the individual deals with her or his own. It is rather about what political decisions do to the individual. Coulibaly creates this perspective by mixing Yvan Talbot’s music with its associations to European pop and African traditional tunes, with texts by Fiston Mwanza Mujila, born in the Republic of the Congo, but since 2009 living in Austria.
Those texts are spoken by eight performers as they perform movements ranging from modern dance to ritual gestures to walking. The performers are a diverse group with different ethnicities and one in a wheelchair. Three are dancers from Coulibaly’s own company, Faso Dance Théâtre, and five are actors at the theatre Münchner Kammerspiele. The work is Coulibaly’s first collaboration with a German theatre.
Eve Martin’s set suggests a world in tatters. White ragged curtains hang like a ghostly Halloween decoration. But the feeling of make-believe is quickly replaced by a churning sensation in the stomach. A bride, Nadége Meta Kanku, stands on a table. Her happy dancing guests bring her presents all wrapped in white and delivered with words like, “I offer the couple malaria and sleeping sickness, fear of losing their livelihood, abatement of the guilt about colonialism, all coffins that they may need tomorrow.” The bride starts shaking as if in desperate need of a fix and then drops dead to the floor, her grieving husband, André Benndorff, hovering above her.

Chloé Ata A Njoya and Ahmed Soura
in Balau by Serge Aimé Coulibaly
Photo Julian Baumann
Without any discernible narrative, fragmented scenes follow. The group lay shaking and writhing on the floor, as if the white clouds, rolling in from the wings and swathing them in mist, were filled with poisonous gas. To a text about the body with statements like, “I testify: to patched up, to colonialized, to circumcised bodies,” a woman, the fabulous dancer Daisy Ransom Phillips, performs a solo full of backbends and contortions as if her body was a piece of modelling dough played with by invisible hands.
As an introduction to the next sections the sentence, “My body is a reservoir of slashed dreams,” echoes in the ears. Two women Nadėge Meta Kanku and Chloé Ata A Njoya sing a song about colonial exploitation. Kanku sings in French, Njoya in German as if she were a simultaneous interpreter. Simultaneously, they perform a quiet dance with steps that bring associations with ballroom dancing, although the couple move slightly apart and are not partners as such.
Ahmed Soura, another remarkable dancer, follows them in a solo, in which it looks as if he is being thrown into the air by a round of shots from a machine gun before dropping dead to the floor in a way that makes you think every bone in his body is crushed. Balau is performed in one of the smaller auditoriums where the audience is sat close to the stage, the proximity making the scene all the more grueling.
A woman, Anja Signitzer, recites a monologue in which she keeps stating that she does not know what is right, or whom she should believe, because one party says one thing, another the opposite. It brought to mind our daily news with opposing information about what is happening in the Ukraine and the Gaza Strip.
It is one of the few places during the performance in which a person stands in the same spot while talking, but the tension in her body, at times so strong that it provoked a shivering, revealed how deepfelt her despair was.
Coulibaly turns the diverse ensemble into a homogeneous group. He has created the piece in such a way so that you forget some performers are not dancers. Erwin Aljukić in his wheelchair at times adds a smooth gliding feeling to the group’s movements, while Martin Weigel lifts the women with ease, making them look safe and secure pressed to his large chest or lying on his broad shoulders.
Mujila’s fragmented text feels like an added layer to the music, which Coulibaly successfully succeeds in turning into physical expression that hit me like a visceral experience. The performance jabbed deep into the emotions and made me more feel than see all the hurt, grief and sorrow the political decisions implied in the text cause ordinary people. Even worse, it showed our impotence to do anything about it. Balau is a political statement told through moving bodies with great success.