Nadia Beugré CI

Nadia Beugré was born in Ivory Coast in 1981. She made her first appearance in 1995 as a member of the Dante Theatre, where she trained in traditional dance. Two years later, she became a founding member of Béatrice Kombé’s groundbreaking, all-female dance ensemble, TchéTché, with whom she toured for years to critical acclaim across Africa, Europe and North America. Following Kombé’s untimely death in 2007, Beugré immersed herself in modern dance by taking choreography classes with Germaine Acogny in Senegal, and continued her training in 2009 by joining Ex.e.r.ce., Mathilde Monnier’s programme for talented, up-and-coming choreographers at the Centre Chorégraphique National de Montpellier. She was soon staging productions of her own, such as un espace vide: moi ('An empty space: me') in 2009 and Quartier libres ('Free Territory') in 2012, and attracting attention from estimable publications like The New York Times, which wrote of her work: ‘It's harrowing, both in action and sound, Ms. Beugré knows how to make a crowd trust her just as, in a split second, she knows how to knock the air out of people. She’s wild, like the wind.’ Legacy premiered at the La Bâtie festival in Geneva in 2015, and has also been performed at the Festival d'Automne in Paris, among other events. Beugré’s piece Tapis Rouge (2017), builds on an earlier work she co-created with Sébastien Martel for the Festival d'Avignon in 2014. In 2018 she created Roukasskass Club, in which she evokes the athmosphere of an Ivorian nightclub. Beugré also performs in works by fellow choreographers, such as Seydou Boro (Burkina Faso), Alain Buffard (France) and Dorothée Munyaneza (France/Rwanda), and appeared in Boris Charmatz’s most recent production 10.000 gestures. In 2017, Nadia Beugré began a five-year artist-in-residence programme at De Vooruit in Ghent.