Yé ! | Water! - Circus Baobab

Flying acrobats, contortionists, and breakdancers bring African circus to life in a show for all ages

African circus lies at the meeting point of modern entertainment and spectacular ritual dances; these are acrobatics that endure through the reproduction of joyful movements or on the occasion of initiatory rites: hand-to-hand, acrobatic lifts and figures, symbolic pyramids, masked dances, sacred drums, and animalistic expressions transposed to contortionists. These artists have a fruitful dialogue with their history, their own cultural heritage while being aware of the inevitable transformation of this traditional world. They are set on inventing and reinventing the poetry of movement while drawing on the codes of today’s youth.

Yé ! uses the African circus in a poetic evocation of environmental issues, calling upon us to build a better world for tomorrow together - one in which we’ll take better care of nature and its future. The groundwork for Yé ! was laid when Damien Droin and Yann Ecauvre started working with Bakala Camara of Circus Baobab in February 2021, meeting on the beaches of Conakry in the working-class Dixinn district and at the Centre Culturel Franco-Guinéen. The artists demonstrated their disciplines to them, and a dialogue began around their artistic aims. Damien and Yann were then able to envision the piece from a contemporary angle and develop a dramaturgy on the themes of water and the environment. From these exchanges grew the desire to create vital poetry on stage, an intercultural philosophy, and a polychronous relationship to time.

Drawing on a wellspring of creativity, Circus Baobab’s acrobats and dancers ferry the spectator on a voyage evoking many environmental challenges, exploring the changing world, assessing the transformations underway, and observing the continuous birth of reality and its depictions through the intersection of art forms. We are transported by these flying acrobats, on the ground, and in the air, beyond reason itself; forced to confront the climate emergency, the loss of reference points, the reappraisal of reality. Each person’s existence is torn between the desire to soar and the fear of falling.

In Yé !, the human body becomes the crossroads of will, of resistance, of collapse, and of resilience, where interpersonal relations are often the only comfort against the pull of nothingness. Immobility becomes synonymous with death. The acrobats and dancers hold and support each other as if their movements carried a flame inextinguishable by the storm in which they find themselves, forming those pyramids at which the Guinean circus artists excel. Men and women are lifted and flung across the stage, reaching heights of over twenty feet. Each performance is constructed like an evocation of humanity’s defiance of nature.