Nicolas Girardin
Production/touring manager - France (2001/2004)

Today, the younger generation of African choreographers are challenged with casting off a whole set of exotic and folkloric stereotypes. For years, these stereotypes have contained the black continent's artistic creation and statement within the strict boundaries of tradition. Salia Sanou and Seydou Boro belong to this group of choreographers and as such have inspired a highly original and challenging sense of creativity on the international scene.
From the start, their interdisciplinary training, which involved drama, cinema, dance and music, allowed to explore new paths into interpretation. Their 1993 collaboration with Mathilde Monnier paved the way into a new form of artistic creation. Salia Sanou and Seydou Boro demonstrated that they could seize the rare opportunity of coming into contact with other artistic cultures. A year later they founded the salia nï seydou company in Burkina Faso and produced their first work, a duo halfway between African tradition and modern body movement. "Century of Fools" was awarded the first prize in the international contemporary dance competition Afrique en création (1994). The two artists were as surprised as their delighted audiences for the success of a first work that contained the seeds of all their future artistic attempts. It was also their first contact with the realities of European programming rules, management and production, international touring conditions. This experience reinforced the ties between the two dance makers and encouraged them to proceed with yet more creative and daring projects.
Eleven years and four creations later, Salia Sanou and Seydou Boro have succeeded in providing the African dance with a contemporary, singular and profound writing on the international scene, the image of a more creative form of dance, which favours meaning and emotion over pure aesthetics.
The two artists' awareness of the new stakes lying ahead for choreographic creation in Africa has driven them to set up a Burkinabe structure devoted to choreographic creation and cultural exchanges.
For their choreographic work in France, Africa and elsewhere in the world, Salia Sanou and Seydou Boro received in july 2002 the Mérite des Arts et des Lettres decoration from french government. They were also elected Artists of the 2003 Year by the Intergovernmental Francophony Agency.

Ousmane Boundaoné
Administrator - Burkina Faso (2000/2004)

In February 1993, Salia and Seydou found themselves with Mathilde Monnier in France, to take part in the creation of the choreographic play Pour Antigone.
Both are from Burkina Faso and live in Ouagadougou. They very often met in the same districts and yet, it was in France that they would be more acquainted with one another and that this complicity between them would come to birth. One can find in their personal artistic course several significant meeting points, the most striking ones being dance and theater. Two genres that imbricate in one another and merge in a successful way. With a wealth of this double experience behind them, they feel entrusted with, challenged by a mission - secular psychosis of the African artist obliged to give a social direction to his act of creation? - that pulls them about. African dance is no more what it used to be or rather it remained like it has always been. The same steps. The same music that support them. The same meanings of their emergences… Even when cities were born or became "modern", the means of communication that developed turned upside down and called into question the sacrosanct beliefs. And while other arts, following the example of music, were watered by it to address to the world in the name of Africa about interculturality, dance remained a "hammering of the ground". Without an opening, without the development of a personal language, it nevertheless remains the crucible where the "others" always come back.
As these questions are becoming essential to Salia Sanou and Seydou Boro as necessary and irreversible things that have to be done, and that answers must be found, attempts are initiated here and there. To forsake discussion in order to act, because initially dance is action. For the two choreographers, it means finding how to present a creative dance, not only full of images but meaningful, accessible to all and for all, on the basis of traditional steps and from African gestures. It means above all, how to get a return of this meeting, which in itself is a bubbling of ideas, to give it a reason to grow and a chance to affirm a common faith in an African dance called to open up and create a dynamics for itself, as opposed to the lack of progress one reproaches it.