Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe

Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe was born in Kinshasa and grew up in France. In 1998, she received the Diplôme National d’Expression Plastique for her sculptures from the art school in Tourcoing, France. In 2005, she founded the company Dance Cie Dixit, where she explored questions of body and identity and also deepened her practice in contemporary dance as well as traditional Guinean, Senegalese and Afro-Cuban dance. The group sees itself as a laboratory for contemporary creation, where dance, visual art and sound art meet. In 2005, she also created the solo Mon coeur balance, in which Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe staged herself. In 2010 she founded DIG UP Production in Vienna, where she still lives and works. She performs in many of La Fleur’s plays and took on the role of director in Love is a warm gun together with Franck E. Yao and Monika Gintersdorfer the artistic direction of the project.

In the work of Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe, nothing is ever handed down to us in its entirety. The sets, the actions, the presence of the bodies on the plateau always present themselves under a certain face, in a certain perspective. What the eye captures always exceeds our perception, because there is always the possibility of other perceptions, or their corrections. Here the perception cannot exhaust the action approach. If perception is incomplete, it is because it is always surrounded by a kind of halo of indeterminacy, the possibility of other probable or even future perceptions.

For a choreographer, a definite point of view does not allow perception; it is necessary to know how to shake it depending on what is at stake and the point of view of others. Recognizing the limitation, the obscurity, the „incomplete“ character of people and ideas does not mean abandoning them. On the contrary, this conscious doubt, this critical examination, opens the way to a transcendence, a projection of the body forward, a surrender.