Welcome to Kalabanté, an African circus in Montreal
When dance, acrobatics and percussion meet, the result is Kalabanté - a circus company created in 2007 by Guinean artist Yamoussa Bangoura. RFI met him at the Nuits d'Afrique festival in Montreal.
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Yamoussa Bangoura founded Productions Kalabanté in 2007 in Montreal but the company's activity really took off from 2015.
The Kalabanté company is part of the Cité des Arts du Cirque, an international hub for contemporary circus acts that includes some 20 companies, among them the world-famous Cirque du Soleil.
"I have worked for almost all the Quebec circuses internationally and I found that there was something missing, I missed African acrobatics.
"So I wanted to stage a show that spoke of my country of origin which is Guinea," explains Bangoura.
Yamoussa Bangoura started out in the 2000s with Circus Baobab, the first aerial acrobatic circus in Guinea, and indeed the whole of Africa.
The company was inspired by Les Ballets Africains (African Ballet Company) created by the artist Fodéba Keïta in 1950.
Since 1998, the Fodéba Keïta Centre for Acrobatic Arts in Conakry has trained street children in acrobatics and contortionism, producing some of the continent’s finest performers.
In 2018, Yamoussa Bangoura opened his own academy, the Kalabanté circus school in Conakry, to try to change mentalities.
"In Guinea, women are not invited to perform in the circus. Our parents thought that it would prevent them from having children.
"We, the young acrobats, are fighting against this. We are in our third generation now, we have the next generation in Africa," he says.
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