Betty Tchomanga: 'Be careful when you watch the goddess of water'

Every week, our radar spots a lesser -known artist who deserves our a ention. This week it is choreographer Be y Tchomanga, who you might have seen as a performer with Marlene Monteiro Freitas, but who is now at Kaaitheater with her own solo Mascarades.

Betty Tchomanga was born in 1989 on the French Atlantic coast and is the daughter of a Cameroonian father and a French mother. She started dancing at the age of nine and turned to contemporary dance in 2007 when she studied choreography at the renowned Centre National de Danse Contemporaine (CNDC) in Angers. To this she added a master’s degree in modern literature from the Sorbonne, which becomes visible in her work fi rmly rooted in dramaturgy.

As a performer, Betty Tchomanga has worked with Raphaëlle Delaunay and Anne Collod, among others, and has since 2016 been creating her own work as one of the three choreographers of the French production house Lola Gatt. “But my trajectory as a dancer has been mainly infl uenced by my encounter with Marlene Monteiro Freitas in 2014 and my collaborations with her,” she confesses. Monteiro Freitas is the equally fierce, witty and celebrated P.A.R.T.S. alumna who took Tchomanga on stage in the frenzied Bacchae – Prelude to a Purge and in Mal – Embriaguez Divina, among others, which was supposed to be presented at the (cancelled) 2020 Kunstenfestivaldesarts.

Possessed

In July, Betty Tchomanga had a residency in Benin and she is currently working at the Antwerp workshop WP Zimmer, where she is preparing her next creation Wildfire, about the slave ship of the same name described by Malcom Ferdinand in his essay Une écologie décoloniale. With it, the French choreographer and dancer returns to the roots she shares with her father, as she also did in her rhythmic and imploring solo Mascarades, which she is now presenting at the Kaaistudios.

“Mascarades has two important starting points,” says Tchomanga. “It is a choreography that starts from one movement, namely the jump. Thematically, I wanted to work around the figure of Mami Wata.”

This combination results in a “possessed” solo that also refers to voodoo culture. Tchomanga takes the universal movement of the vertical jump (in Latin the words for “jumping” and “dancing” share the same etymology) as its basis. Mami Wata, on the other hand, is the polygonal mythical fi gure that reappears mainly in Western and Central Africa, but also in the African diaspora, as the goddess of water. Often in the guise of a mermaid, siren or contortionist, she radiates power and sensuality, but also maintains an ambiguous relationship of attraction and repulsion with those who watch her.

MASCARADES 3 & 4/9, 20.30, Kaaistudios, www.kaaitheater.be