Serge Aimé Coulibaly: What’s very original and a great strength is Snake's total commitment, in his art, in his presence, his interaction with the audience. He summons anything that can help him make an impact. It’s a matter of life and death for him.

He’s never satisfied and doesn’t sit back and rest on what he’s achieved. He's a good dancer but he's always on the lookout. He finds other things. At one point when it was becoming difficult to create for venues, he took his performance the street. And he opened the door for others. It’s a bit like he broke down the walls. Today, you can see Snake everywhere in festivals in Africa and Europe. It’s not because there are no other shows in Africa. No. It’s because he went where others don’t go.

Zora Snake: My work talks about of a form of violence, but with poetry, with a more in-depth aesthetic. The poetic gesture I make on the set may seem violent, but it was not provoked beforehand. I didn’t say to myself: Well, in this performance, I will be violent. It comes through reflections, research, workshops, residencies that bring these creative choices. It comes naturally. For example the barbed wire on the body for Transfrontalier. How could I follow my path in this other place? It’s such a sensitive subject that must be both violent and beautiful to watch. For Le Départ (‘Departure’) there is this compressed body. All the tension of these 22 million inhabitants living in Cameroon who can no longer bear a certain oppressive policy. These are all the voices of activists, young people crying on the street that I carry within me. It’s all this that I’m trying to tell. We are smugglers, mediums, we convey the unsaid.

Serge Aimé Coulibaly: Everything is linked, everything is connected. If someone is concerned about the reality of the world, they want to tell it in an honest way. We don't live in two separate worlds. It’s not Africa and Europe.

How could an artist tell his world by lying to himself? I talk about the world I live in. I’m like a witness of the times. The reason I’m in this job is to try and improve the humanity that’s within us, to reach out to others. This humanity is everywhere.

Zora Snake: When we think of a project, we don't think of it as a Burkinabé or as an African, but as a human, a person with morals who owes it to themself, who has the duty to bear witness to our time. The idea is to share, to create dialogue between ‘here’ and ‘there’, to create another way to exchange. Because we all have the same history. There is no slave, there is no ... We all suffered the same humiliation.

How do we create a ceremony to rediscover this humanity that has distanced itself during these tragedies? And which indeed continues to move away from us with words. Words by which people are manipulated. Words which create fear, which create frustration, withdrawal. We’re creating a ritual of life - I don’t mean a village ritual.

I believe in complementarity. I can say today that I am a choreographer because have been fed by Serge Aimé, by Akram Khan, by Romeo Castellucci, by Dieudonné Niangouna and Étienne Minoungou. And it’s all these complementarities that make us human people that give us the strength to want to bear witness to our times.

— Interview by Benoît Henken on February 6, 2020