Combat des lianes

At the origins…
the all-powerful vines

For those who know Zora Snake, it's hard not to see in Combat des lianes the forces that drive him. It brings to mind the powerful cry of the pygmy peoples of southeast Cameroon, who are disappearing, but also deforestation. We think of his village in the high mountains of West Cameroon and the virgin forest that is his refuge, his breath. We think of the book Sagesse des lianes - Cosmopoétique du réfuge 1 by Dénètem Touam Bona, somewhere between the polished image of the film Greystoke, the legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes by Hugh Hudson, shot in the remote heart of the Ekom Nkam falls in Cameroon and the subversive wisdom of the indigenous peoples against the capitalization of the living.

As a dance performance, Combat des lianes should not be seen as a thinly-veiled, targeted indictment, but rather as a poetic and visionary metaphor for the brutal state of the world today. The violence suffered by the Pygmies is not so far removed from the violence suffered by the Bororos in northern Cameroon, the homeless, or Afro-descendants. And ultimately, the violence suffered by all those who are invisible in the city and elsewhere, because of their geographical origin, gender, age or sexuality.

Zora Snake not only looks the catastrophe in the face through the eyes of people who suffer it, but also scrutinizes issues of immigration, discrimination, social and climate justice, borders, and the power of the works of art that are exhibited in museums to the greater glory of (neo)colonizing forces. The artist works through the imagination of lianas, links and tensions. He believes in the omnipotence of fiction and form to speak to us.

Dance: body and vines

If there is a story to be found in Combat des lianes, it is the story of struggle. Even more so here, it's all about resistance, beyond dreams, on the side of the living, whether it takes the form of a roar, sublimation or nightmare. How can we draw inspiration from all the ideological struggles that have defined the conditions of peoples under capitalist and colonial domination?

How can we use lianas to tell the story of social struggles, discrimination and deadly prejudices? How do danced and dancing bodies tell the story of the victorious, united and endless struggles of our time?

Combat des lianes is a snapshot of the anger in our world that forms nodes of resistance through the power of the vines that beckon humanity. The body is linked here in many ways, from vine to vine, from the imaginary to the real, from the poetic to the political, from the human to the sacred.

Through the power of gesture, at once twisting, contorting and poetic, Zora Snake's choreographic grammar is a journey through the invisible, like the snake of life, the rite of reincarnation and reinvention of a healthier, more peaceful society that we dream of in order to return to ourselves.

If the dance takes shape here in the physicality of the vines – hollow, splitting, falling and hanging, creaking –; in the lore of the secret Nku' ngang societies of West Cameroon who believe that vines chase away evil spirits or in ritual dances, it is not a "primitive", "ethnic" or "ethnological" dance. It is the dance of roots towards all roots. It is a human dance in osmosis with nature, remembering what is to come, now.

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