Zimbabwe Independent, September 9, 1996
Culture should move with the times – dance teacher
Alphonse Tierou, the Paris-based teacher of African dance, visited Harare last week to renew his acquaintance with Tumbuka Dance Company, and to see the work of some of the country’s traditional groups (…).
“Traditional dance is good”, he says, “it is a creation of our ancestors. But people who do traditional dance are interpreters, not creators. If I only do traditional dance, I am looking back, I am dreaming.”
(…) His years in France have convinced Tierou that “people in Europe want to keep Africans in the past, to keep us in a stylised folklore”, and he tells of a meeting with a French woman who was researching African dance. “I told her that African fashion should be like European fashion, that it should reflect the world of today, and be used in dance as well. She said no, and told me that I should be proud of my traditions. I touched the jacket of her Chanel suit, and asked, ‘Is this from the middle ages, then?’ She didn’t speak to me any more.”
Tierou is also determined to break down the cultural barriers which have been erected between Francophone and Anglophone Africa.
The Sunday Independent, December 3, 1995 (South African weekly press)
Francophone countries lead move to take African dance out of the folklore ghetto into theatre art
By Adrienne Sichel who served on the jury of the continent’s first competition for contemporary African choreography, held in Angola.
There is an urgent need to stop this continental brain and creativity drain (…). In his mission to achieve this, Tierou has had the influential backing of Afrique en Créations, an association to promote Contemporary African arts which is supported by the France’s ministry of co-operation (…).
Today’s African artists are beginning to theatrically discover their identity, formulate their own artistic language, knowing all too well, in the words of Alphonse Tierou, that “without dance, Africa is nothing and without technique there is no progress”.
