African arts in Europe’s cultural landscape: framed or seen?
Serge Aimé Coulibaly is a dancer and choreographer from Burkina Faso. He was born in Bobo Dioulasso, and has worked in Europe and the rest of the world since 2001. His inspiration is rooted in African culture and his art is committed to the necessity of powerful contemporary dance. Since he set up his Faso Dance Théâtre company in 2002, Serge Aimé Coulibaly has been exploring complex themes, with the desire to offer young people a genuine positive dynamism. His productions have been presented in many theatres all over Europe and Africa and also been invited to several festivals.
Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, 1993: Serge Aimé Coulibaly’s artistic journey starts in Company Feeren. Despite its rich dance scene, African professional dance troupes with full-time employees are rare. Driven by the ambition to gain experience in Europe to teach contemporary dance in Burkina Faso, in 2001 he landed in Europe – first to join French choreographer Nathalie Cornille, and later Les ballets C. de la B. in Belgium. Today, Serge Aimé runs Faso Dance Theatre, one of the few professional contemporary dance companies in Africa, and ANKATA (Bobo Dioulasso, Burkina Faso), an international laboratory for research, creation, and production for the performing arts.
This article explores Serge Aimé’s view on the influence of African culture in his work, reflecting on how African artists are seen and often framed within Europe’s cultural landscape.
Building Ankata
From the very beginning, Ankata was created as an autonomous space, financially independent from the Institut Français, which had previously supported artists with equipment and resources. Starting with all his artistic income in 2012 as an 80m2 studio built, it currently involves over 400 people. It has expanded to a 300-seat theatre, and welcomes more than 15.000 visitors.
The project’s challenges span from the difficulty in implementing international artistic exchange, hindered by terrorist threats and shaky international co-operation, to financial ones. The main and shared challenge for artists is not about performing, but rather making a living from their art. In Burkina Faso’s specific case, there are no dedicated funds for culture per se, so artists need to demonstrate that their art can generate value for society.
On this path, Ankata’s contemporary dance pillar project Next Generation becomes a tool for societal impact, particularly among young people; a 3-year programme for dance, theatre, administration, and management skills, educating Burkinabe artists to promote their work and navigate the global performing arts landscape. Every year, it welcomes approximately 20 people, aged between 18 and 25, including some who had previously dropped out of school.
Ankata’s second pillar is Africa Simply the Best competition, which supports the work of African choreographers and Pan-African creations. Its latest edition (2023), 14 projects from 11 countries out of 117 applications were selected for the final phase in Bobo-Dioulasso, marking a potential first step into international artistic visibility.
Drawing strength from these efforts and results, Ankata was able to build and feed its storytelling through one-on-one meetings, creating videos unveiling the reality behind the project, showing how it directly impacted the community and created an emotional connection. This led finally a few committed contributors to invest significant amounts, after the first timid results from crowdfunding.
African and European audiences
Coulibaly’s will to express his Africanness, his culture rooted in improvisation, shaped the first ten years of his career. But creating pieces which could resonate both with an African audience and a European one has not been easy. He needed to confront the different aspects of what dancing means in Europe compared to Africa.
First, Brussels’ audiences have significantly wider contemporary dance knowledge compared to Africa’s, where this language is new. Secondly, his effort to capture African dance’s vitality in a contemporary piece revealed a certain naivety, Europeans tend to slip easily into a Eurocentric perspective, and he felt the necessity to justify his heritage in his performances.
C’est la vie, one of his latest pieces, raised different audience responses in Burkina Faso and in Europe. In the first case, the impact was far greater than he had anticipated, with people attending several times and staying after the performance to share perspectives. The African perception of art often views dance as a spiritual act, a form of dialogue with something beyond the physical, invisible or sacred; a dancer’s touch on the shoulder or the head is a gesture of blessing or an energetic connection – not merely a choreographic element, as in a European context.
Serge highlights an essentialist view of Black bodies that denies their artistic expression and technical skill, reducing them to their skin colour: audiences often rely on stereotypes of African bodies, assuming Africanness could not be performed by white dancers. This cliché isn’t solely related to audiences, but also to programmers and festival makers – Europeans would not agree to co-produce his performances if dealing with African topics.
Today, contemporary dance creation is deeply tied to questions of origin and place. But unlikely other countries, as it happens for Japanese performing arts, recognised as relevant, mesmerising and valuable, Africa is denied the same legitimacy. European audiences often fail to grasp the symbolic depth of African dance. This raises a deeper, underlying issue: the way we position ourselves in relation to Africa, not as a continent to learn from, but too often as one to observe from a distance.
Serge grew up with childhood stories about France. His memories are filled with Europe, not only in his imagination but in his sense of self. Alongside his Belgian nationality and the grants from the Belgian government, he is also European with a European culture. Yet one question remains: What do I bring to Europe? Can I be more than a Black man?
One way to claim the same humanity was to bring people to his performances. It was only then that his status began to shift. Serge’s most successful piece Kalakuta Republic, dedicated to Fela Aníkúlápó Kuti, toured in more than 165 countries across 4 continents.
Post-coloniality
A necessary perspective shift occurred, unexpectedly, after working for 20 years with Australian Aboriginal cultures, as one of his five Australian projects involved transforming traditional Aboriginal dances into contemporary dance. This collaboration opened his eyes to his own African culture, especially the binary vision he had of Africa versus Europe. Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger all have historic and post-colonial links with France. Despite self-determination movements in Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, the ties with colonial countries remain based on economic co-operation and other aspects: while these countries gained independence, they did not achieve true self-determination, as they became markets for French companies in West Africa.
By moving beyond the binary position of Europe versus Africa, Africa could engage with other continents and build fair co-operation, which would eventually balance the power relationship with Europe. Serge speaks French and initially received funding from Francophonie programmes for touring, yet argues that it is important not to rely too heavily on France and to focus on different partnerships, Asia being an example.
Future Projects
This autumn, Serge released the project Few days before tomorrow, showing how cultural diversity can co-exist within a shared community and humanity. Not by chance, the idea derives from Brussels – a cosmopolitan yet divided city where communities are geographically and culturally separated.
In the end, celebrating a nuanced understanding of community is central to Serge’s commitment, and the reason he began working in contemporary dance..
This text is based on a transcription of the 70-Years-On Conversations: Artists Words with Serge Aimé Coulibaly, organised by the European Festivals Association, and facilitated by Emily Ansenk, Director of Holland Festival, and Tom Creed, Theatre and Opera Director based in Dublin, that took place online on 2 April 2025.
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