Song of Resistance

It will be impossible to walk past the Panthéon again without recalling what happened at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in late September 2025: the extraordinary transformation—verging on possession—of Germaine Acogny into Joséphine Baker. Madame Baker, the celebrated artist and member of the French Resistance in World War II, is buried in Monaco. Since 2021, however, she has been honoured at the Panthéon with a cenotaph—a symbolic tribute to her artistry, her resistance, and her civil-rights activism. Acogny brought her back to life just a few arrondissements away, on the very stage where Baker had made her Paris debut in “La Revue Nègre”—a sensation in 1925.

Performance

Germaine Acogny: “Joséphine” / “Le Sacre du printemps,” choreography by Acogny and Pina Bausch

Place

Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Paris, France, September 24, 2025

Words

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti

Germaine Acogny in “Joséphine.” Photograph by Maxime Dos

Acogny’s creation, conceived with her longtime collaborator Alesandra Seutin, was more than homage: it was a meeting of trajectories. The choreography triangulated between Baker’s exuberant rhythms, Acogny’s contemporary vocabulary, and their shared African heritage. Fabrice Bouillon-LaForest’s score echoed this fusion, interlacing Charleston riffs with African sonorities and producing—like the choreography—something strikingly new and elusive. Mikaël Serre’s drums set the pulse, punctuated by Baker’s own words: fragments of interviews, speeches, memoirs. The text began with accusations of Baker as a ‘devil,’ moved through her famous declaration ‘ni juifs, ni chinois, ni nègres’, and culminated in the simple affirmation: ‘I am Josephine Baker.’

“Joséphine” unfolded like a ritual of invocation, its talisman an Ashanti doll that remained on stage throughout—a medium channelling Baker’s presence. The opening image was unforgettable: a silhouette in a black dress with flowers on the back, one arm casting a hypnotic shadow against the Théâtre’s monumental golden curtain. As the curtain shifted, the scenography revealed itself, pared down to essentials. On the otherwise empty black stage stood a full-scale light-bulb frame—the mirror itself missing: an emblem of absence, an evoked reflection. With extraordinary magnetism, Acogny lit up the darkened stage. She cycled through costumes that conveyed authorship rather than mimicry: first a pink feathered dressing gown, then a lean costume with a green belt amplifying the movement of her hips.

At one point, a banana appeared from the frame and was placed in her hands. With this symbol she recast Baker’s scandalous ‘banana dance,’ once performed for Parisians in little more than a skirt of sixteen rubber bananas—a provocation that toyed with stereotypes of race, exoticism, empire, and gender, unsettling French colonial fantasies. Acogny used the fruit subversively: she hurled it at the audience. Laughter rippled at first but quickly subsided under her unflinching gaze. Unease gave way to silence, then reflection. As the dance turned inward, Acogny walked solemnly in military attire while Baker’s voice re-emerged—an excerpt of her 1963 Washington speech, evoking the deep injustices of racism in the USA. In thirty minutes, Acogny honoured Baker’s life trajectory: her rise from poverty in St. Louis to international fame in Paris, her role as a Resistance spy, and her adoption of a ‘rainbow tribe’ of children. Baker was here not nostalgically commemorated but reactivated: her values—freedom, equality, embodied resistance—brought urgently into the present.

Despite Acogny’s magnetism and the symbolic weight of the work, the solo itself occasionally felt static, even a little flat. Its dramaturgy, centred so entirely on her figure, might have gained breadth through the presence of other performers. Yet the audience responded with clear enthusiasm—a reaction owing as much to the symbolic charge of the piece as to its choreographic invention.

Germaine Acogny in “Joséphine.” Photograph by Maxime Dos

The second half of the programme was devoted to “Le Sacre du printemps,” danced by thirty-eight performers from thirteen African countries. Once again, history returned in layers. Stravinsky’s music—played live by the orchestra Les Siècles under Gianfranco Rizzi—seemed to shake the very walls of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, just as it had at its scandalous premiere in 1913. It was, once more, a convergence of histories: the same theatre, the same score, but a new body of interpreters. The dancers came from École des Sables, the school founded by Acogny on the Senegalese coast at Toubab Dialaw, between the Atlantic and a baobab forest. Since 2004 the centre has become a landmark of African dance, a place of residencies and intensive training that gathers artists from across the continent. As Acogny has written: “My technique is not just a technique but also a philosophy, because during class and the execution of movements, I teach the importance of being proud of who you are and your dance culture.” (Ancestral Voices: Dance Dialogues, p. 11). That philosophy radiated here—in the proud, majestic bearing of her dancers, in their commanding presence.

Accustomed to moving barefoot on sand before the ocean, they danced now on the soil that Pina Bausch required for the piece, the stage itself covered in earth. Bausch’s Sacre, created in 1975—the very year of Josephine Baker’s death—was amplified by the dancers’ specific training and embodied discipline. They had first performed Bausch’s version in 2021, in collaboration with Sadler’s Wells and the Pina Bausch Foundation. On this performance (28 September), the role of the Chosen One was embodied with breathtaking intensity by Dovi Afi Anique Ayiboe. Beyond technical strength and cohesion—that impression of a company breathing in unison—one detail marked this performance as unlike any other rendering of Bausch’s choreography: the gaze. Again and again, the eyes returned as central: proud, unwavering, even when clouded by fear or turmoil. Through their looks and gestures, the dancers inhabited “Sacre” with an awareness of self and of their roots, something on which Acogny’s philosophy insists, and which renewed the work. In this, the piece revealed itself—Bausch’s choreography, Nijinsky and Stravinsky’s creation—as a timeless, universal work of art.

Dancers of École des Sables in “Le Sacre du printemps” by Pina Bausch. Photograph by Maarten Vanden Abeele

The sense of palimpsest—narratives layered upon the same stage—gave the event its uncanny power. Though little more than an hour in length, its structure was dense and resonant: Baker followed by Bausch traced a dialogue between two women who had once unsettled European stages in radically different ways, now brought together by Acogny, whose life has been devoted to weaving past and present into conversation. It also affirmed Acogny’s singular place in dance history: an artist who transformed herself from performer to emblem of freedom, resistance, and renewal. To watch her, in her eighties, embody Baker and at the same time guide her dancers through Sacre was to feel those histories superimposed.

Acogny embodies modern African dance not as the nostalgic fruit of a “return to the sources,” but as a living, creative evolution, rooted in what she defined as fundamentals—earth, rhythm, animal steps, the dancer in constant relation with nature and the cosmos. The Acogny Technique, though codified in her 1984 book African Dance, has become a living, decolonial language, resisting the exotification to which African dances are too often subjected in Western frames. She voices their dignity and depth, allowing them to emerge as a vector of identity, affirmation, and invention. In this sense, the performance was not simply homage to Josephine Baker or revival of Pina Bausch’s “Sacre,” but the manifestation of a lineage—ancestral and contemporary together—that Acogny has safeguarded and reimagined, offering it back to the world in ever-renewed form.

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti is a Paris-based philosopher researching ancient thought, divination, and practices of salvation at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. With over a decade of ballet training, she studied History of Dance as part of her Philosophy and Aesthetics degree at the University of Bologna. Alongside her academic work, she writes about dance.

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