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Celia Bambara

Dance, Multidisciplinary, Multidisciplinary Art, Performance, Sculpture / Installation, Visual / Media

The CCBdance Project is a bi-national pick-up company that is registered as a company in the Ivory Coast and fiscally sponsored by the Fractured Atlas in the United States. The CCBdance Prjoject is an African contemporary company that engages the thematic materials of anti- racism, translation, love, violence, travel and inter-culturalism. Our work seeks to create new worlds in which we can see/feel afro-modern realities across borders and boundaries.

About the Artist

Dr. Celia Weiss Bambara is a dance artist and scholar as well as a dual citizen of the US and Burkina Faso. She is the artistic director of the CCBdance Project, which was co-founded with Burkina Faso born dance and theater artist, Christian Bambara in 2006. Her choreography, improvisation and/or site- dancework has been shown in the United States, and internationally in the Caribbean, West Africa, and in Europe. This work has been shown at venues including: Dancespace (NYC), Movement Research (NYC), Zacho Studios (SF), Links Hall (CHI), Drucker Center (CHI), Institut Francais in Abidjan, Goethe Institut in Abidjan, Alliance Francaise (CHI), Jane Addams Hull House (CHI), African American Museum in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Occidental College, University of Southern California, National Theater in Abidjan (CNAC), INSAAC (National Arts Conservatory in Abidjan), Cannes at the MJC Picaud, Laboragras in Berlin, National Television in Haiti, Trinidad at Alice Yard, in Jamaica at the Caribbean Studies Association, Donko Seko in Mali and at the Belk Theater at UNC Asheville. She is currently working on multi-media works in dance-film, site-dance and photography. Her work has been awarded grants or residencies by the Puffin Foundation, Maryland Arts Council, The Djerassi Foundation, Ragdale Foundation, Ecole Des Sables (Senegal), Donko Seko (Mali), Tanzart (Germany), UCIRA (University of California Institute For Research in the Arts) among others. Her movement research combines the base of Haitian dance with other African forms, modern/contemporary dance, yoga and Klein Mahler technique and Body Mind Centering. Dr. Bambara’s work addresses the intersections of practice as research in contemporary and African diasporic dance. She has published a chapter on contemporary dance making in the works of women choreographers’ who have mentored her or with whom she has collaborated in Port-au-Prince in Susanna Sloat’s 2010 volume on Caribbean Dancemaking. The Journal of Dance and Somatics Practices, the Journal of Haitian Studies has also published two articles on Haitian dance and articulations of diaspora. The Chicago Artist Resource and Chicago’s Social Justice Journal Area Magazine, have published works that addresses her artistic work through dialogue about improvisational practices, movement research, and social justice. Her current book project addresses over lapping Jewish and African diasporas through questions of improvisation and processes as practices of interculturalism. This practice as research project situates African Contemporary Dance as a geo-political set of practices: research questions and answers that she has negotiated as a dance artist through creating work and dancing with artists in the Caribbean, US and West Africa. Dr, Bambara teaches choreography and improvisation courses, dance studies, dance administration, contemporary technique, yoga, and somatics. Celia also teaches Haitian traditional dance classes.

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Artist's Statement

Since 2006, the CCBdance Project has performed in Cannes, France, Kirchau, Germany, Berlin, Germany, Remsheid, Germany, San Francisco, New York, Connecticut, Los Angeles, Chicago, Des Moines, Iowa, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Grinnell, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Trinidad, Cote D'Ivoire, Haiti, Mali, Senegal and Jamaica. Celia Weiss Bambara and Christian Bambara formed the company together incorporating works from they made independently and creating new dance work. Celia Weiss Bambara is the current artistic director. The company includes the choreography and collaboration of Lacina Coulibaly, Christian Bambara and Celia Weiss Bambara. The CCBdance Project has performed new original works, improvisations, site-specific dances and works with  film and photography. We are also developing a formal dramaturgical process in our collaborative works with mentors, colleagues and collaborators. 

Featured Work

Photos

This solo work asks questions about how we mourn, let go of the fear and stigma surrounding death and locate the edges of how we lose those dear to us. Equally, this work asks why some die and others live in Africa. It questions the ways that certain lives are privileged over others. Drawing from Ndedi Okorafor's textual landscape of post-apocalyptic Africa, the work excavates outsiderness, the destabilization, and re-centering of self that mourning requires and finding home in one's own body in order to mourn. The project draws upon African and Caribbean movement materials in an experimental contemporary dance work that incorporates aspects of theater. Choreography: Celia Weiss Bambara Dance: Celia Weiss Bambara Musical Collaboration: Kimathi Moore Lighting Design: Rob Bowen Length: 30 minutes with props This work received Dean of Humanities Funding for Musical Collaboration at UNC Asheville in 2017 and benefited from a Summer 2017 Residency at TanzArt in Kirchau, Germany. The work has been shared at CIE Téné's Contemporary Dance Festival Les Deux Terres in Cannes France, at Flox Galleries in Kirchau, Germany, in San Francisco at Byb Bibene's Mbongui Square Dance Festival, at Danspace through Draftwork (curated by Ishmael Houston Jones), at UNCA Asheville's BELK Theater and informally at UNC Asheville's studio during the artist studio series.
Inherited Dreams investigates the spaces of shared experience, including the traces of past events on each individual. These life events and dreams are in dialogue, demonstrating the shared, similar and disparate paths of various artists. This work portrays conversations about shared hopes and differing directions, our disconnections, and possible unities. It enacts failure but also the joy of inter-cultural dialogue. Choreography: Celia Weiss Bambara Dance: Jean-Luc Okou, Lassana Kamagate, Celia Weiss Bambara Original Music Composition: Aboubakar Bassa Boumou Costume Design: Souleymane Boumou Lighting Design: Sam Bapes Length: 40 minutes This production has been generously supported by grants from the US Embassy in Abidjan, the Puffin Foundation, the Ministry of Culture, project partners EDEC and the INSAAC (National Arts University) and donations to the CCBdance Project. Technical assistance was provided by the CNAC and a residency at the National Center for Art and Culture. Inherited Dreams premiered at the National Arts University (INSAAC) in Abidjan and the Afrik Urban Arts Festival (Ivory Coast) in 2013. It has also been shown at Un Pas Vers L'Avant at the Institut Français in Abidjan in 2014, the CNAC in Treichville, Abidjan, and the MASA Festival in Abidjan in 2016. We are indebted to Kate Arcieri for her support, as well as to Kadhy Boumou, Marie Rose Guiraud, Jenny Mezile, Massidi Adiatou, Ange Aoussou, Souleymane Badolo and Abou Bassa.
Je Te Souhaites Du Bien ET Après…Is This What We Are Looking For?Choreography/Direction: Celia Weiss Bambara Collaborators: Movement: Kayla Hamilton, Yacouba Badolo Videography: Jessica Ray, Ashli Bickford, Loren Earle Original Composition: Abou Bassa, Kimathi MooreVideo Editing: Jessica Ray This work draws upon scores for an evening length work of the same title. Dance artists Jean-Luc Okou and Momar Ndiaye have assisted in the research process for this work as collaborators. This contemporary dance project engages the thematic materials of how we treat others in society and suggests perhaps other ways of intertwining our worlds. Very often we say how we wish people well but turn a blind eye to their plight or to the lives of others in general. This work suggests then a way of seeing, hearing, and speaking differently so as to break apart established ways of societal blindness or numbness. The work draws upon the ways that we are blind to those around us and presents an observation of the human condition. Due to the pandemic, selected scores from the evening length work, which was slotted to premier in 2020, have been made into a dance film. The CCBdance Project is indebted to our collaborators and mentors as well as to the Maryland State Arts Council. This project has been supported by the Maryland State Arts Council and through residencies at Ecole Des Sables (Senegal), Donko Seko (Mali), and the University of North Carolina, Asheville. Mentors Souleymane Badolo, Germaine Acogny and Kettly Noel have graciously offered feedback at different points in the process. Christian Bambara has also generously offered his support for this new work for the company.
This screen dance was researched in sites in Asheville, NC in 2019 and in Marquette, MI in 2020. The original score was created by Kimathi Moore was funded by a University of North Carolina Asheville Teaching Council Award in 2019 for musical collaboration during a production for dance minor students, which drew upon similar thematic materials. In 2020, Celia Weiss Bambara furthered the research process by improvising and engaging in somatic studies in sites in the small peninsula in Michigan where she lived between the ages of 2 and 12 roughly. From the ages of 9-11, approximately, my mother would pack me off to Jew camp in Wisconsin for almost a month. There I lived on a kibbutz for children in army tents. While it was a wonderful experience on many many levels it was also challenging on other levels. Mainly, I was not as sophisticated as the big city Jewish girls. I found refuge though, in the small garden patch, singing everyday, New Hebrew learning, and the lake and in the outdoor temple services. We would sit outside in the woods and listen to lectures on god and nature, ethics, and community. The 11-year-old girl, that is still a part of me, with the long braids and uneven laugh, loved the lectures on Kabbalah and nature and the singing. This dance film working connects me to that partially blind 11 year old and my adult understanding and somatic studies of women’s connections to nature as a place of power, Jewish female identity, African dance practices, Diasporic links and refuge.
This is still of the screen dance created in collaboration with Jessica Ray, Lacina Coulibaly, David Zoungrana and Celia Weiss Bambara for the CCBdance Project.

Videos

Booking

celia@ccbdanceproject.com

negotiable.