"I was born on Pentecost Day in '44. My father told me that since then, a dove landed on my bedroom window every day until I turned one. They nicknamed me 'Iya Tounde: the mother has returned.' The dove was, in fact, the tutelary deity of my grandmother Alufo, a priestess of the female religious community 'Yao Orisa' – the keeper of power, the sacred, and the divine – who died four years before I was born."
Thus speaks the most "black" and the most "classical" of African dancers about her origins. At twenty, in Paris, she earned a degree in physical education teaching and studied European dance. She returned to Senegal in '75, where she was discovered by Maurice Béjart, who saw her dance at President Senghor's birthday celebration; it was love at first sight. Béjart and Acogny shared a common background in Senegal and a similar, though opposite, artistic journey.
Maurice Béjart started from classical ballet to enrich it with Asian and African elements and inspirations. Acogny combined the purity and abstraction of classical ballet with the animism and warmth of African dances. A new, highly original style was born. When, later that year, Béjart opened the "Mudra Afrique" center, he, considering Germaine his "African double," entrusted her without hesitation with the artistic direction.
Deeply committed to the idea of dance (considered the first and most important form of expression), Acogny dances to rediscover "the archetypal images deposited at the bottom of ancestral memory" (Senghor). To reach the light of the spirit, there is no other path than that of the body. "I manage to make everyone dance," Germaine declares, "even people who have never danced." Our entire life is dominated by rhythm, and many people have issues with their own. They are either behind or too far ahead: I can help through a technique that can enrich a person just as classical and modern dance enrich culture.
I teach to rediscover the joy of living by recognizing one's body through the chest, which I call the sun, the buttocks, which I call the moon, and the sexual area, which equals the stars. Only in this recognition can the energy of dance shine.
