Zab Maboungou: Since being featured in 2003, she has been racking up awards
Since 2003, the dance artist has been racking up awards and accomplishments
In our November 2003 issue, we featured Zab Maboungou in a profile written by Bridget Cauthery. At the time, the Montréalbased dance artist’s company, Compagnie Danse Nyata Nyata, was seventeen years old (founded in 1986) and Maboungou was the first Canadian artist of African descent to receive funding from both the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec. Now, seventeen years later, the company is in its third decade and Maboungou has been awarded the 2020 Governor General’s Lifetime Artistic Achievement Award in Dance. But that’s not all.
Her continued work for the advancement of diversity in the dance sector has garnered her other awards including the 2015 Conseils des arts de Montréal Award for Cultural Diversity in Dance; the 2014 Martin Luther King Achievement Award; and in 2013, it was the Charles Bridell Award. In 2019, she was named a member of the Ordre des arts et des lettres du Québec.
Maboungou has also been recognized as an Afro-descendant of exception for International Decade for Persons of African Descent (2016-2025) by the Organizations of American States (OAS). “It is very important because of what it politically and ideologically meant to arrive from Congo to France to Canada, and to see Black people recognized as contributors in art, as it has been a struggle at all levels,” she says.
As a choreographer, performer, educator and writer, Maboungou takes an active role in institutional policy renewal in the arts sector. Her years of political analysis were instrumental in establishing the Canada Council for the Arts’ first delegation as a guest country at MASA, Abidjan Performing Arts Market in March 2020. It was there, in Abidjan, Ivory
Coast, that Maboungou last performed Wamunzo, a new solo of a musical-pounding work where the body pathways explore an aesthetic of presence, in solidarity with time and space.
Beyond policy work, Maboungou has worked to codify her LOKETO technique, which she describes as using the grounding of infinite breath as well as a specific postural relationship of the feet, knee and hip. This posturing is specific to rhythm cultures – a way of responding and exchanging our capacity to know and stand in the world. Maboungou articulated one of her struggles in confronting Canadian dance definitions: “To do contemporary dance is one thing. To be in contemporaneity and to feel what it is is a different story. So, it is not an etiquette but a constant reflection on the world and dancing within it.”
At the time of the 2003 profile, Maboungou’s book, Heya Danse! Historique, poétique et didactique de la danse africaine, was on the verge of publication. The book, published in 2005, was born out of Maboungou’s reflections as a philosophy professor and her choreographic journey. She intersects dance and art with her evolving pedagogy in order to create dialogue, similar to a philosophy. Because she was raised within traditional vernacular and music and training in Central, Western and East African aesthetics, her insights were initially misunderstood by communities following their subscribed traditions. Her unique contemporary positioning of LOKETO as an artistic philosophy and a vernacular of rhythmic cultures challenged the westernized notion of how dancers think and introduced an embodiment of language, spirit, mind and intellectual decision-making in multidirectional planes.
As a sought-after keynote speaker committed to global artistic development in Canada and abroad, Maboungou holds a common rationale within her body of work: “Always be involved in what is happening now. Reflect on how and what we decide to do about it because everything is related.”