École des Sables

École des Sables is an international center for traditional and contemporary African dances, a school for theoretical and practical teaching, a laboratory for research, and a space for meetings and exchanges, conferences, and artistic residences.

The school is dedicated to professional training for dancers from all over Africa in traditional and contemporary African dances. Its objectives are to professionalize African dancers, allowing them to be able to live from their art, and to encourage communication and collaboration between dancers, choreographers, and companies from Africa and with the rest of the world; in short, to develop and promote contemporary African dance. Since 1998, the school has regularly organized professional training workshops gathering dancers and choreographers from Africa, the African diaspora, and all over the world.

École des Sables was created in 1998 by Germaine Acogny, considered as “the mother of contemporary African Dance,” and her husband Helmut Vogt. Germaine Acogny is the former director of Mudra Afrique (1977–1982), a pan-African school founded by Leopold Sedar Senghor and Maurice Béjart, which had the objective of giving a professional education to African dancers and citizens to make them become responsible and autonomous through the art.

For more, visit ecoledessables.org.