The legs of the Chameleon
go exploring!

My teaching is about what I admire and what I understood about dance from the place I came from. In my classes I give the tools for awareness, subtlety, grace and the ability to listen to the polyrythm for a structured improvisation. The relativity between the music, the drum, the drummer and the body of the dancer are important to me. The dancer responds, plays, and talks to the audience, as a music instrument to complete the drumming of the percussionist. Thus my teaching passes through a lot of specific basic elements and a lot of really small details, details that in my point of view make a dancer! For example: how to have the time to taste the floor with our feet in order to be able to give clear conscience and life to the legs?
I called this session I love so much: "The legs of the Chameleon"

All of the exercises and training I propose in my class and workhops came from a deep analysis and questioning of different traditional dances from countries such as: Ivory Coast, Brasil, Togo, Gabon and Benin.



Anani Sanouvi
Anani Dodji Sanouvi, has been hailed for his ability to assimilate different traditions into his own dynamic dance style. Born in Togo, brought up in Gabon and having lived in Senegal, he brings together traditional heritage and modernity, local and universal, ritual and aesthetics.

In 1997 he began dancing professionally in Togo. He attended workshops such as at the Ateliers du Monde in Montpellier (France, 2001), the Professional African Contemporary and Traditional Dance program of the L'Ecole des Sables of choreographer Germaine Acogny in Senegal (2002, 2005) and at P.A.R.T.S. in Belgium (2006).

Anani taught and performed in Africa and Europe for several years before taking up residence in Brussels as Dance Laureate of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Program for a mentoring year with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, in 2006, at her dance company ROSAS. In 2005 he was also a laureate in the UNESCO-Aschberg Bursaries and in 2004 a Guest artist of the Goethe Institute of Munich.
During his period in Brussels, Anani has taught African rhythm and dance to first-year students at P.A.R.T.S., performed and toured with Rosas, while developing further his research on the relation between primary impulses and sound.

Nowadays Anani is based in Amsterdam and Senegal where he is establishing his company and recently his work has toured in UK, USA, Holland, Belgium and Austria. Besides, he has concluded a residency at Danswerkplaats Amsterdam with the performance of his new creation, “Heavy Walking” - a collaboration with tap dancer Marije Nie.
Anani passionately negotiates his position of being an African dancer inside a non-African context, not giving away what he considers crucially important in his roots but being able to assimilate different traditions into his own language.