For Sabourin, dance is a transmission, a reason, and, above all, “a rage for life” – like the title of his 2018 autobiography. It made sense that he sought to bring his knowledge of dance and understanding of Congolese culture to help remedy the situation, instead of following more “Western” solutions. “By dancing, by singing, the women manage to free themselves, to give themselves up. It makes a difference.”
It is a reciprocal activity, he says: “Giving my dance classes here gives me such adrenaline, it’s like a drug. I see what it brings to others and the progress they make. 99.9% of the people who attend are women, all different in age, morphology, origin, carrying different traumas. They are together during a class, they shed a weight and they rebuild.”
Re-Creation has evolved: “Discussions with the therapists nourished my action. I adapted my workshops based on that.”
To ensure that they were indeed making a long-term, tangible impact, Sabourin and his partner decided to develop a method where a dancer and a psychologist or psychotherapist would work in pairs, thereby feeding into each other for optimal success.
Re-appropriation and weapons of war
For Sabourin, dance offers a woman who has experienced violence a way to fight against male domination. “The body has always been the tool of patriarchal domination, par excellence, wherever one is in the world. It’s always gone through the body. We made domination seem natural by talking about ‘the strong sex’, because men have muscles and testosterone, and ‘the weak sex’ when we talk about women, or even ‘sub-men’.”
He goes on to detail how various mutilation practices and inhibiting social norms have also been means of maintaining this dominance: “The more women found ways to prove their humanity, the more we, the men, found physical ways to compel them to remain under this domination. So, for us, the re-appropriation of the body is an essential step in the re-appropriation of women’s history.”
Although the work of Dr Mukwege and the Re-Creation project are valuable in helping women recover physically and psychologically from sexual violence, neither would be necessary if sexual warfare – like chemical warfare – was banned.
“It’s a proven fact. There is a specificity, a real calculation, a reflection on the question that is behind such attacks on women. To rape a woman is to destroy her but it is also to destroy her family environment, the reproductive system. We would like there to be a UN resolution, supra national, that bans the sexual weapon, just as the chemical weapon was banned. It will not prevent everyone from using it but at least there will be a recognition, a legal framework, that will facilitate the fight against this act.”
Femi Diipo: 
Yewande Philips: 
DSEED: 
Olakunle Olajide: 
Oyebisi: 