ADMISSION:
Admission is free. RSVP beginning Tuesday, September 2, at 10 a.m.

RSVP

To join virtually, please visit the USC Kaufman School of Dance YouTube page on the day of the event for the livestream. 

DESCRIPTION:
Over the past 15 years, work and thought about borders has taken a choreographic turn as dancers, choreographers, and activists mix different styles and spaces, flip the script on which styles belong to which spaces and traditions, stage explicit interrogations of geopolitical borders, and create pieces for performance in border zones. Their work challenges us to rethink what borders are and how they can be navigated.

In a thought-provoking panel facilitated by USC professor Edwin Hill and Ohio State University professor Lucille Toth, an intersection of French choreographers, dancers, and dance scholars will discuss ways in which international and transnational travel affects and is affected by dancers and dance practices. The panel will include award-winning French choreographer Bintou Dembélé and French dancer and choreographer Marie Poppins (Marie Bonnevay), who founded the international street dance collective Femme Fatale. 

This conversation will be livestreamed (audiences in Paris can watch and interact at 7:30 p.m. their time).

Lunch will be provided. 

This event is presented as part of City of Angels / City of Light, a transatlantic dance exchange and series of events connecting choreographers and students from the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris (Paris Conservatory) with the USC Kaufman School of Dance. The exchange will foster artistic growth through cross-cultural collaboration, celebrate the vibrancy of contemporary dance in Los Angeles and Paris, and contribute to the discourse on global practices.

Bios:

A major figure in hip-hop in France, Bintou Dembélé has created an artistic approach rooted in peripheral territories and the margins, embodying ritual and corporeal memories. Her projects and collaborations are diverse—from the operatic world to the museum space to music videos—allowing her to transcend the boundaries of art and culture. She began her career as a member of crews such as Aktuel Force, Ykanji (which she co-founded), and the collective Mouv of the Contemporary Dance Theater in Paris. In 2002, she created Rualité, an artistic and cultural platform that has produced many of her works, which have been performed around the world.

Edwin Hill is an associate professor in the Department of French and Italian and the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC. His first book, Black Soundscapes White Stages, builds a conceptualization of sound as a terrain of post/colonial conquest and contestation where one’s place in the world is critically imagined and experienced. With an analytical lens trained to dynamics of Black transnationalism and French colonial history, this book puts Black French modernist poets like Léon-Gontran Damas in relation to Black Atlantic popular musical forms and emergent technologies of sound transmission in the interwar years. Hill’s current book-in-progress, entitled Black Static and the French Republic of Sound, offers a sound studies approach to Black rage.

Lucille Toth pursues a dual career as both an artist and a scholar, with a strong focus on interdisciplinary postcolonial feminist performance. Toth is an associate professor of French at OSU-Newark, affiliated with the Ohio State Dance Department. Trained in contemporary dance in France, her research interests lie at the intersection of dance, literature, medical humanities, gender, and migration studies. She is the author of Danses et pandémies. Du SIDA à la COVID-19 and co-editor of Danse contemporaine et littérature, and has been published in 50 Contemporary Choreographers, Tangence, French Cultural Studies, Percées, and H-France, among others. Her new book, Embodied Narratives in the Health Humanities and Literary Studies, co-edited with Eftihia Mihelakis, was released in September by the University of Toronto Press.

Marie Poppins, born Marie Bonnevay, is a French dancer and choreographer. Specializing in street dance—primarily popping, voguing, and waacking—she has distinguished herself with a unique style that blends strength, musicality, and elegance. Marie began her journey on the battle scene, winning prestigious competitions such as Hip Opsession Nantes, Hip Hop International, Soul Session Oslo, and Bboy Summit. She then transitioned into the commercial industry, performing for world-renowned artists including Madonna, The Weeknd, Busta Rhymes, Justin Bieber, and more. Marie founded the street dance collective Femme Fatale, a group of three female international dancers: Marie Poppins, Lily Frias, and Dassy Lee, based in Los Angeles but originally from different countries: France, Mexico, and Korea. She continues to appear on stage, notably with world-class circus companies such as Cirque du Soleil and Franco Dragone. She also collaborates with Red Bull and is a member of historic collectives like Style Elements Crew (pioneers of hip-hop in the United States) and the House of Ninja (an icon of ballroom culture).

Related Events:
City of Angels / City of Light: A Transatlantic Dance Performance and Q&A
Thursday, October 16, and Friday, October 17, 2025, at 7:30 p.m.
USC Kaufman School of Dance, Large Performance Space
For more info, click HERE.

Presented by USC Visions and Voices and the USC Kaufman School of Dance with the support of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels and Villa Albertine. Organized by Jackie Kopcsak (Dance), Dane Martens (Dance), and Edwin Hill (French and Italian and American Studies and Ethnicity).