Of French and Congolese origin, Zab Maboungou is the artistic director of Zab Maboungou/Compagnie Danse Nyata Nyata, a contemporary dance company founded in 1987, based in Montreal, Quebec, whose artistic vocation encompasses creation, research and teaching.
Zab Maboungou learned her craft from her earliest childhood through contact with traditional dance and music groups, in Congo-Brazzaville, in the heady days of post-independence cultural effervescence. Since then, she has never stopped broadening her knowledge of the musical forms and dances of Africa, highly sophisticated in her view. As a performer, she has integrated various traditional and “trad-modern” formations and ballets (from Central, West and East Africa). She has learned from and worked with masters of African dance, in a period of momentous change, such as Lucky Zébila (Congo/France) and Babatunde Olatundji (Nigeria/USA) while simultaneously taking part in a contemporary creative process, aiming to confront movement in its intrinsic capacity to express what she calls “our situation in the world”.
She is also continuing her studies in philosophy, a discipline that she teaches at a college in Laval, Quebec. Eventually this will equip her to provide an unprecedented theoretical dimension to her reflection on dance, arts and culture.