The DJEŪM is an Afro-Urban dance style from Cameroon set up by Arsène ETABA which means DANCE in the Njoyi language (spoken in
the Central region of Cameroon, among the Eton people from whom he originates).
It invites the people to DANCE to claim, to hope, to aspire but also to celebrate, forget and forgive, this through a sincere and salutary
invitation of the spirits rooted in our soils: THIS IS WHY WE ARE CONSTANTLY POUNDING THE GROUND.
It is a new Afro-urban dance of Cameroonian origin where the standards of urban African dance are evolved, particularly through a
gestural vocabulary that combines customs, contexts, intentions, techniques and probably commercial (with the aim of expansion)
The principles of the Djeūm: sincerity, sharing, risk and responsibility. It is fully talking about what we would like to express, explaining
according to the offbeat standards of a body vibrating to the rhythm of Afro sensations and energies.
That said, it is to bring together both the anthology of African dances but to make them understood according to our perceptions,
aspirations, and this in complete freedom.
The Djeūm involves the 4 essential elements of the uniqueness of a life: Fire, Water, Earth, Wind.
With your feet pounding on the ground, you have to create a dynamism with ancestral attachments, according to various energetic
variations to talk about the Earth – You have to send these blows into the body, its entirety, up to the torso to specify what is being said
Water, because it considers that every foundation, every initiative, every ancestor needs water to respectively water, fluidify and offer an
action, a purpose.
The arms that accompany each other like this wind that allows us to draw on a new breath to continue to make the moment of bodily
discussion quite poetic are added to the practice.
With intentions of different and variable intensities, amplitudes, the Djeūm opens up to all the danced and dancing universes of Africa
(Traditional, Urban, Ancestral…) to clearly draw out its singularity
Leave a Reply