Arouna Guindo

Arouna “Soundjata” Guindo is a Hip Hop dancer and choreographer from Benin West Africa currently an artist in residence with the Dow Dance Company in New Orleans. Mr. Guindo is a dancer, choreographer, artistic director, and dance judge. He has danced for choreographers such as Awoulath Alougbin, Francesca Pedulla, Koffi Koko, Pierre Doussaint, Salia Sanou, Marcel Gbeffa, Bienvenue Bazié, Frey Faust, Seydou Boro, and Caleb Dowden. His dance style can be described as street dance, breakdance, contemporary experimental, and abstract Hip Hop. As an international dancer, he has taught and performed in Benin, Germany, Togo, and currently the US. Mr. Guindo most recently performed at the Ogden Museum for the Iya- Orisha Project. Arouna has been teaching dance for ten years and taught at the Multicorps Choreographer Center in Cotonou. He currently teaches at Dancing Grounds and Artivism Dance Theatre in New Orleans. His work as a choreographer brought him to Berlin, Germany in 2017 where he had a residency for his work “Toguna”. In 2023, Arouna received two important grants from the ACF African Culture Fund and the Togo Creatif for his Hybrid project dance and sculpture project Ori-Djinn. In 2019, he founded the company Dreamkeys and with it started an experimental platform for researching the production and dissemination of Hip Hop shows and performance titled ''Le chaos ELEGANT''. Through these two ventures, he has produced many pieces of urban dances in Cotonou and was supported by Jai Productions of Anne Ahiha, The Contemporary Arts Center of Lobozounkpa, and the French Institute of Cotonou. He has also been developing a marathon dance performance and street dance project, of which a 48-hour edition of non-stop dance ''Hors Normes'' was hosted in residence and produced by Le Centre at their Les échos de Lobozounkpa festival.