Michel Kelemenis

Born in 1984 in Engbanda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Pepe Elmas Naswa discovered contemporary dance in 2007 thanks to a performance by Didier Ediho, a Congolese dancer and choreographer whose work has been a fundamental influence on him.

He then trained by participating in various workshops led by Faustin Linyekula, Hildegard De Vuyst, Ula Sickle, and Serge Aimé Coulibaly.

As a performer, he worked in particular with Didier Ediho. He created the El-Urbaine collective—now renamed Pepenas—and designed his first piece, 3 Faces, completed in 2013.

In direct contact with his time, Pepe Elmas Naswa explores a fundamentally changing choreographic universe, at the crossroads of contemporary dance and urban dance.

In 2020, his creation Dans la peau de l’autre (In the Skin of Another), in which he questions his intimate memories of Kinshasa in a universe combining popular dance and Afro-street dance from Kinshasa, was co-produced by the Festival de Marseille and the Ballet National de Marseille.