Yoann Cormier on bringing ‘In Mali, When Animals Dance’ to life at the Musée des Confluences.
30 April 2026
How do you exhibit something that resists being fixed in place? In ‘In Mali, When Animals Dance’, Yoann Cormier takes on the challenge of translating sogo bò, a vibrant Malian performance tradition rooted in community, rhythm and transformation, into a museum setting. Rejecting static display in favour of immersion, the exhibition unfolds through light, sound and movement, drawing visitors into a shifting world where masks, music and myth converge. In this conversation, Cormier reflects on staging a living culture while preserving its mystery, energy and ongoing evolution.
Sogonin kelennayaala, petit gibier solitaire qui se promène. © Musée des Confluences – Sandrine Expilly.
Suzette Bell-Roberts: The exhibition presents sogo bòas as a total spectacle combining theatre, dance, music and community. How did you bring this living, collective practice into the museum without turning it into something static?
Yoann Cormier: The main challenge of this project was to convey the reality of festive celebrations within an indoor exhibition space. To achieve this, we moved away from traditional museum display conventions, such as glass cases, to immerse visitors in the collections. We also aimed to restore these masks to their true form and monumental scale by reconstructing the missing parts using feathers, textiles, and plant fibres, in collaboration with the costume workshop of the Lyon Opera. Finally, and most importantly, it is the footage filmed in the early 2000s by Sonia and Albert Loeb, the couple behind this collection, along with the accompanying music, that allows visitors to truly experience the authentic atmosphere of these festivities.
Nyòsusulamusow, femmes pilant le mil. © Musée des Confluences – Sandrine Expilly.
The scenography moves between the village, the river, day and night. What guided your choice to focus on immersion rather than a more traditional narrative display
Telling the story of the sogo bò, like any live performance, seemed to us less meaningful than making it feel. We therefore chose to emphasise immersive staging, particularly through a carefully designed lighting scheme throughout the exhibition. This lighting recreates the progression of the sun over the course of a Malian day, beginning with the warm, intense light of early afternoon -when the sogo bò usually starts – and continuing into the night, when the festivities carry on. Visitors thus move not only through space, but also through the time of the performance.
As for the river’s physical presence in the exhibition, it seemed essential to showcase the remarkable films in which masks and “puppet stages” are mounted on large pirogues, performing for an audience gathered along the banks of the Niger. This is an unexpected form of theatre for the uninitiated, and it was worth making it tangible in the exhibition space.
Exposition “Au Mali, quand les animaux dansent. Donation de Sonia et Albert Loeb © Musée des Confluences – Juliette Valero.
The masks use animal forms to reflect human behaviour and psychology. How do you approach this relationship between human and animal in the exhibition?
The way in which the ‘masks’, these ‘wearable puppets’, are handled by their bearers, the meaningful choreographies they create, not to mention the songs that accompany these short scenes, depicting the animals while also reflecting, in a mirror, human character and its flaws. All of this is brought to life through the footage shown in the exhibition, including a remarkable sequence commented on by the Malian historian Youssouf Tata Cissé.
Kurunba, grande pirogue. © Musée des Confluences – Sandrine Expilly.
Sogo bò is both public and secret. How did you handle what can be shown and what should remain hidden?
The question of secrecy accompanied us throughout the preparation of this exhibition. We could, for instance, have revealed the ‘undersides’ of the ‘puppet stages’ and the ‘Kalaka’, with explanatory sketches showing how the young men position themselves inside these structures, how they divide roles, and how they manipulate animated figures.
After careful consideration, however, we chose to preserve the element of mystery surrounding what happens behind the scenes and to maintain the anonymity of the mask bearers. Of course, we still explain how these festivities are organised, but without betraying all their secrets.
Dajèkun, tête d’antilope chevaline. © Musée des Confluences – Sandrine Expilly.
The exhibition is built from the Loeb collection. How did you work with this collection while recognising its personal and historical context?
This collection is the result of acquisitions made in Mali in the early 2000s from Malian dealers (and, of course, in full transparency with the Malian authorities, including the National Museum of Bamako), born out of Sonia and Albert Loeb’s fascination with these festivities. It is therefore a coherent collection (with neither very old nor very recent objects), yet one that is part of a much longer history: the earliest known account describing the Koté Kono, these large bird-snail figures, two of which are reconstructed in the exhibition, comes from Ibn Battuta, the great ‘traveler of Islam,’ and dates back to 1352. These objects are presented in dialogue with footage filmed during the same period by Albert Loeb, forming a cohesive whole – a personal testimony, but also a historical one, as this practice began to decline in the following decade (2010–2020), when the sogo bò was inscribed on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list (2014).
Warabakun, tête de lion. © Musée des Confluences – Sandrine Expilly.
With these traditions under pressure today, how does the exhibition balance preservation with keeping the practice alive and relevant?
In my view, this exhibition is a valuable piece of heritage documentation, as it helps preserve a practice that is indeed under pressure, with the Malian context offering little support for its continuation.
At the end of the exhibition, however, we wanted to strike a more positive note by presenting the sogo bò in a form that still endures, notably during major festivals such as FESMAMAS in Markala, which was held again this year. We were fortunate to film during the 2025 edition, thanks to a Malian film crew on-site.
Exposition ‘Au Mali, quand les animaux dansent’ au musée des Confluences © musée des Confluences – Bertrand Stofleth.
Sound and rhythm are central to sogo bò. How did you use sound to shape the visitor’s experience?
The visitor route is fully sound-designed and structured so that visitors do not perceive any ‘looping’ effect. We have incorporated quieter moments as well as more festive sequences in which the sound intensifies, allowing visitors to experience what sogo bò audiences truly feel when witnessing the animal masks’ entrances, accompanied by singers and driven by percussion. It is a rather unusual kind of museum experience.
Kurun, tabouret. © Musée des Confluences – Sandrine Expilly.
The exhibition brings together myth, daily life and contemporary stories. What does this say about how sogo bò continues to evolve today?
As seen in footage filmed in Markala last year, the practice is evolving, with new forms and characters introduced. It is a living, dynamic culture, and I hope this will enable it, despite an unfavourable context in Mali, to continue to exist.
This exhibition is on view at Musée des Confluences in Lyon until 07 February 2027.
