this article looks at various conceptions and experiences of freedom that manifest themselves around the teaching of African dance in Europe, namely the Senegalese dance SABAR. While African dances are frequently promoted as a vector of self-‘liberation’, linked to exotifying stereotypes about Africa, the ethnography of SABAR’s teaching situations reveals that these visions are being criticised, and that there is also a reform of pedagogies and insights into the other, particularly around the teaching of the SABAR musico-choregraphic ‘game’. Learning from SABAR’s improvisation codes, through misunderstandings and disagreements, sometimes leads to some instantly fugets of successful chorregraphic conversation between students and musicians, and to freedom practices based on fragile alignment of participants’ codes and emotions.