Contemporary African Dance as a Decolonizing Practice

2019

This paper takes a look at the concept of dance history and historiography. I engage with several problematic terms like the universalization or globalisation of most or all Eurocentric historical accounts of certain dance styles, and their existing periods that have served as paradigms or cannons that define a generalised history of dance in or across the world. For the purpose of this study, I also include the field of dance anthropology with its relation to dance as they are both predominantly written and researched Euro-American Scholars. Why do most dance historians not talk about African dances, on the other hand, why are dance anthropologists fascinated be these exotic African dances that dance historians neglect? Who teaches dance history/anthropology in Europe, who are its students and what its major texts are? I also examine the possible challenges historians are likely to face when they attempt to write about African dance or movement practices by looking at why myths, legends and oral literature often associated with Africa as a continent make it a victim of the western kaleidoscope, dance history and historiography. Are both fields of study meant to whet the appetite of the European scholarship and consumer capitalism? If so, this paper makes an attempt to decolonise dance anthropology/history African dance or movement practices I will make reference to some selected African dance styles, a reflexive account of my own personal choreographic experience and also make specific reference to Bata dance from Nigeria.

Critical African Studies 11(1), pp. 1-9, 2019

In this introduction to the special issue on dance in Africa and beyond, we review the anthropological study of dance in Africa since the 1920s and introduce the seven contributions, organized around the key themes of transformed identities (both contemporary and historical), decoloniality, new media, morality, and the problematic representations of African diasporic identities in contemporary Europe. With this special issue, we argue that the study of dance and music provides an important window into the myriad creative ways in which people in Africa and in the African diaspora deal with problematic situations, generate new artistic forms, engage with questions of ethics, and carve out spaces in which they experiment with novelty and reinvigorate their lives.

Journal of African Cultural Studies

The wife whose turn it is that evening, bring her along. No, bring your favourite wife! But that's not sharia't,. No sharia't in the nightclub! This suggestive exchange takes place between Malian eminences grises who, in the 1960s, were members of 'Las Vegas', one of Bamako's many dance societies, as they contemplate a reunion now that they are all in their 60s rather than in the '60s. Back then, scores of young people of Bamako had been photographed by their contemporary Malick Sidibé in their groovy decolonial glory, with thoughts of sharia't seemingly far from their minds. Now those very people were starting their get-together with namaaz, though in a trice the memory of their youth made them break out from the prayer mat to a mean pachanga. The scene is captured in Dolce Vita Africana (Spender 2008), a documentary film on Sidibé's work and times. 1 While his photographic oeuvre shines the spotlight on the camera's role in decolonising an African country, the documentary underlines its collaboration with the dance floor to fashion the euphoric subject of decolonisation, but also that euphoria's afterlife, and dance's ability momentarily to turn back the clock. These themesdance as embodied memory and nostalgia, dance as challenge to linear temporality, dance as a collective social actshape this special issue on dance and decolonisation in Africa. As editors, we drew inspiration from many sources: classic novels that weave music and dance into their evocations of community life, written on the eve or aftermath of decolonisation, for example Camara Laye's L'Enfant Noir (1953), Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's A Grain of Wheat (1967); a new generation which returns to those foundational moments through critical nostalgiasuch as Tunisian filmmaker Moufida Tlatli's depiction of belly dance in The Silences of the Palace (Samt el qusur, 1994); singer-songwriter Paulo Flores's revival of the Angolan dance-music genre semba; and scholarly works that have illuminated such mobilisations of dance and music within the frame of

Critical Stages , 2024

We have entered a period of high scientific and technological advancements that is shrinking the world and upturning long-held beliefs and ideologies about our culture. Seeing these changes, one is coerced now to ask, "how African is Africa?" or "how traditional is tradition?" These drastic changes on the tripod of complexities, contradictions and chaos have formed the basis of Zygmunt Bauman's use of the term "liquid" and Ziauddin Sardar's "postnormal" to qualify the present epoch which indicates a drastic shift from solid cultural structures to more flexible structures. The indigenous performatives of the African culture are implicated in this change: Can the concepts of African dance serve these postnormal times? Are the canons of postnormality threatening indigenous dances towards extinction, and if so, what ideological and philosophical approach can be injected into the indigenous dances to secure sustainability? The researchers rely on critical theory and observe that if indigenous dances are to survive beyond this millennium, there is a need to rethink the concept, context and content of African dance since the aesthetic, functional and ideological platforms that birthed the pure forms are changing, if not completely eroded. Indigenous dance choreographers as a matter of urgency must begin to engage African dance creations from the points of critical syncretism which allows the choreographer to be flexible enough to align indigenous dances to the realities of contemporary society. The researchers recommend certain areas critical to this transition.

ABSTRACT African dance performances have been popularized globally as a result of its initiators’ need for global identity. This has encouraged African dancers and choreographers to create work that address social, cultural and political issues peculiar to the African continent. However, so many debates have arisen to redefine contemporary dance and contemporary African dance. The latter, with a core reference to Africa depicts a dance with its roots and plot structure in Africa. This paper tends to make reflections on the contemporary African dance, especially in Nigeria and its impact on the contemporary Nigerian society who are beginning to understand this new language in the performing arts. It will analyse opinions from the two factions in dance, that is, the ‘distortionist’, who is the contemporary dancer/choreographer or the preserver of culture who is the indigenous dancer/choreographer. Keywords: Contemporary African Dance, Choreographers, Acceptance, Challenges, Growing Trend

International Journal of Education & the Arts, 2022

What is 'African dance'? Is the label 'African dance' representative enough of the diverse dance traditions in African communities, or is it just another form of tokenism? How is the term 'African dance' rooted in the histories of colonial racism against the African people? What are the dangers of using the same label as an attempt at instituting anti-racist curricular and interventions in universities, conservatories, dance studios, and dance companies? In problematizing the label 'African dance', we should be cognizant of the view presented by Stuart Hall (1991) that how people are represented is how they are treated. The article examines how the generalization IJEA Vol. 23 Special Issue 1.2-http://www.ijea.org/v23si1/ 2 reflected in 'African dance' has genealogy in the earlier racist European colonial homogenization of Africa, which Valentino Y. Mudimbe (1988) has termed as the 'invention of Africa'. A critical examination is made on how using the label 'African dance' in the current anti-racist dance curricular projects compound racism that whitewashes a complex continent with multiplicity of cultures and dance practices into one single monolithic label. The article provokes critical reflection on the complexity of dance traditions in Africa and inspires a new thinking that looks at the different insidious facets of racism, which can easily be exacerbated by the very projects that seek to address social injustices, discrimination, and marginalization.

African Somaesthetics: Cultures, Feminisms, Politics, 2020

This chapter develops the notion of African somaesthetics to disrupt the discourse of concert dance informed by a hetero-normative White male gaze. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s description of the somatic experience of Black consciousness and bell hooks’ critical gaze theory, the author develops the notion of a somatics of Blackness which recognizes the body as a site of both somatic and political identity formation. Utilizing Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s decolonial methodologies and Walter Mignolo’s theory of decolonial aesthesis, this work suggests how African choreographers decolonize the mind/body in performance by expressing African aesthetic criteria through post-colonial somatic engagement.

Academic and intellectual discourses are still riddled with dualism. African dances are no stranger to this polarity. African dance, homogenizing as it sounds, has been widely applied to define, characterize, theorize, claim, and brand a miscellany of dances from different cultures in Uganda. In this talk, I will deconstruct “African dance” as an imaginary concept, which derives homage in western ethnocentrism. It is the concern of this presentation to reveal dance from Africa for what they are: varied, culturally specific, demographically contextualized, and geographically confined. In inverting this conventionally embraced concept, I lean on Edward Said’s theory of orientalism to advance the view that fabricating artistic homogeneity about African dances is not only intellectually and academically problematic, but it also raised questions about representation and appropriation of dance forms from Africa.

Dance Research Journal, 2017

This article analyzes two contemporary pieces, Faustin Linyekula's La Création du Monde 1923–2012 and Vera Mantero's A mysterious thing said e. e. Cummings, which respond to dance productions presented in Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century by criticizing their “negrophilic” attitude. The article juxtaposes the analysis of these two contemporary pieces with rereadings of the historical choreographies/events of the 1920s to which they refer, namely, Les Ballets Suédois's La Création du Monde (1923) and Josephine Baker's performances. Theoretically revisiting historical works that developed within such a “negrophilic” framework alongside contemporary pieces relating to them can be taken as attacking this very framework, trying to “undo” the Eurocentrism inherent in its cannibalistic processes. Such a perspective may allow for the acknowledgement of plural, multiple views of Africanistic presences in an otherwise “negrophilic” context.

Critical African Studies, 2019