Hot Feet and Social Change

African Dance and Diaspora Communities

Kariamu Welsh, Esailama Diouf, Yvonne Daniel, Kariamu Welsh, Esailama Diouf, Yvonne Daniel

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780252051814
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

The popularity and profile of African dance have exploded across the African diaspora in the last fifty years. Hot Feet and Social Change presents traditionalists, neo-traditionalists, and contemporary artists, teachers, and scholars telling some of the thousands of stories lived and learned by people in the field. Concentrating on eight major cities in the United States, the essays challenges myths about African dance while demonstrating its power to awaken identity, self-worth, and community respect. These voices of experience share personal accounts of living African traditions, their first encounters with and ultimate embrace of dance, and what teaching African-based dance has meant to them and their communities. Throughout, the editors alert readers to established and ongoing research, and provide links to critical contributions by African and Caribbean dance experts.

Contributors: Ausettua Amor Amenkum, Abby Carlozzo, Steven Cornelius, Yvonne Daniel, Charles "Chuck" Davis, Esailama G. A. Diouf, Indira Etwaroo, Habib Iddrisu, Julie B. Johnson, C. Kemal Nance, Halifu Osumare, Amaniyea Payne, William Serrano-Franklin, and Kariamu Welsh

PART I

Hot Feet and
Local Histories

SAUCE!

Conjuring the African Dream
in America through Dance

Esailama G. A. Diouf

While generalized categories such as “African dance” neglect the diversity within African continental and diasporic traditions by assuming a cultural homogeneity among Africans and Afro-descendants globally, the manifold “spirit(s)” of dance have rarely been interrogated. Beyond the bodily techniques that all dances encompass, a dance harbors a spirit that manifests and produces meaning through embodiment. Cultural policymakers, like Leopold Senghor, and cultural artists, such as Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus, spoke of dance as a vital force, one that “can take you out.” The dancer both loses and finds her-/him-/themselves when mounted by the spirit of the dance, and it is through the dancer that the spirit of the dance—sometimes multiple spirits—“lives in the world.” What both continental West African and African Diaspora dancers have generally called “spirit”—and which is called ase1 in Yoruba-based Diaspora traditions and espri in Fon-based Diaspora traditions2—facilitates transcendence within performance and enables what dancer/choreographer M. Jacqui Alexander refers to as spirit knowing, a mechanism for making the world and the meta-worlds intelligible.3 For most Europeans and North Americans, despite formal religious beliefs and practices sometimes expressed in their dance, their experience is largely understood in secular materialist terms, divested of spiritual aspects. As a result, spirit, as a way of knowing, is not generally believed to have the capacity to bodily instruct on dance, performance, or the African diasporic experience. However, in its true essence, dance, like music, transcends material, cultural and geographical borders; it involves rhythm; it depends not on, nor is it dictated by, time; and it requires no special clothing. Dance needs only to connect with the spirit of the performer through a form of communication that I refer to as spirit talk. Transcending materiality and discourses on authenticity, aesthetics, or cultural production, the spirit of the dance interlocks with the spirit of the dancer. Beyond verbal dialogue, two spirits enter a dialogic and dialectic conversation that alters the dancer’s entire being and existence in the world, exposing her/him/them to a kaleidoscope of colors, shapes, textures, and sounds. In these liminal moments the spirit of the dancer is fortified and the spirit of the dance persists, and both are raised at a meta-level of creative expression.

SAUCE!

After meeting in California in the 1970s, my parents, Naomi (from Liberia) and Zakarya (from Senegal), joined together in the development of a U.S.-based West African Dance Company.4 Their mission was to educate U.S. Americans, particularly African Americans, regarding Africa’s—mostly West Africa’s—rich cultural heritages through the practice and performance of traditional music and dance. Our two-bedroom apartment served most often as a studio space for workshops, rehearsals, and the making of costumes and drums, as well as for the learning of new songs and creation of new choreographies. In our small apartment, sometimes for weeks at a time, my parents hosted five to ten visiting artists from the national dance companies of Senegal, Guinea, Mali, or Liberia. Back then, U.S.-based dancers and musicians, both West African and African American, not only came together in whatever space they could find to rehearse, but they also ate and lived together. Engaging under the same roof in day-to-day exchanges, they learned about each other, along with the history, culture, language, and spiritual contexts of the music and dances they were practicing and performing—transforming themselves and their new social relations and environments. This was an era in which the performance of West African–derived (WA-derived) dance was at its height in California, during the late 1970s and early 1980s. However, few formal WA-derived dance companies existed then. Nevertheless, it was a time when Africans and African Americans joined together in intense cultural exchanges that broke through stereotypes and invited dialogue and discovery.

In our home, the practice of music and dance was also a regular occurrence, particularly in the kitchen. The kitchen, specifically, served not only as a venue for preparing West African dishes, such as ceebu jen (Senegalese fish and rice), but also for singing, sewing costumes, rehearsing movements and choreography, learning the folklore—traditional beliefs, stories, and knowledge systems—associated with dances, and debating current events. As such, it became an important place for forging offstage relationships between West Africans and African Americans. It was from these settings that the idiomatic expression “SAUCE!” was created.

In many West African cooking traditions, soups and sauces, such as mafaa (peanut stew) or palm butter (popular Liberian palm nut sauce5)—whether red or clear, cooked with palm oil or peanuts, or served over rice, fufu, or cassava—are a mainstay of daily meals. As a child, I would watch as continental West African women taught teams of African American women how to make these dishes. One West African woman would direct a group of African American women in preparing the base of the sauce, while other West African women directed other groups of African American women in preparing the ingredients that would go into the pot. As food preparation was underway, other members of our community of dance students and teachers formed male and female clusters around the small kitchen table, where they monitored everything that was occurring while either sewing costumes for the next show, learning new songs, or analyzing movements. The activities—whether in the form of singing a song, stirring a pot, or tapping on the table—always fell into a shared rhythm with no clear beginning or end. For us, the kitchen became a metaphoric context for the synergy created by the interplay of our company’s creativity and the power inherent to the transmission of tradition and culture.

The role of the “kitchenspace”6 as a binding element was reflected in the emergence of “SAUCE!” as an exclamatory idiom in the company’s internal jargon. Shouting “SAUCE!” on the dance floor signaled that the performance of a dancer, drummer, or group had reached a certain spiritual climax, a point at which creativity and tradition combined to yield something greater than the sum of their parts. It was at this point that all structured choreography would be abandoned, leaving the dance to pure improvisation—the point at which interpretation and spiritual connection prevailed. It was through this practice that great artists were revealed.

Among most groups of West African and African American dancers in the United States, a shout of “SAUCE!” is used to indicate moments of high or exquisite WA-derived performance. Just as most sauces maximize flavor and jazz up a meal, “SAUCE!” was shouted on the dance floor when a dancer has discovered how to balance the technique of the dance form with his or her own style, while maximizing the varying flavors within the rhythm. Taking the execution of the dance “up a notch,” this dancer’s performance exudes the varying textures of the rhythm and “speaks in tongues” within movement to a congregation of fellow dancers, who in turn are spiritually uplifted. “SAUCE!” was thus spirit talk, vernacularly rooted in the phenomenological experiences of a local, yet global, community of artists and students of WA-derived cultural productions. Through such childhood experiences, I learned early in my life as a dancer that achievement in dance does not depend primarily on how well you copy a movement or learn a choreographic phrase, but how well you understand and embody the dance’s spirit. It is through this spirit that many African Americans came to know African dance.

My Africa

While the dynamic within my parents’ dance company was one of appreciation, exchange, and learning, we also came to know the many obstacles our African American members had to overcome to become receptive to African culture. In effect, they had to un-learn the many falsehoods they had been taught about Africa in order to allow themselves to embody its many cultures and traditions. Arthur Moore, a former Katherine Dunham drummer, noted: “My first impressions of Africa and African rhythms were influenced by movies like Mogambo and that garbage out of Tarzan. In school, there was no curriculum that involved African history; world history was European history. And I had no idea, because in this diaspora the farthest I ever thought I would go was East St. Louis.”7

Moore’s statement reflects the experience many musicians and dancers had during the late 1960s regarding the image of Africa presented by Hollywood: one of “jungles, wild animals, ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ blacks, and thundering drums.”8 Referring to films such as Tarzan of the Apes (1918), The African Queen (1951), The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), and Mogambo (1953), actor Danny Glover noted that regardless of whether a film was about Africa or was dominated by African scenes, filmmakers tended to use Africa as merely an exotic background for love and adventure stories that did not concern Africa in any fundamental sense.9

In The Invention of Africa, African philosopher V. Y. Mudimbe surveys how the “Western” construction of Africa shaped the way in which Africa and Africans were imagined. Mudimbe argues that this ideological campaign involved setting the European and North American intellectual configuration of knowledge as the epitome of European power, against which all others would be compared and judged. Mudimbe hypothesizes that, while first despised, works of “primitivism” became integrated into the “Western” tradition during the twentieth century through what he calls the “ethnologization” and “aestheticization” processes. According to Mudimbe, ethnologization is the process of isolating a datum from its real context in order to analyze and classify its attributes, identify its model, and, finally, assign it a label that allows for its location/categorization, such as a degree of latitude or the name of a tribe. In early ethnographic studies, a product is granted or denied the status of art based on external criteria; in effect, a work must have visible characteristics and constraints that can, technically, be localized along the timeline of European and/or North American intellectual and aesthetic history in order to belong to the realm of artistic achievements.10

Mudimbe’s theory is referenced here to help describe how performances of expressive culture have also undergone ethnologization. Like “art objects” or “ethnographic artifacts,” many WA-derived dances were developed in specific indigenous spaces, which means that the original or local dances often differ from their reproductions in festivals, theaters, and studio spaces. Bearing traces of “the folk” while developing the characteristics of new bodies and new spaces, WA-derived dance performances became live elements of a “material stock,” representing the “everyday life” of African people. Indeed, “traditional” dance had to move and change through performers, space, and time, simply in order to survive. Hence, it is certain that change would have emerged, regardless of whether the dancer, producer, or choreographer had attempted to apply Mudimbe’s three-pronged approach to account for the origins of the dances and transcend the “shortcomings of anthropologists’ ethnologization and aestheticization of the objects.”11

Nevertheless, when traditional dances are passed down to contemporary performers, the formal, historicized transmission of customs and beliefs—while surviving—also assume contemporary meanings because of their assimilation into new spaces and contexts and the cultural frames of new performers. African Americans, just like many of the Africa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword: The Bantaba! Initiation of Purpose
• Preface
• Introduction: When, Where, and How We Enter
• Part I: Hot Feet and Local Histories
• Part II: The Elders’ Work and Words
• Part III: Perpetual Motion in the Aesthetics of Africa
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover