| Session 6 | Africanist Aesthetics |
| Ariel O. Scott | Spatiality, Motility, Community: Choreographing Feminist Tactics in Urban Africa |
| This paper examines the feminist tactics of African choreographers Germaine Acogny (Senegal) and Faustin Linyekula (DR Congo). Acogny situates her school, Ecole des Sables (also home to her company, Jant-Bi) on the coastal outskirts of Dakar; Linyekula founds his Studios Kabako in urban Kisangani. Invoking feminist notions of spatiality and motility, anthropological treatments of African modernity and witchcraft, and research on community-based art practice coming out of performance studies, I address Acogny and Linyekula's differing relationships to African urbanization. While Acogny sends her dancers on survival expeditions only for them to return to the relative stability of Ecole des Sables, Linyekula and his dancers have developed a network of community arts centers across Kisangani in the aftermath of DR Congo's upheaval. Acogny's feminism operates on a phenomenological and psychological level, while Linyekula engages in feminist community-based art practices predicated on spatiality and the social. | |
| Cristina Rosa | Embodying Femininity: Black Identity in Motion and the Back-&-Forth Friction of the Embodied Concept of Ginga in Samba |
| In this paper, I will historicize the concept of ginga, the syncopated swing of the hips, present in Afro-Brazilian circular social dances such as samba-de-roda. Contrary to street processions and parades such as congadas (black king pageants) and folias (carnaval celebrations), samba-de-roda has been cultivated within private environments such as slave headquarters (colonial era), and in-doors events at the so-called “Auntie houses.” Starting at the end XIX century, samba-de-roda, becomes a common practice within Afro-Brazilian community (eating) parties organized in urban centers such as Rio de Janeiro by matrons at their backyards. In these social dancing circles, participants would improvise rhythms and lyrics with percussion instruments (including kitchen utensils, while a (pair of) dancer(s) would improvise a solo (or a duet) at the center. Despite the spontaneous atmosphere of these performances, samba-de-roda is codified with a specific set of (unspoken) rules and principles (i.e. repertoire of movements and rhythms, norms for entering and existing the circle, expected behavior, etc). My analysis will unpack the functions and meanings of the corporeal orature samba dancing bodies perform, and the tangible traces they produce within the audience/community. This paper will focus on the choreographies of (female) gender instantiated by the dancing bodies and supported by the spatial organization in which they are performed. Finally, I will address the transformations set in motion by the radio and the recording industries (20s-30s), which projected the samba music into the national scenario, erasing the (black) dancing body from its central position. (Floating) representations of blackness would (re)emerge in the latter decades, through iconic samba dancing bodies. | |
| Anna Scott | Borracha/Bounce |
| An investigation of the flip flop and its role in Brazilian culture as shoe, object of Carnaval, class marker, musical instrument, and cultural export, BORRACHA/BOUNCE through a juxtaposition of traditional and contemporary dance invites the audience into an awareness of the bizarre reality of global trade and fads. The show is written and choreographed using a big dose of humor, following tightly the conventions of a paper or powerpoint presentation, without the paper or powerpoint. Instead, I dance while talking and play with various rubber objects, situating the flip-flop as a lived thing and process. Ritsu Katsumata’s score underlines the movement and text by playing with concepts of High and Low Art--something challenged by the adoption of the flip flop as haute couture. What becomes apparent is the import of gendered, raced, and classed gestures in branding an object as a representation of cultural cohesion. | |
| Ariel Osterweis Scott is a Ph.D. student in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on questions of virtuosity, temporality, and race in contemporary dance. At UCB, Scott co-planned the 2008 Dance Under Construction conference, "Willing and Able: Re-Figuring Dance, Performance, and Disability," and the "Conference on African and Afro-Caribbean Performance." She earned her BA in Anthropology from Columbia University, and worked professionally with the dance companies Mia Michaels R.A.W., Dwight Rhoden and Desmond Richardson's Complexions, and Heidi Latsky. Her choreography, presented in New York, London, and Berkeley, has addressed pregnancy, translation, and the drawing poems of Robert Grenier. | |
| Cristina Rosa: Born in Brasilia, Brazil, Cristina Rosa is a scholar and an artist whose research focuses on Afro-Brazilian aesthetics within performance practices. Rosa has a Master degree in Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is currently engaged in her doctoral research in culture and performance studies at the World Arts and Cultures department, at UCLA. | |
| Anna Beatrice Scott is assistant professor in the Department of Dance at University of California, Riverside and founding Convener of the Center for Body, Performance & Dance. She specializes in the study, analysis, and performance of dance practices in the African Diaspora, with an emphasis on the performance of epidermal realities as they intersect transnational entertainment industries and local spiritual/ philosophical practices. Anna has performed professionally with Fua dia Congo, Ceedo Senegalese DanceCompany, Abiogenesis (a Chicago based performance art troupe) and Chama Compania de Dança. She is completing an e-book investigation of Carnival, Completamente Pirado: O Carnaval Depois o Novo Linguagem do Pé (Flipped-out Tongues/Wagging Heads), a multimediated, user-driven experience of the ‘Grand Folly’ and race in Bahia, Brazil with Ritsu Katsumata and the dark2digital.com collective. Anna leads the De/Cipherin' Practices Colloquium, a national gathering of scholars working in/on/through/ with the Arts of Africa and Its Diaspora. She served as Provost's Fellow in Theatre, Film and Dance at Cornell University in 2003 to 2005. Her one-woman show, Fish Tales, Rivers and Other Female Parts has been presented at UC San Diego, RISD, Brown University, and MIT. She contributed the entry of "Performance Art" to the Encyclopedia of African-American Culture, Art & History," and "Flip Flop," an essay on the object of Carnival to the forthcoming edition of Vectors On- Line Journal. Her current performance project, BORRACHA:BOUNCE, based in part on "Flip Flop," will be presented at University of Indiana this spring. | |
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