Being Contemporary: Postcolonial Perspectives on the Global Dance Market

Let us start with a statement by Germaine Acogny herself: “What is contemporary dance in Africa? If it has to do with time, then we are contemporary. And if it is a concept like in France, well, we are not like them. They can say we are not contemporary. But we are contemporary” (Théâtre de la Ville 2014).

It would be carrying coals to Newcastle to declare that the so-called global art market is one that is dominated by Western market laws. It is also widely known that what is labelled as contemporary is defined by the post-Fordist and neoliberal structures, rules, and conventions of this same global art market. The “contemporary” is the keyword, which regulates the principles of in- and exclusion (Ritter Reference Ritter2008): curators, festival managers, directors of theaters, and so on and so forth, are the “legitimated speakers” who hold a hegemonic position and who control this market. Especially artists from other cultures, in which the contemporary plays a different role and in which the relationship between modernity and tradition or contemporary art and traditional art is negotiated differently, only enter this market if their artistic work is regarded (in the logics of this market) to be contemporary. In this respect, the contemporary is not primarily an aesthetic but an economic category: the contemporary is the central exchange value of the global art market.

But how are cultural experiences, artistic traditions, and the aesthetic practices of work in so-called African dance translated into an aesthetic form that is seen as contemporary on the global art market?

In the 1980s, African dance came into the focus of the Western art market. This can be seen as a precursor of wider international economic and political developments, such as the end of apartheid in the 1990s, the globalization of the capitalist market, or the increased economic interest in the “forgotten” continent of Africa. This decade saw the emergence of a new global dance generation that claimed contemporaneity and wished to break away from modernity and its hegemonic aspirations. These are translators, coming primarily from spaces outside of the Western cultural sphere, and they are mainly people of color. Like Acogny, who first gained prominence in the 1980s, these are dancers from various generations and various countries with different colonial backgrounds. Based on their respective personal life experiences and histories of migration, they destabilize the myth of the “authentic African dancer” and confront late colonial paternalism with their own education and artistic careers. Their work and art change that which is perceived as African dance. It is thus no longer the “objet trouvé” discovered by the Western connoisseur of the “authentic African”—as was the case in modernity—and to be mystified or exoticized by Europe. “Africa” is not merely a geopolitical notion, but also a social imaginary marked by colonial patterns.

Artistic working methods and works of art from African countries and regions and from different artists are very different, and it is impossible to generalize them. But it can be shown that since the social upheavals in the 1990s, various transformations become evident in discourse surrounding “African art” and African dance. These transformations are happening on the international art market and correspond to the transmission of “modern art” into so-called “contemporary art.” Whereas at the beginning of the twentieth century, the avant-garde of (historic) modernity sought inspiration in so-called “primitive art,” art “claiming global contemporaneity without borders and history” (Belting and Buddensieg Reference Belting and Buddensieg2013, 61) had prevailed by the turn of the twenty-first century. This contemporary art contrasts with modernity and demands the right to a postcolonial presence. In this light, interpreting African dance also brings opposing translations to the fore. These translations open dance up to global reception, while restricting it at the same time. They create something new by transcending Western boundaries, while both reinforcing and preserving entrenched hegemonies through the dialectics of in- and exclusion. This “blind date” (Mackert, Kittlausz, and Pauleit Reference Mackert, Kittlausz and Pauleit2008) between the global North and the global South takes place on multiple levels of cultural translation, which are closely intertwined: translations between dance and language, between different dance cultures and interpretations of dance, and between different perceptions and cultural knowledge bases.

German culture scientists Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg have pointed out that the notion of “translation” only became relevant in the global contemporary art market due to a growing struggle for attention and appreciation. Ljudmila Belkin describes contemporary art as “a concept of value which functions as certification: it determines what art is and what not” (ein Wertbegriff mit Zulassungsfunktion: Er bestimmt, was Kunst ist und was nicht; Belkin Reference Belkin2011) or, following up on Pierre Bourdieu: contemporary art is a rallying cry in the globalized field of art, used to engage in—also postcolonial – politics, and this occurs via the ostensible credentials of artistic quality (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1995).

Artists from cultures that are marginalized on the global art market are especially caught up in a paradox of identity and difference: they reference their traditions, but mainly show their art in places where the understanding of these traditions approximates the limitations of what can be translated at all. The reason for this: works of art by “other” cultures as well as their specific artistic practices must be translated into a concept of contemporaneity in order to be recognized and included in the Western art market. Unlike most artists from European countries for example, artists from African countries are not automatically integrated into the distribution criterion “contemporary.” It is therefore no secret among artists from all over the world that they can only become part of the globalized market of contemporary art operated by the West, when they themselves label their art as contemporary or when they are labelled as such by others.

In the 1990s, Acogny likewise began to call her art not only African dance—as in her book African Dance, which was published in three different languages (Acogny Reference Acogny1980)—but “contemporary African dance.” The art market's subtle principles of in- and exclusion substantiate the fact that this can only be achieved by taking on the role of the “Other” or by providing proof of cultural hybridity. To draw on German sociologist Norbert Elias: the Other always remains an “established outsider” (Elias and Scotson Reference Elias and Scotson2009), and his or her art is simultaneously in- as well as excluded.

A differentiated understanding of temporalities (Avanessian and Malik Reference Avanessian and Malik2016) and contemporaneity is also central here: dance from Africa emerged in different moments of contemporaneity in accordance with distinct temporal units. These “different moments of contemporaneity” can only be understood through alternative frames of reference and with the help of cultural translation, for example, by arbitrating between the ethnological, artistic, and historical background of the work, as well as the cultural and technical knowledge of dance that the artists’ work is embedded in. I will illustrate this argument by focusing on the life and work of Acogny.

The Life and Work of Germaine Acogny: Translation Between the Négritude Movement and Modern Ballet

Senegalese dancer and choreographer Germaine Acogny is known as “the mother of African dance.” She established her first dance studio in Senegal's capital, Dakar, in 1968 and has since become a major figure in African dance, blending so-called contemporary dance with (traditional) African styles. Acogny, who started to dance professionally in the 1960s, has a hybrid dance background: on the one hand, she learned ballet in Belgium and France. On the other hand, she also studied traditional African dance under the auspices of her grandmother, a well-known Yoruba priestess. What makes her work so valuable is the way in which she combines European classical and modern dance with (traditional) African dance, especially traditional ritual dances from Senegal, to create a style that is very much her own distinct form of what she later calls “contemporary African dance.”

Photo 2. Germaine Acogny (2013). Photography by Bart Grietens.

Acogny was born in Benin in 1944. She lived there until the age of six and then the family moved to Senegal, where her father worked as an officer for the French colonial government. He insisted on raising his daughter in French culture and in the French education system. In 2015, she dedicated a piece to him and her childhood history. The piece Somewhere at the Beginning, developed together with director Mikaël Serre, takes the memories and writings of her father as a starting point to discuss the dominance of French colonial rule in her own family, a state which also entailed the denial of the status of his own mother, a Yoruba priestess.

But her father's high-ranking service for the colonial government also allowed her to travel and to learn the globalized, European feudal technique of ballet. From 1962 to 1968, she studied classical ballet in France, after which she returned to Dakar. Until 1977, she again lived between Paris and Brussels, where she worked with Maurice Béjart, one of the most important reformers of neoclassical ballet in the twentieth century.

In 1977, she went to Dakar with Béjart—whose father, the philosopher Gaston Berger, was born in Senegal—and together they founded the dance school Mudra Afrique International, which they codirected until 1982. The school was initiated and subsidized by the first president of Senegal and founder of the Négritude Movement, the philosopher and writer Léopold Sédar Senghor—Senghor considered the “black woman” and dance to be the epitomes of Négritude, ideas he wrote down for the first time in 1945, in his poem Femme noire.

During this period, Acogny worked on the principles of her technique, which she described as a hybrid form of a bilateral translation practice: both as a “modernization” of African dance and as an “Africanization” of the European ballet body. As early as 1974, she stated the following:

When Mudra Afrique International closed in 1982, Acogny returned to Brussels—again working with Béjart. Here in Europe, she developed her reputation as a choreographer, producer, and teacher of contemporary African dance, working in collaboration with different artists, such as musician Peter Gabriel.

Acogny's passion for African dance and culture led her to return to Senegal in the 1990s. In Toubab Dialaw, near Dakar, she established in 1997 L’École des Sables—an international center for contemporary African dance, in the form of an art village—together with her German husband Helmut Vogt. This dance school has since become the center for African dance.

Aside from her artistic work, Acogny is also involved in promoting African dance around the world. Her influence has been especially strong in France—the former colonial ruler of Senegal—and she has set up a European base at the Studio-École-Ballet-Théâtre du 3è Monde in Toulouse. In 1997, she was appointed Artist Director of the Dance Section of the African Creation Department in Paris and of the Choreographic Meetings of Contemporary African Dance organization—both posts that she held until 2000. She continues to tour the world performing, teaching, choreographing, and producing, and is still one of the foremost promoters of contemporary African dance.

How could she become a global player in the contemporary dance market as the multiple Other—as a person who is marginalized on different levels: as a woman, as a dancer, as an artist, and as a person who calls herself black?

Practices of Translation in the Work of Germaine Acogny: A Praxeological Approach

Translation is a term endowed with the imagery of “carrying from one side to another” or “crossing over.” This draws attention to the fact that translation can never be “one to one” or identical, and that it can never represent the transportation of supposedly authentic meaning. Similarly, African dance can neither be transferred authentically to other cultures or different generations nor be placed onstage as “art,” because it is popular dance culture.

Photo 3. Germaine Acogny teaching in École des Sables during an exchange between École des Sables and P.A.R.T.S in February 2013. Photography by Bart Grietens.

Translation is always confronted with the paradox of identity and difference, which was already recorded by Friedrich Schleiermacher (Reference Schleiermacher1838) in the nineteenth century. This was further elaborated on, above all, by Walter Benjamin, whose text “The Task of the Translator” (Reference Benjamin, Bullock and Jennings1999; originally published in 1923) was fundamental to the development of the concept of cultural translation in translation studies and postcolonial studies. The paradox is that translation actually removes the difference, or in other words, the translation should be identical with the original, and yet at the same time, identity only emerges through difference. Although this paradox is a genuine element of translation, attempts are made—for example in dance—to disperse it in one direction or another.

It would appear that Germaine Acogny recognizes and plays with this paradox of identity and difference in her translation practice—even turning it into a central topos of her artistic work by, for instance, addressing this paradox with regard to dance technique. In the 1980s, she began developing a dance technique of her own, which took its structure from the academic system of ballet (i.e., including a number of set poses, steps, and basic movements). However, the poses, steps, and basic movements themselves were derived from traditional African dance as well as from everyday movements and actions taken from the context of an African village community. The incentive to develop an idiosyncratic dance technique came from her personal experience with European pointe work, for which her so-called “African body”—her height, her long arms, her pelvis, her flat feet—was not suited and that physically injured her when she danced (Acogny Reference Acogny2016).

In her desire to obtain international respect and equality for African dance, she translated conceptual dualisms of North Atlantic art and dance theory—“classical” and contemporary; “traditional” and “modern”—into a new theatrical aesthetic. This adaptation earned her criticism, for instance from African purists or from the African diaspora, who wanted to maintain the idea of original, authentic, traditional, and ritual African dance and who were opposed to modernization. However, Acogny had the idea of reversing a hegemonic European art practice:

This example vividly demonstrates that in order to describe what translation means, it is necessary to concentrate on the “how,” (i.e., on the practices of translation). How does translation of dance take place and in what ways can we examine the aesthetic practices of translation and their performative effects? In the following, I will outline a praxeology of translation.

A praxeological approach asks how these complex cultural processes of exchange and negotiation take place. It therefore concentrates on quotidian and bodily practices that underlie cultural translations. Practices of translation show themselves in their situatedness or, in other words, in their materiality and physicality. Therefore, a praxeological approach is contrary to a semiotic approach oriented to the systems of signs and symbols inherent in a dance. The practical ability and implicit knowledge of dancing bodies is demonstrated in actual situations. Acogny's body is, for example, trained in specific methods that are framed by rituals translating a specific philosophy. The practical abilities thus gained are based on (corporeal) knowledge acquired through everyday experiences and dance experiences. This knowledge is implicit insofar that the ability is not reflected in the situation.

Thus, activities and actions of the artistic work process are brought into focus: the practices of warm-up, training, improvisation, research, note-taking, recording, composing, choreographing, etc. Because these are—also at L’École de Sables—organized along collectively shared, practical (and therefore corporeal and implicit) forms of knowledge, they will always be different from working practices of other choreographers, including choreographers coming from other African regions. This also entails that carrying out these practices will produce other bodies and subjectivities.

From this perspective, it is easier to understand that the practices of aesthetic translation should not be primarily understood as an intentional act or as a process by which the meaning of movement is transferred but—and this is one of my central arguments—should be rather seen as “doing dance” (instead of “acting dance”). It is a direct physical process, generated through the practice of working on the aesthetic form.

The question of “how” invites us to also look beyond the bodies of the dancers, as it already contains within it the relationship between bodily practices and material artefacts (e.g., spaces, props, stage scenery, and costumes). In her artist village L’École de Sables, Acogny has set up two theater stages. In both cases, the back wall has been left open, to allow for a view of the sea. It is here that the dancers rehearse and train and Acogny develops her pieces. As I was able to observe in my ethnographic research at L’École de Sables in 2016, rehearsals and classes always take place with at least six musicians handling various types of drums. For Acogny, musical rhythm and dialogue with the drummers are essential to the development of movement patterns and choreographic forms. The materials she uses are things that she finds on her morning walks along the seaside—stones, sand, feathers, fabrics, water. But she combines these “natural” materials with technical settings such as video projections. This hybrid quality of her translation practice is also present in the costumes, which often change throughout the pieces: fabrics, patterns, and styles reminiscent of African cultures, typically worn by women at festivities and rituals, in everyday life and when dancing, but also tight, contoured dance suits, like the ones used in modern dance and ballet in the 1960s, as well as the comfortable dance clothing typical for contemporary dance.

Photo 4. Dancers in École des Sables during an exchange between École des Sables and P.A.R.T.S in February 2013. Photography by Bart Grietens.

Politics of Translation

In her artistic work, Acogny has also always been a political subject. Through her dance technique of contemporary African dance, she established a postcolonial position and an emancipated stance as an African dancer, artist, and woman—both in her own country, as well as on the international dance scene. Her identity as a political artist is vividly exemplified in her being awarded the New York Bessie Award for Best Dance Piece in 2007, for her piece Fagaala (Genocide), which she developed ten years after the events in Rwanda.

This example demonstrates, that in terms of the political, translations are always exposed to ambivalence. To conclude, I wish to draw attention to this fact: translations have political and emancipatory potential, because they represent ways of negotiating differences and offer possibilities for overcoming hegemonic conditions. Acogny does not see her strength in emancipation in the Western sense of the word. In this regard, she is fully conformed with African gender discourse, which rejects Western feminism, arguing that it is only oriented to a class of white Western women living in an individualized society (Daymond Reference Daymond1996; Nzegwu Reference Nzegwu, Dübgen and Skupien2015; Oyěwùmí Reference Oyěwùmí2005 and Reference Oyěwùmí, Dübgen and Skupien2015). Instead, two alternative concepts have emerged in the gender discourse in African countries. One is the theory of “womanism” coined by African-American author Alice Walker and further developed by Nigerian literary critic Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi (Reference Ogunyemi1985). Womanism is understood as a black development of feminism that seeks to link the emancipation of women to the specific conditions in African cultures. The second concept is called “stiwanism” (acronym for “social transformation including women”), and was developed by Nigerian poet Molara Ogundipe-Leslie (Reference Ogundipe-Leslie, Dübgen and Skupien2015). She demands that gender issues should be taken into consideration in all acts of social reorganization, believing that gender inequality can only be altered if society is transformed as a whole (Arndt Reference Arndt2000, 30).

Analyzing the interviews I did with her, Acogny defines herself as a woman and an artist, who owes her knowledge to the strengths inherent in female African cultural traditions before colonialism—in her case the traditions of her grandmother, a Yoruba priestess. For her, this precolonized time was characterized by a social situation in which matriarchal cultures provided a safe status for women, different from the Western modern patriarchy introduced by colonialism. She combines this memory of female strengths that her grandmother gave her with the strengths of a globally operating, migrating, and acting artist. Acogny is a woman, a black person, an artist, a dancer. She could have been marginalized, discriminated against, and excluded on multiple levels. But instead, she had some particularly substantial experiences in the 1960s. On the one hand, it was the era in which Senegal gained independence from French colonial rule and became one of the few democratic countries in Africa under president Senghor. On the other hand, it was also the time Acogny came into contact with multiple upheavals in Western art and dance in 1960's Europe, the student movement, especially in France, and the birth of the Western women's rights movement. At the time, she migrated several times back and forth between Senegal and Brussels and mainly worked with two men, Senghor and Béjart, who also played a decisive role in these respective upheavals. Simultaneously, she opened both men's eyes to what African dance could mean to the Négritude movement (in Senghor's case) and to modern dance history (in Béjart's case).

However, next to the political and emancipatory potential of cultural translation, we also see its corresponding, preserving aspect: establishing authority, making something one's own, stabilizing, and updating hegemonic relationships. This is the hegemonic aspect of translation sometimes ignored in the debate on cultural translation in the arts and in African dance.

When dances from other cultures, such as African dance, are remolded by European dance studios into the corset of Western dance culture or labelled as “authentic dance,” or when African dance is adopted as “ethnic dance” in the context of contemporary dance, we are faced with the paradox between identity and difference and the political two-facedness of the boundary that is simultaneously a separation and an overcoming. We also face the discursive construction of what Elias and Scotson called the “established outsider” (Reference Elias and Scotson2009). That even a world-renowned artist such as Acogny calls her dance “contemporary African dance” instead of contemporary dance or African dance points to the ambivalence in the attribution process and the paradox of identity and difference: wanting to be part of the global “contemporary dance market,” while also denoting oneself as Other. This labelling of oneself as the Other enforces marginalization in the global Western art market, but also serves to establish a political and aesthetic identity of African artistic dance. To this extent, Acogny not only services the rules of the Westernized art market. She also plays with the paradox of identity and difference by positioning herself as an artist in different cultural frames and along the borders of different dance fields—contemporary dance on the one hand, African dance on the other.

In these political practices of inclusion and exclusion, the hegemonic side of translation manifests itself. But even here, translation has an intrinsic productivity, as new choreographic forms and dance styles, gathered under the label of “contemporary African dance,” emerge in and through these political practices.

Summary

What I wanted to demonstrate with this text is twofold: on the one hand, as a sociologist, I have argued that the general critique of the global art market can be concretized and differentiated in academic analysis by means of a praxeological approach. On the other hand, I argued from the perspective of a dance scholar that the social, political, and cultural experiences of dancers and choreographers are not only the social framework for their artistic work but also an integral part of the work process and of the (self-)marketing process of artists. Africa, unlike any other continent, is a social imaginary and is characterized by myths and exotic connotations, and like no other continent, it is still exploited and excluded from global processes. For these two reasons, the production conditions and the distribution term “contemporary” of the so-called global art market are particularly exemplified in artists from African countries.