Outside of football, which invites a positive regard on Africa, African music has also drawn the West’s admiration, where, well-represented and often associated with rhythm and good ambiance, many resort to it in order to unwind. But appearances hide the fact that African dance is on the way to becoming a voice of Africa, next to the paths and voices that we already know and which seem completely blocked : politics, the economy, media, etc.

A cultural vector

Multiple, varied realities compete to express African uniqueness. Among them is dance which plays an imperceptible role as Africa’s spokesman because it is often considered from a caricatured and exoticized perspective. However, visiting African dance centres and shows of African dancers and choreographers reveals the hidden face of a reality which evades caricature. It could be said that, where reason and discourse have failed, dance is on the way to succeeding. Have we finally found the miraculous solution of Africa’s progress ? That’s what Ivoirian choreographer and theoretician Alphonse Tierou in a book entitled L’Afrique bougera (Africa is changing). This idea is already present in an article published on his website which calls African dance an “economic locomotive”. Tierou shows that “if dance moves, Africa will move”. According to him, dance “concerns above all African Man, and that man is central to any economic and/or social development project”.

In reality, if African dance has become Africa’s best ambassador, this is due neither to its practical value nor its exportation value, even less so to its economic or even artistic value. It is because it permits both the dialogue between peoples and the purest expression of the African being.

The source of meeting between peoples

A simple click on the site Africultures gives you a rich and varied range of cultural happenings relating to Africa. This site links to a multitude of schools and centres of African dance as well as dance troupes and companies. You will see that these centres are just as prevalent in Europe as in the United States. Beyond that geographic spread, the profile of those joining in is also striking. Those who participate in the dance lessons and dance companies are not, as one would assume, primarily African or of African descent. In the U.S., Norway, Italy and France, whites are even more interested ! If we take a closer look, we see that it is a true encounter between peoples more than a neo-imperialism taking a rerouted path and softer voice of culture. None of the professors or choreographers limit themselves to an African reality ; rather, they feel the need for openness, mixing and dialogue between cultures. There are even companies created on the basis of cultural sharing, such as Adelante, at the crossroads between African cultures (notably Cameroonian) and Eastern (Libyan and Chinese). This is equally the case of the company Alokli (alo kli : “branches” in the ewe language of southern Ghana and Togo) who, while being the expression of the West African presence (Ghana and Togo) in America, opened in Martin County, California. Is dance the best path towards cultural dialogue ? Is it able to express at once the “same” and the “different”, the self and the other, particularities and commonalities, better than other forms ?

An expression of African genius

Led by Africans – of birth or of descent – these centres, by the quality of their performances and the variety of offerings, are astonishing. The contents ally theory and practice, summon the spirit by appealing to the body. Beyond technical abstraction and savoir-faire, this necessitates a meeting of the spirit and mind. Whether it be Babette in Bordeaux, Aisha Diallo, Katherine Josephau, Alphonese Tierou, Mohamed Keita aka Didi, Georges Momboye and many others in Paris or elsewhere, all the professors of African dance seem to express a trait of African genius through way of being and expressing that has incited exploration by scholars. This genius that shows through dance is not found only through a physical function (“its capacity to reinforce the body and make it suppler”) or through a function of social integration by favouring “human encounters outside of habitual conditions”, or even in a therapeutic function, by allowing “the reintegration of the human being in its totality, reunification by harmonization of the body, mind, and individual opening up”. Neither is it the artistic function which allows for the “expression of feelings, emotions, sensations, desires, aspirations”. It is all of this at once and Babette is correct in highlighting all of these aspects.

It is especially African dance’s capacity to reveal the unity of the body and the spirit, and to suggest a vision of the world that escapes the temptations of monism and dualism which characterize, respectively, Eastern and Western thought. Credit is due to Africans who have shown that there is not a complete break between two things that, by appearance, are presented as radically opposed. For example, that night is not the reverse of day. Credit is also due to the teachers and specialists of African dance for opening a path towards a definition of what can be considered specifically African, as well as a third path towards the characterization of African thought.

A “somalogie” ?

Since the independence of African countries, affirmation of the black and African identity and its self-actualization has given birth to all types of reflection. To define the specifically African, Leopold Senghor had this beautifully poetic phrase : Reason is Hellenic, emotion is Negro”. How could one more succinctly define an identity and yet more caricatural to constitute a social status ? Many African philosophers have posed this same question.

Showing that dualism is particular to a Western thought incapable of nuance, they reaffirmed the impossibility of opposing feelings to reason, sentiments to reflection, body to spirit, animalism (or almost) to humanity, all different pairings that engender and feed racism. Man is at once emotion and reason. The mind that thinks, reflects, calculates, is the same that laughs, cries, loves, etc. Attempting to synthesize, the Cameroonian philosopher Matin N’Kafu defended, in Rome in 1998, doctorate the idea of vitalogie [from vita, (life) and logos (discourse)], meaning the discourse of life or, more exactly, life as more eloquent than discourse. According to its author, one need only regard as the African live to learn. He concluded, following the Belgian priest Placide Tempels that Africans live more ideas than appearances lead to believe.

Are professions and theoreticians of African dance conscience of this ? We could come to the same conclusion through the reality of dance as they present it. If dance is a language, there is no language without ideas ! According to the most respected philosophical traditions today, language is the materialisation of immaterial thought ; it is the explicit manifestation of an idea to be communicated. This perhaps explains why different specialists of African dance willingly associate dance and painting, dance and sculpture, dance and therapy, etc. We could also say in a more general way : dance and African culture. Are African people conscious of the intrinsic unity of being to the point of overcoming the distance between the body and the spirit ? Dance says more than emotion and sentiment which, it must be reiterated, designate what is the least structured in us. Dance is the liberation of the sprit, as Hegel might say, a spirit in movement. It is for this reason that we call it a somalogie ; a discourse (logos) of the body (soma), or, to be more exact, discourse by the body.

More than the tuning in to the body and the self, which explains the concordance between movements, rhythm and the perfect agreement of gesture and music, African dance is the tuning in to the spirit, or rather sensible speech of the spirit, structured discourse of thought. Thought unveils itself through the body. That is why dance is an open book on Africa and on the world as a whole. Those who know how to decipher the words enter into direct contact with unmasked, undeviating reality. In this sense, dance is the clearest language to communicate something about ourselves or the universe. If, as Babette says in the presentation of her school, “dance is a way for the individual to enter into relation with the environment or with others”, if “all that we have lived, all our history and that of our culture, the social milieu we live in determines the way we see our body” and unveils itself through dance, that is because the meaning of the movements is not in the movements themselves, but rather that which they are the sign/symbol. It is through the investment of the sprit, not the emotion, in these movements that they “become comprehensible to others even if they still maintain a certain air of bizarreness in the form”.

Richard Djiropo
article traduit par Lewis Portia

Source:

---