James Mweu & Kunja Dance Theatre Contemporary dance as African cultural production

Abstract

This paper argues for contemporary dance in Africa to be considered a form of African cultural production. It provides a brief discussion of the historical perspectives and research interests in cultural production as a field of inquiry and seeks to demonstrate how these provide a framework of the emerging critical discourse on contemporary dance in Africa. It then exemplifies how these ideas are manifested in practice through a consideration of James Mweu, the founder of Kunja Dance Theatre in Kenya. The discourse surrounding contemporary dance in Africa is complex. Writings on the practice suggest it could be considered both a neocolonial imposition and a contributor to processes of decolonisation. The growth of contemporary dance in Africa was stimulated by the establishment of an inter-Africa dance competition in 1995 by a Frenchsponsored dance biennale, which at the time was called the Choreographic Encounters of Africa and the Indian Ocean, and has since been renamed Danse l'Afrique danse! A major controversy about contemporary dance was caused by the departure from the organisation soon after its first event of one of its key instigators, the Ivorian choreographer Alphonse Tierou, in protest against the imposition of French artistic criteria by competition judges. His philosophical tenets for contemporary dance in Africa, which had guided the artistic activities leading up to the launch of the competition, were sidelined by the organisers (Mensah 2005: 2), who set rules that insisted that entrants present ‘new forms’ of dance which should not be associated with ideas of African tradition, but which still retain motifs or signifiers which a western audience would perceive as being African. Both African choreographers and scholars feared the competition was creating ‘an assistance culture’, and was a form of ‘cultural neocolonialism’ (Mensah 2005: 2–3). While these justifiable concerns persist, there is an emerging academic discourse which promotes the ownership of contemporary dance by African choreographers and dance artists’ (Adewole 2004, Sorgel 2011, Okoye 2014, Sieveking 2014, Adair 2014, Nii- Yartey 2016). Observing developments in contemporary dance in Nigeria, Chukwuma Okoye for example, suggests that contemporary dance is undergoing a ‘process of indigenisation’ (2014: 55). Following Jane Desmond's social constructionist perspective, he argues that when a foreign dance form is absorbed into a society on the terms of the people in that society, the resulting practices cannot be considered a mere copy of the form that was appropriated (55).