Performing Multiplicity: Contemporary African Dance in Neoliberal Economic Conditions

Abstract

Increasing large-scale capitalism and neoliberal economics affects small stories everywhere. For numerous African artists, a late twentieth-century shift away from patronage by cultural sectors of national governments to patronage by outside sources, primarily French funding agencies, changes the conditions in which they create art. While outside funding presents certain limitations, it also creates new opportunities for artists to work transnationally and to create new paradigms outside those canonized by the nation-state. Within the realm of dance, the moving body is foregrounded and becomes a medium capable of revising narratives that stick to certain racially and culturally marked bodies. Contemporary dance, with its reliance on abstract and innovative choreography, encompasses an especially useful genre for identifying how postcolonial African artists negotiate neoliberal economic conditions to transform outdated narratives of African cultures and subjectivities. This paper considers critiques of power hierarchies in the oeuvres of Senegal-based contemporary choreographers Andréya Ouamba and Fatou Cissé in relation to the structures of funding they rely on. Through a methodology of combined movement and political economic analysis, I argue that although neoliberal economic conditions limit postcolonial African artists by reducing patronage sources to competitive outside agencies, these same conditions allow artists to disidentify with the nation-state and its associated tropes of African cultures constructed and disseminated via national dance and theatre companies. Consequently, contemporary choreographers gesture towards a future in which Africans are recognized more widely for their multiplicity and responsiveness rather than perceived singularity and timelessness. I build on the emerging scholarship on contemporary African dance by Hélène Neveu Kringelbach, Nadine Sieveking, Sarah Andrieu, among others and draw on ongoing ethnographic field research, centering the voices of the artists themselves. Performance studies scholar D. Soyini Madison states that representation informs the ways in which people are treated (Critical Performance Ethnography, 2nd edition, 2012). Contemporary choreographers are at the forefront of cultural movements in Africa that collectively work to expand narrow constructions of Africa's art forms and artists. As choreographers of international renown, Ouamba and Cissé exemplify the critical role of contemporary dance in shaping future constructions and perceptions of Africans, thereby impacting the material conditions in which they live and work.