Choreographic Performance, Generations and the Art of Life in Post-Colonial Dakar

Abstract

This article looks at three generations of choreographic performers in urban Senegal to examine the creative ways in which people develop their bodily skills, not only for the pleasure of innovation, but also to ‘make their way into the world’. In so doing, they produce new social spaces and engage with a multiplicity of existing ones. I suggest that this multiple engagement characterizes contemporary urban Africa, where social mobility is conceived of as multiplying the possibilities of building a decent life in spite of economic hardship. In West Africa, this is in continuity with a long history of social mobility achieved through travel and the acquisition of new skills. Through a multiple engagement with different genres, performers also experiment with new ways of producing choreographic work. At every juncture, the social spaces thus produced either intensify or reduce the connections with global spaces already laid out by previous generations.

Ambiguous Masculinities: Gender and Sexual Transgression in Contemporary Dance Works by Senegalese Men

“…The only annual contemporary dance festival in Senegal, it aims to bring artists of different generations together and to establish Saint-Louis as a viable site of artistic production. Whereas artists of an older generation had the advantage of significant state support, those coming of age today face a drastically different and much more challenging situation that relies heavily on resources from outside Senegal (Kringelbach 2014). Diagne hopes that by bringing artists together, they can work to find solutions to change the current structure while providing the younger generation opportunities to better understand the local lineage that their work builds upon.…”

Funerary Comedies in Contemporary Kinshasa: Social Difference, Urban Communities and the Emergence of a Cultural Form

“…All of them are in their late teens to mid-twenties. Most of them come from a poor background, and, as has been noted with regard to artists elsewhere in Africa (Neveu Kringelbach 2014), they adopt popular culture as one of the various spaces in which opportunities for making a livelihood and for social mobility are available (Simone 2001).…”