Drums, Dance, Dreams, and Remittance: Transnational Interconnections in Ivorian Immigrant Mask Performance in the USA

Ivorian immigrant musicians and mask dancers based in the United States routinely operate in social fields that transcend geographic, cultural, political, and spiritual borders. On cell phones, through social media, and via Western Union money transfers, they have regular, often daily contact with people back in Côte d’Ivoire. They keep up with daily Ivorian print and broadcast news on sites such as Abidjan.net. In dreams, some receive visits from spirits they associate with their natal Ivorian villages. Those who possess the means travel back to Côte d’Ivoire to visit, bring money and gifts, or make sacrifices to ancestors to secure permission to continue performing sacred mask spirits abroad. Through remittances to family and financial propitiation of competitors, performers fend off sorcery attacks leveled at them not only by Ivorians back in their home country but also by immigrants from other parts of the African diaspora living in the United States. Nearly all Ivorian immigrant performers in the United States have performed in touring groups crossing national boundaries and crossing continents; the most successful of them still do from their new US base. They spend most of their time in their adopted nation, where they struggle to make a living by representing, on stages and in schools, in classes and at camps, at festivals and workshops, their nation of birth, albeit in a form—West African ballet—that is itself transnational. In other words, they perform a transnational form of nationalism, transnationally. At the center of these performances are mask dances, which the performers proudly claim is what makes Ivorian traditions stand out in the competitive African music and dance marketplace in the United States.

Ivorian immigrant mask performances, and the individual life stories of those who perform them, exemplify the transnational as described by Vertovec: a world characterized by “multiple ties and interactions linking people or institutions across the borders of nationstates” (2001:447). Drawing from nearly a decade of ethnographic research with individual Ivorian immigrants in the United States, this essay describes and analyzes transnational interactions, interconnections and mediations in Ivorian mask spirit performance and in the life stories of individual performers. I will first outline a brief history of Côte d’Ivoire’s version of the West African national ballet, which is itself a form of transnational mediation that facilitated the migration of mask spirit performers and performance traditions from Côte d’Ivoire to the United States. I will then shine the spotlight on one individual, Vado Diomande, whose life story illustrates the profoundly transnational nature of Ivorian mask performance in the United States.¹

While the portion of Vado Diomande’s life story excerpted for this essay focuses on transnational processes in his work as a mask spirit performer in the United States, all Ivorian immigrant mask performers at the center of this study began living lives imbricated in transnational economic, cultural, and discursive networks long before they left Abidjan for distant shores. Indeed, their means of entry into the global capitalist economy was their training in Côte d’Ivoire’s version of the West African ballet.

The concept of the West African national ballet first materialized in 1958 in the newly independent Republic of Guinea where, in an anticolonialist move, President Sekou Touré appropriated the term “ballet” to valorize Africa as a land of great cultural and artistic achievements on par with those of Europe. Guinea’s Les Ballets Africains began touring internationally, becoming a prototype that influenced both audience expectations around the world and the creation of other West African national ballets that would form in its wake. Ethnomusicologist Eric Charry defines ballet succinctly: “Although rooted in village traditions, regional and national ballets combine diverse local styles, which would rarely mix in a village context, with European ideas of group choreography and stage presentation” (2000:194). Underscoring the ideology motivating the choice of the name of this new genre, dance scholar Francesca Castaldi argues that “the concept of African Ballet serves as a challenge to European racist assumptions, suggesting that African dances are classical forms...