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[31] Dancing in and out of Africa Dance Research Journal 32, no. 1 (Summer 2000). The photograph was striking, no doubt about it: a black man in profile, his eyes squinting into the sun, his mouth open, his dreadlocks spouting out of the ponytail on top of his head. The bareness of his neck and shoulders, combined with the urban trendiness of his coiffure placed him as the synecdoche for the ninth international Festival of new Dance in Montreal (FIND) entitled Afrique, Aller/Retour. This image marked all of the official festival publicity, including the stationary for press releases. in addition, it was the central image for the large festival posters that adorned billboards and building walls all over Montreal. This was the first visual cue i received about this international festival of new dance, which was dedicated to showcasing contemporary African dance and dancers. like any self-respecting critic, i immediately felt as if this image, although wonderfully seductive, was politically suspect. Combined with a festival named Afrique, Aller/Retour (which was oddly translated as “Africa, in and out”), i was prepared to deconstruct the neocolonialist basis of this latest importation of African culture, especially as several of the commissioned works were advertised as collaborations between European choreographers and African dancers (never vice versa). i mean really, who but Europeans get a round-trip ticket “in and out” of Africa? What happens, i wondered, to these dancers after the European choreographers are done with them? Fortunately, over the course of my stay at the festival—which included a symposium exploring the theme of cultural hybridity featuring talks by dance critics, cultural theorists, and dance artists—i became aware of a silver lining to this international festival. in spite of the corporate marketing and institutional hierarchies, there was still room for real artistic dialogue and critical exchange. in general, the performances i saw staged two different perspectives on intercultural sharing. in some pieces there was a desire to explore what we might term a cultural pastiche, where two movement styles inhabit the same stage environment, and yet the traditions coexist without merging or changing in any fundamental way. in contrast to this collage paradigm, there were other performances in which the dancing was both culturally grounded and intriguingly hybrid at the same time. For example, Pour Antigone, by French choreographer Mathilde Mon- dancing in and out of africa 319 nier placed five African dancers on the stage with five European dancers. Monnier had visited Burkino-Faso in the early 1990s and had been inspired to create a dance based on the Antigone myth about the responsibility for grieving and the conflict between individual needs and civic order. interestingly enough, Monnier found that the African dancers were much more comfortable expressing grief publicly than the European dancers, who tended to see intense grief as a private emotion. The effect of this evening-length movement interface was less one of a meeting and exchange than one of channel flipping. Much of the dancing was performed in small groups of two or three, with some extended solos, and the dancers rarely communicated across their own movement traditions. indeed, eventually the European dancers seemed almost entrapped by their own abstract, angst-ridden, movement for movement’s sake, especially given the joy with which some of the African dancers moved. ironically, it was a collaboration between two of Monnier’s dancers that provided one of the most moving examples of a contemporary hybrid of African and European dancing. Figninto, ou L’Oeil Troué was created for three male dancers and two musicians by Seydou Boro and Salia Sanon. The performers’ dancing encompassed both African-based movements and the idiosyncratic gestures and stillnesses that punctuate a European postmodern dance aesthetic. There were exceptional moments of choreographic beauty when a barrage of fast, tumbling movements would suddenly arrive at an epic stillness, or when the awesome speed of the dancing would shift into a slower, more timeless rhythm. During his talk at the symposium, Salia Sanon elaborated on his experience working with Monnier. At first, he reported , he did not like working in silence, or devising his own gestural sequences . Trained in Africa, he automatically thought of dancing in terms of the music. But, he added, sometimes dancers in Africa can feel as if they are only visual accompaniment to the “real” art of music. Eventually, he found a certain expressive freedom in being able to leave the music and explore the possibility of rhythmic and physical...

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