Afro-Futurism or Lament?: Staging Africa(s) in Dance Today and in the 1920s

For the arts in Europe the 1920s were a time of so-called negrophilia (see Clifford 1989, 901–908), characterized by fascination for African-American forms, such as jazz and the Charleston, and art forms developed on the African continent. In both the production and the reception of art, the complexity of cultures on the African continent was not regarded in a differentiated manner and transatlantic African-American culture was not perceived with any degree of specificity. Two parallel phenomena can be observed during this period: (1) European theater obsessively incorporated/cannibalized the “foreign” (Haitzinger and Hauser 2010, n.p.), and (2) everything that was connoted as “black” and/or appeared as such was equated with the imaginary realm of Africa. France was (still) one of the most important colonial powers in this period. In the late nineteenth century, after the Berlin Conference (1884–1885), France, in competition with other European countries, had established a colonialist state encompassing over twenty million people in the western and equatorial African areas. The Berlin Conference, also known as the Congo Conference, organized by the first chancellor of Germany, Otto von Bismarck, regulated European colonization and trade in Africa during the imperialist period.

Theoretically revisiting historical works of the 1920s that developed within such a negrophilic framework alongside contemporary pieces that relate to such works can be viewed as an attack on this very framework, an attempt to “unlearn” the Eurocentrism inherent in its cannibalistic processes. Such a revisiting allows for acknowledging that Africanistic contributions may bring about the appearance of more pluralistic views of Africanistic presences. Here, the term “Africanistic draws on Brenda Dixon Gottschild’s viewpoint, which rejects a narrow territorial or implicitly colonial understanding of a “black” continent or a “black” race and instead takes into account the multilayered and complex resonances and presences of Africas, both concrete and imaginary (Berliner 2002; see also Gordon 2009):

I use it here to signify African and African American resonances and presences, trends and phenomena. It indicates the African influence, past and present, and those forms and forces that arose as products of the African diaspora, including traditions and genres such as blues, jazz, rhythm and blues and hip hop. It denotes the considerable impact of African and African American culture on modern arts and letters. ... In sum, the term denotes concepts and practices that exist in Africa and the African diaspora and have their sources and practices from Africa.

(Gottschild 1996, xiv)

The contemporary focus on the (empowering) Africanistic acknowledges the complex entanglements of cultural influences in (historical and contemporary) choreography.

In this article, I will first analyze two contemporary works—La Création du Monde 1923–2012 (2012) by Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula and one mysterious thing said e. e. cummings (2002) by Portuguese choreographer Vera Mantero—both of which take up signature pieces dating from the 1920s and can be seen to critique and challenge the negrophilic framework those works were created in. Paradoxically, I will demonstrate that the Africanistic as plural, nonessentialist/essentializing features can be identified in the very productions that Linyekula and Mantero criticize: both productions, I will argue, are examples of Africanistic presences in the 1920s. Following the analyses of Linyekula’s and Mantero’s works, I will then sketch out an image of Africanistic presences in the Ballets Suédois’s La Création du Monde 1923–2012 (1923) and in La Revue Nègre (1925), the show in which Josephine Baker most famously appeared. Both might be considered signature pieces of their time, marginalized in the canon of dance historiography until their rediscovery by contemporary dance artists such as Mantero and Linyekula, by scholars, predominantly from the United States, working in cultural studies and historical disciplines (Baer 1995; Cheng 2001; Henderson 2008; Bennetta 2007; Lepecki 2006; McCarren 2003), and by exhibition projects in the visual arts.

La Création du Monde 1923–2012: Polemic

In 2012 Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula—recognized as a central figure in European contemporary choreography and known for his critical practice—produced a piece titled La Création du Monde 1923...