Misnomer: Reflections on a Dance Performance

GHANA STUDIES / Volumes 12–13 ISSN 1536-5514 / E-ISSN 2333-7168© 2011 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 249 MISNOMER: REFLECTIONS ON A DANCE PERFORMANCE SHERON WRAY Introduction African Dance troupes were integral to constructions of nationhood and pan-Africanism at the time of independence (Acogny 1988). There has been a tendency to forget their significance as part of a broader political culture in which building a repertoire of dances from a vast array of ethnic groups contributed to a national voice. The dancing body and drumming hands function as a form of memory and a material language forming an interlocking genealogical heritage across the continent. The term “African dance” is a misnomer, oversimplifying the weight and significance of the multiple languages of a varied cultural inheritance. The dances in Ghana are not like those in Senegal, and distinct from those in Guinea—distinctions which are not so easily detected by the untrained eye or ear (Fig. 1). Between the 1950s and 1970s, many national African national dance troupes were established including the Ghana Dance Ensemble. Keita Fodeba, founder of Les Ballets Africains de Guinea, was accused of defaming ethnic dances. In his defence, he argued that the company was creating access to “correct” ideas about life in Africa. Dances were altered by fusing diffuse regional dances, using interchangeable musical parts, extending aesthetic emphases, making visible plural gender participation, and staging them in auditoriums before secular audiences thus desacralizing their ritual function. The notion of traditional African dance is problematic (Welsh-Asante 1993); it is more reflective of post-colonial rhetorical aspirations than practice in dance performance. The dances of Africa are now part of the world stage and are equally subject to dynamic gainful scrutiny. Since the 1980s there has been a wave of NGO-funded cultural interventions across the 250 Ghana Studies • volumes 12–13 • 2011 continent that has had a significant impact on the evolution of “contemporary ” African dance. The space of contemporary African dance has thus become part of a shared heritage, which, in turn, implies the multicultural politics and aesthetic predilections of the global cultural capitols. In Africa, contemporary African dance is mainly performed for a rarefied audience made up of expatriates, NGO and corporate personnel. It remains to be seen if local audiences will gravitate towards these new practices. Whilst it is an interesting zone of experimentation, the artists themselves often divest themselves of all vocabulary that might label them “traditional” and therefore non-progressive. In general, the adoption of the contemporary African dance idioms implies attaining higher professional status within a spectrum of interconnected international performance venues and residencies. Finance and distribution of new work by and for Euro-American markets is the goal rather than an ideological debate about to purposefully breaking the rules of tradition or modernity. Figure 1. Ghana Dance Ensemble, whole company (Photo: R. Lane Clark) Wray • Misnomer: Reflections on a Dance Performance 251 Collaborative Work with Ghana Dance Ensemble, July 2009 I had the opportunity to collaborate with the Ghana Dance Ensemble (GDE), a professional dance company based at the University of Ghana, Legon, as part of a performance staged on 27 July 2009. At the University of Ghana, dance scholarship has been part of the University curriculum , initially under the auspices of the Institute of African Studies, since 1962. Working with a company grounded with such specialized historical knowledge and trajectory within dance practice was largely unknown to me in spite of my performance with African American dance idioms. I am a choreographer and director whose origins are from within the African Diaspora and my dance background might be summarized as having a European foundation. By way of England, my training and professional work stems from concert dance though my interest in my own origins that have taken me to Jamaica, Cuba, Gambia, Guinea, Trinidad, and Ghana for the first time in 2004. I came to this collaboration with a suitcase full of questions . I had only seven days to unpack, to layout how to ask them and how to process the feedback, and at the same time to construct a piece of work to share as the opening event for...