Homelands: Senegal & Rwanda

This week, we begin our journey to homelands around the world - places of origin for peoples and their cultures, including dance.

'Locating' each tradition will involve a deep look into early, recent, and modern history of the area, in addition to their traditional and contemporary dance practices.

In today's lesson, we look at both Senegal (West Africa) and Rwanda (East Africa) as important cultural sites for African Dance.

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Warmup

Isolations

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Student Presentation: Distant History

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Historical Information

Ancient History: Ironworking

Question: What is the African technological innovation discussed here, and what were its implications?

History of Senegal

History of Senegal (Bou al Mogdad)

Map of Precolonial African Continent (1830-1850)

Sovereign Indigenous Nations

Map of Colonial African Continent (1878-1914)

Colonization: The act of taking control of an area or a country that is not your own, especially using force, and sending people from your own country to live there. (Oxford)

This map overlaps with dates of last nation in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, Brazil (1888) - though it continued illegally beyond that date in many countries.

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Student Presentation: Traditional Dance

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Traditional Dance Practice

Reading: Beyond the Surface, an Inclusive American Dance History (Grant-Murray 2015)

"African dance is a multifaceted system of life that incorporates movement, song and chant, music, visual art, nature, and the universe. It is a holistic way of living that incorporates the relationships of the former into one physical body with nature and the cosmos. The rudiments of African dance require that all art forms work collectively together; one cannot exist without the other...

African dance is not like any other dance form; it is unique in that you are able to convey kinetic and kinesthetic energy with corporeal emotion, as well as physical, auditory, visual, and ritual processes. Works are created and performed to contextualize the social, political, economic, religious, and sacred lives of humanity. There are dances that articulate the harvest, as well as marriage, puberty, birth, death, and war of persons in complex civilizations. African dance is attached to the lives of people. It is a human phenomenon that extracts and fuses time, space, and place."

(Michelle Grant-Murray, 2015)

Film: Chuck Davis, Dancing Through West Africa (1987)

Alexander Street Press

28 minutes

Question: Using the frames of viewing dance, what are some of the movement and practice characteristics of traditional West African dance?

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Student Presentation: Modern History

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Modern Political Map of African Continent

Timeline of Independence (Brooklyn Museum)

Rwandan Genocide

Outreach Programme on the 1994 Genocide against
the Tutsi in Rwanda and the United Nations

"November 5, 1959: Hutu Uprising
Throughout the colonial era, the minority Tutsi (14%) were favoured over the Hutus (85%). They were given privileges and western-style education, while the Hutus were the oppressed masses. In 1959, the Hutus rebelled against the Belgian colonial power and the Tutsi elite, forcing some 150,000 Tutsis to flee to Burundi." (UN.org)

Questions:

1. Find an important event from the UN's Rwandan Genocide timeline.

2. What were & are the implications of colonization for peoples of the African continent and diaspora?

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Student Presentation: Current Dance Practices

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Contemporary Dance Practice

Reading: Biography of Germaine Acogny

RISE (Abidi)

Germaine Acogny: Mother of African Contemporary Dance | Senegal (Showcase)

Compagnie Jant-Bi

About FAGAALA (GENOCIDE)

"GERMAINE ACOGNY (choreographer) was inspired to create a work dealing with the issue of genocide after having read Murambi, le livre des ossements, (Book of Bones) by Senegalese writer, Boubacar Boris Diop, which is the first fictionalized rendering about the Rwandan genocide. In addition to the writings of Diop, Acogny conducted personal interviews, gathering testimonies about genocide. A combination of Diop’s fiction and these real-life accounts informed Acogny’s perspective and creative vision.

Germaine Acogny’s reflections: "This murdering madness has existed since the dawn of time, and it will probably never completely disappear. But, in order to reduce this violence, each one of us must fight against fear, hatred and vengeance, as those feelings can easily invade us. I would like everybody, the society and politicians, to become conscious of the urgent need to find solutions for peace in order to extinguish the flames of hatred and to avoid that this type of tragedy will ever happen again. I will try to find a body language inspired by all the inner distress to face the collective madness.

This suffering, the horror and the screaming of pain caused by this tragedy will be linked with and translated by the dancer’s bodies, so as to call out to the world, and shock and disturb the bodies and spirits, but showing at the same time a tiny light of hope, ready to become a sunray. The guiding texts of this creation are written in Wolof (widely spoken in Senegal), French and Japanese, in order to better illustrate the sad universality of the subject".

KOTA YAMAZAKI (choreographer) represents the spearhead of the young generation of Japanese choreographers. His work is based in Butoh, a performance art that originated in Post World-War II Japan, combined with other dance and movement techniques including ballet and modern. His dance is full of energy and a strong sense of social engagement.

Yamazaki’s choreographic approach in Fagaala was to find a connection between the genocide of Rwanda, Butoh and African Dance. Both choreographers—Acogny and Yamazaki—worked together to find, through their specific gestures, a common language capable of creating powerful and touching images of the human tragedy of genocide. The choreographers use strong body language coupled with voices and sounds to evoke both suffering and hope.

Kota Yamazaki’s reflections:
"Japan lost the Second World War. Although I belong to the post-war generation, I can understand that artists from the preceding generation have created new works based on their traumatic experience of that war. The understanding of this trauma is one of the factors building my unconscious world. I believe it is a mission of my generation to seek the next steps for regeneration. Butoh is said to have been created on such trauma, and this idea seems to be established in most of the Western world. I think it is only partly true. I also think that Butoh was born from many factors following drastic social change in the ‘sixties in Japan, when people were forced to radically change the standards in their lives. I do not want to explain or show only political genocide in Fagaala. I also want a work that will last forever filled with beauty and originality. To give this new work impact, I think that the audience should be told beforehand that it deals with the genocide of Rwanda."

Excerpts of Fagaala

Questions:

1. How does choreographer Germaine Acogny address this historical event artistically, and what does she hope to achieve from it?

2. Why might art / theater / dance be an effective form through which to achieve those objectives?

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Dance Practice

Online West African Dance Class with Maguette Camara (Ailey Extension)

Warmup 0:00 to 12:00

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Closing

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Additional Resources

Documentary: African dance: Sand, Drum and Shostakovich