The relationship ought to be straightforward and obvious: serious African-American choreographers and their counterparts on today’s African continent.
Surely their mutual passion for dance, rooted in intersecting history, is a simple one of community bonding, unalloyed joy and shared suffering.
But little in our culture turns out to be more complex. These fascinating parallels on the contemporary world arts scene, though linked, are interrelated in a way every bit as complicated as the broader relationship between modern Americans and Africans: The ocean between is vast, literally and metaphorically. The interplay is as multi-faceted as the countless dialects, ethnicities and political structures that populate Africa itself.
Ron K. Brown, the U.S. choreographer whose Evidence troupe will be a part of the upcoming AfroContempo Festival of American and African troupes, beginning Friday at the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago, calls the relationship “a twisted mirror.”
“As an African-American, you’re constantly trying to define yourself, to connect to something deep and ancient,” he explains. “That’s true whatever you do, even, say, if you’re a lawyer. You don’t know where you began.
“So for me, as an artist, traditional African dance is something I have to consciously reach back for, a hunt for grounding. But from the first, I’m trained here as a modern dancer. I understand that aesthetic.
“Contemporary African choreographers tend to work in reverse,” he says. “They’re at home with that history and tradition, and their challenge is to incorporate it in more abstract and modern works.” They’re intimately in touch with centuries of African history, in other words, but less so with Western modernist art. Brown adds, “In both cases, we’re trying to become. We’re both trying to define ourselves. We just go at it conversely.”
“I think socially, culturally, racially, it’s a conversation that’s part of my personal journey,” says Ralph Lemon, whose U.S. troupe will also visit, his as a joint venture with the Museum of Contemporary Art. “I’m not quite sure what that conversation is. Part of it is conceptual. Part of it is quite practical. Art is just one way of marking this wider cultural collision course.”
The brief festival will feature four entries: soloist Germaine Acogny of Senegal (Friday and Saturday), Lemon and the final installment in his “Geography” trilogy at the MCA (March 3-6), the Cote d’Ivoire’s Compagnie TcheTche (March 17-19) and Brown’s Evidence (April 14-16). Phil Reynolds, executive director of the Dance Center, says the idea arose during African performances at the 1999 Montreal international dance festival.
“I was there, and I was impressed,” Reynolds said. “We’ve worked with some African companies since, but this time we add the twist of juxtaposing the presentations with that of two American companies. Both Ron and Ralph have worked in Africa, and both have infused African elements into their work.”
What’s ultimately fascinating may well turn out not to be the obvious parallels or stylistic crossovers, but the revelations involved in studying two distinctly separate aesthetic treks, Lemon’s proverbial “collision course.” Companies such as Acogny’s JANT-BI and the all-female TcheTche, led by Beatrice Kombe, are distinct from traditional African folk dance presentations in their affinity for modern abstract art. But both are steeped in African tradition.
Lemon and Brown, meanwhile, practitioners of Postmodernist and even Post-postmodernist artistry, have explored traditionalist African dance elements in their work. Lemon’s latest “Geography” piece, “Come home Charley Patton,” explores Southern U.S. history, partly inspired by his work with artists from Haiti, the Cote d’Ivoire and Guinea.
As for Brown, “There’s no way you can look at his work and not see West African influences,” Reynolds says.
Though global shrinking makes a lot of this more readily accessible, in some ways it’s nothing new, either. “For years, there wasn’t that distinct a separation,” notes Susan Manning, author, dance historian and professor of English, theater and performance study at Northwestern University. “Africanesque movement has had a huge influence on American dance, including the works of [Chicago-born] Katherine Dunham in the ’30s and Pearl Primus in the ’40s. During the leftist years, after the Depression, concert dance made some room for them, though not enough. That’s why they worked on Broadway and in commercial theater.”
By the ’60s, and the heyday of pure abstraction, practiced by the likes of Merce Cunningham, dance became about dance, she says, worlds apart from the socially conscious dance associated with that decade’s black power movement, and a serious gap developed. But by the ’80s and Postmodernism, with its openness to context, history and biography, another merger evolved. “That’s what’s interesting about the festival,” says Manning, one of the panel discussion participants. “It’s not just about preserving traditional dance, it’s about bringing it into the contemporary world.”
Lemon, one of the art’s deeper thinkers, sees a darker lining. “I worry about whether this dialogue is balanced,” he says. “There’s not a lot of Western work going to Africa. Instead, there’s a lot of traditional work being performed here on proscenium stages, with a separate audience, all very Western in viewpoint, primarily for white audiences. There’s money here, and it puts people in the theaters. That’s not all bad, but we can’t take for granted our power as Americans, either.”
