Oshun, ‘la muchacha francesa’, and her ‘Maravillas de Mali!’: 1st – 7th December 2014
As usual, what was planned barely happened and each day brought its share of surprises.
This week I chased up pending meetings, I came back to places I already visited and I continued to explore some new ones. I went to the headquarters of OSPAAAL (Organización de Solidaridad de los Pueblos de África, Asia y América Latina), Museo de la Danza, Universidad de la Habana and Instituto Superior de Arte. The latter, Che Guevara’s project, was quite amazing: the atmosphere was filled with sounds made by young music students who were training everywhere in and around the Facultad de Música. Creativity, inspiration and labour were palpable, and I really enjoyed this experience.
Instituto Superior de Arte
Young music student rehearsing outdoors
After coming back for the third time to the Instituto Cubano Radio y Televisión (ICRT), I could finally start the long process of asking for the authorisation for consulting their archives, both for my own research project and other Modern Moves interests. I really hope that it will yield something tangible.
Like every week I came back again at EGREM studio to try to obtain something there, but even if I got a few little new things, it is not really what I was hoping for… Each time I met other people there, they seem to be aware of who I am and what I am looking for since when I start explaining, they interrupt me by this kind of comment ‘¡Si, la muchacha francesa, Las Maravillas de Mali!’
Well, as it is written on a little piece of wood in the ‘casa particular’ where I am staying: ‘Todas las personas que visitan esta casa nos dan mucha alegría, unas cuando llegan y otras cuando se van…’ – ‘All people who visit this house give us joy, some when they arrive, others when they leave’ —, I think that EGREM studio and some other places where I keep coming will be relieved to see me leaving their premises! However, I know that some people acknowledged my ‘obstinación y perseverancia’ and they really tried to help me in my quest.
I also returned to the national archives and national library, and dealing with sudden interruptions of service due to untimely fumigation, electricity or water cut, or other unexpected problems, I managed to collect interesting documents, like the telegrams exchanged by Ministerio de relaciones exteriores and African countries at the time of their achievement of independence.
I am also working on finding documents for other Modern Moves purposes but it seems that, like everywhere else, the topic of couple dance has been less explored than the music linked to these forms.
Books at Biblioteca nacional
Speaking of which, I diversified my discovery of Cuban music and dance landscape by exploring new places. I was advised to go to Teatro Brecht for a Latin jazz, rock and funk event; I danced salsa, merengue and rueda de casino in ‘al fresco’ places or during live concerts of the new generations of mythical orchestras Conjunto Chappottin and Conjunto Arsenio Rodriguez; I went to nightclubs where I could definitely not deny that the Cuban way of dancing reggaeton is extremely far from how I learned it in Paris. As I was told, it is considered here as a couple dance, and indeed it is, with the difference that they don’t face each other.
Rock, funk and Latin jazz at Teatro BrechtConjunto Chappottin
Another interesting thing I saw in nightclubs and other places: at some points the crowd moves together with the same steps on various kind of electronic-like music and the steps they do, labeled under the name of ‘discoteca’ for which I could know so far, correspond exactly to what I learnt as kuduro when I was in Mali. In front of this manifestation of globalisation on the dancefloor, I would really like to find out more about the circulation network of such dance moves which are differently interpreted worldwide despite their shared kinetic basis.
I also attended a santeria ceremony and it was really impressive to see the initiated respond to the songs and rhythms played on the bata drums, how the crowd does certain things at specific times, all being expressed through gestures, dance moves and songs.
Bata drums played in honour of Chango
Later in the week, I watched a show made in honour of the orishas by a group of female drummers, singers and dancers. Through a completely different setting and with the representation of some orishas, it was interesting to see how Afro-Cuban religious items are used and mixed in a contemporary dance performance.
Oshun the group of female drummers Obini Bata
I set up classes of different Cuban dance genres for next week, and I am now about to start with danzon and danzonete!
Improvisation and Orquesta Aragon’s Shadow: November 24 to 30, 2014
This week, Elegua opened the doors.
I changed a bit the orientation of my research strategy and I multiplied the efforts in such a way that I seem to have reached the turning and decisive point when the field allows you to be part of it.
I can now take at the right Cuban price a ‘taxi collectivo’ (that means taxis reserved for Cubans, payable with the currency reserved for Cubans). I am quite proud of this precious improvement! Indeed, when you are coming and going all day long throughout the very extended city of Havana, this makes really a big difference.
As a fieldwork rule, this week has also deliberately been placed under the sign of improvisation. Interestingly enough, as both an ethnomusicologist and a Modern Moves team member obviously interested in the mechanisms of improvisation in music and dance, it is also something you have to deal with while doing fieldwork. Indeed, even if I made a quite precise plan of what I would like to achieve for each week of my stay, each day never happens as planned.
Playing with such unpredictability, I visited new places to pursue my research: Conservatorio Municipal de Música de La Habana (Amadeo Roldán), Conservatorio de Música Alejandro García Caturla, Museo de la Música, Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos, Agencia Cubana de Derecho de Autor Musical, Radio Progreso, headquarters of the journal Revolución y Cultura, Casa de África, Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba. I met interesting people in some of those institutions and even though they were not able to help me directly, sometimes they provided me with names, phone numbers or ideas of other places to go. My table work at Centro de Información y Documentación de la Música Cubana Odilio Urfé, Museo de la Música
By spending time in the Centro de Investigaciones y Desarrollo de la Música Cubana and in the Centro de Información y Documentación de la Música Cubana Odilio Urfé (within Museo de la Música), I collected documents about cultural policies of the Revolution period and numerous newspapers articles about the tour famous Orquesta Aragon made in Africa in the beginning of the 1970s.
Newspaper archives
I also found other interesting and quite moving documents, like the thesis made in Spanish by one of the Malian members of the group Las Maravillas de Mali about a Malian performance genre; or again Odilio Urfé’s handwritten corrections in his manuscript about the African influence in music and dance of Cuba.
Odilio Urfé’s manuscript
Among the persons I met and had interviews with, the most luminous moment of this week was certainly the meeting I was lucky to have with Manuel Egües, the son of well-known flautist Richard Egües of the mythical Orquesta Aragon. I spent a half-day with him, recording a one-hour interview in Spanish, watching photos of their tour in Africa, and listening to old recordings of the famous orchestra. He was so generous and happy to share his knowledge that he spontaneously provided me with some extremely interesting recordings regarding Orquesta Aragon’s stay in Mali in 1973.
It is exactly through this kind of generous encounter, and meaningful and precious moment, that you become aware of the usefulness of what you do. I felt blessed indeed when he told me how grateful he was that a young European woman was interested in such things important for him to transmit.
With all the information I got about Orquesta Aragon, I should be able to meet the band next week, fingers crossed, and hopefully have an interview with one of the oldest members still alive who has known Las Maravillas de Mali when they were in Cuba.
Regarding music and dance activities, I really would like to be like Eshu with his gift of being everywhere at once, as there are so many things happening at the same time here! At least I can almost every day manage to attend a ‘matiné’ of one kind and a ‘noche’ of another. ‘Matiné’ means that the event takes place between 5pm and 9pm and ‘noche’ between 11pm and 3-4am, knowing that in reality live concerts barely start before 1.30 am. I attended various kinds of concerts and dance events in different places, the size of the venues varied from the large Casa de la Musica to the smallest alternative-like theater for an intimate trova and poetry evening.
NG La Banda at Casa de la Musica
Concert of Cuban music
I experienced a vast range of Cuban music, from son, trova or bolero to reggaeton and timba via abakua and guaguanco and I danced salsa to the energetic sounds of NG La Banda and Pupy y los que son son.
Couple dancing during NG La banda’s concert
Pupy y los que son son
I was invited to some of these events by musicians or dancers that I had met, and, without these intermediaries, it is unlikely that I would have been able to find certain unusual places. I received other invitations for next week and, among others, I should be able to attend a Santeria ceremony. Indeed, even without looking for this, I have encountered several manifestations of Afro-Cuban religions, whether it be in the form of small or impressive altars in a room corner of a house or during some of these events that I’ve atteded.
Altar in a Babalawo’s house
Religious shop
Abakua performance
I am now about to go to Callejón de Hamel to get my henceforth necessary rumba fix — with the positive feeling of a forthcoming week full of promises of interesting encounters and findings!
On November 6th I headed to Bournemouth to for ADAD ‘s (Association for Dance and Diaspora) conference ‘Re:generations: Rethinking the Past to Imagine the Future’. Throughout the three days, a combination of keynote addresses, panel discussions, papers, performances and workshops were to explore dance and the African diaspora. From the starting point of the significance of the histories of dance practitioners and companies, reformulations for future development in African diasporic forms was to be imagined and built.
I was curious about how the diaspora as well as ‘Africa’ was to be negotiated with such a big line up of practitioners and thinkers from all over. Arriving in the coastal town of Bournemouth on a cold, windy and stormy day gave the diasporic identity of the conference a special feel and as I walked towards the South West Pavillion, the restless waves and the stormy skies brought a scenery within which the vastness of diasporic dance and identity would unravel. I was welcomed at registration with a schedule for the following days, and a box of Vitamin D tablets. And on that stormy day, the longing inherent in diaspora resonated through the function of those tablets, the lack and the appeasing of that which the sun so gracefully gives.
The conference worked as both a playground as well as a springboard for dance forms and identities. The topics ranged from all sorts – histories of British-based dancers who are Black, generational dialogues, connecting dance and the African Diaspora internationally, Africa and the Caribbean in British dance, as well as the evolution of African dance and music forms in the diaspora – and finally the pedagogy of teaching Dance of the African Diaspora.
The diversity of topics explored also made visible the lines that separate differences within the African diaspora – the ways in which diaspora was negotiated and what kinds of ‘africanisms’ unfolded or reaffirmed themselves. If movement is always subject to contagion by its very nature, how dance forms have negotiated space and how closely tied they are to identities – national or transnational affirmations – make them slippery and subject to change. Of course the ‘Africa’ which ultimately ties the whole conference together is seemingly more than an imaginary – it becomes the very thread that sews together the whole as much as the seeds that sprout new -isms. Understanding how this certain notion of rootedness was central to many practioners – uprooted themselves – lent a lens for the direction the diaspora were to move into – tied to a continent. This was specifically fascinating, where rootedness and Africa seemed to be a guideline for the purity of dance, but with the diaspora still as the seed. The reconstruction of ‘Africanness’ then entailed a variety of different subject positions and political issues. The claim of movements or dance sequences becomes central when claiming identity through the diaspora not only in African diasporic dance forms, but in ballet and contemporary dance which often ower unacknowledged debts to Africa. The masterclasses replicated this specifically, about the claiming of movements as one’s own – where the re-creation and re-interpretation then worked as the separation line between many practitioners.
This symbology of Africa made me wonder, how the diaspora feels tied in the ancestral sense and through the present. In any case, the body is the reception and expression of these Africanisms and the faith within the symbology itself undoubtedly is what keeps the rhythm of the body moving.
When people ask me how I became interested in the intersection of nightlife, fashion and popular culture I always tell them that the whole time I was a doctoral student at Yale I split my time between seminars on literary theory and dancing at Mr. Black — when that gay basement den was still a secret black door on Broadway. I read Benjamin on the train to New York City and got coffee for my editors at Condé Nast, the international magazine empire that publishes Vogue and The New Yorker. For me it has always been a challenge to differentiate the nerdy aspect of my personality — the side that is always thinking, analyzing, historicizing, looking for cultural patterns — from the side that loves gossip, fabulous clothes, dancing, and having fun. With the help of my dissertation committee I learned how to bring both sides together.
To me the most interesting academic work bridges the gap between theory and practice, between high theory and what Jack Halberstam has called “low theory,” or theories informed by “low” cultural productions. Great conversations happen when scholars move out of the ivory tower and talk with artists, musicians, dancers and other cultural producers. You have to mix the high with the low — it’s my intellectual philosophy.
That was the idea behind “Music, Fashion and the Power of Queer Nightlife,” a panel I put together for this year’s American Studies Association Annual Meeting on “The Fun and the Fury: New Dialectics of Pleasure and Pain in the Post-American Century” in Los Angeles. At the end of the day I wanted to create a space where scholars could talk about their various expertise in nightlife and club culture and I wanted DJs and party promoters to talk about their interest and expertise in nightlife to see where things emerged. Scholars spend so much time analyzing culture that many of us forget about the cultural producers we’re writing about.
Photo By Madison Moore
The panel was a great success. I lead a conversation — talk show style — about the power and meaning of nightlife with Gregory Alexander and Loren Granic of LA’s A Club Called Rhonda, Amy Cakes Danky Dank, a New York club kid and designer, Victor Corona, who is writing a book on contemporary club kids, Ananya Kabir of Modern Moves, and Modern Moves associate researcher Matthew Morrison, who writes about black sound. The conversation was so powerful that the 90 minute time slot we were given wasn’t nearly enough and hands shot up in the air near the end of the discussion.
A few weeks prior I led a similar conversation right here in London titled In the Mix: DJs, Dance Floors, Diasporas,” a panel with Benjamin Lebrave, Willy Vertueux and John Armstrong, three DJs with specialties in the Afro dance floor. As part of the Arts and Humanities Festival at King’s College London, the panel touched on the history of the dance floor, the DJ as an artist and provided colorful details about what it means to be a DJ on the Afro dance floor.
This was, again, an attempt to create a space that is inside and outside of academia, a space where artists and academics could come together and share their ideas about the dance floor.
As a scholar of performance and performance studies I know that making a piece or producing a piece of theater offers a different kind of knowing. Close reading and analysis of visual, sonic or literary texts can only offer us one kind of theory. But when you get in there and get your hands dirty, when you’re producing your own cultural productions, whatever shape they take, you’re armed with a wholly different type of knowledge and expertise. The way you create a cultural production is it’s own type of theory.
I put my experience producing experimental performances and club events to use when I choreographed IN THE DARK, an underground techno and house music dance party that took place in Hoxton and was part of this year’s Arts and Humanities Festival. With top talent coming from Ø [Phase], The Black Madonna and Edvardas Rut, the dance party was my take on the theory of the event, a subject that has been touched by everyone from Alan Kaprow to Brian Massumi.
I thought if I booked top DJs that everyone and their grandchildren would come to the event. Much to my surprise, and for the first time in my 5 years of producing events, student’s were interested but not really that interested. I was told by one student newspaper representative that they wouldn’t cover the event or promote it beforehand because “it wasn’t newsworthy,” and there was no press release sent out because higher ups at the University felt that it could be bad press and did not “want to end up in the Daily Mail.” This is even as the University fully supported and encouraged every aspect of the event.
Photo By Fareda Khan
The irony of this for me is that I have actually already been in the Daily Mail for my nightlife-meets-academic antics. In the Fall of 2011 I taught an undergraduate seminar on club culture when I was still a graduate student at Yale that made the international airways. I got emails from Yale donors telling me it was shameful that I dragged Yale’s name through the mud with a course like the one I was teaching. So here I was again, three years later, faced with a parallel situation.
Though the party did not go off without problems — it was my first thing in London and dealing with a roster of high profile artists — I thought it was a great success. The DJs where phenomenal. Everybody had fun and I could instantly see what I would do differently the next time. I saw where all my mistakes were.
As I continue with Modern Moves I have several more ideas for experimental performance pieces that will bridge the gap between academia and nightlife, one of which emerged directly out of my experience with IN THE DARK. If you really want to produce a theory of nightlife, and if you really want to understand how nightlife works, to me it is as important to study and spent time on dance floors as it is to produce dance floors. That’s where the theory lies.
First week in Havana: Rumbero’s shoulders and hurricane season
23rd November 2014
On Monday 17th of November, I landed in Havana after a ten hours flight from Paris. I finally exited the airport after a 3 hours wait stuck at the border, which seemed completely normal to the customs officers: when I asked them what the problem was, I only got the answer ‘¡Estamos en Cuba!’.
This first week has been dedicated to one of the main focuses of this research trip, finding in the archives tracks of a group of musicians from Mali who came to Havana around 1964 to learn afro-Cuban music in the frame of the cultural relationships developed between Cuba and African socialist countries during the Cold War.
Las Maravillas de Mali – Biblioteca Nacional
My strategy being to start with the biggest institutions to the smallest ones, I began my week by going to the national archives and the national library. Unfortunately, none of them seems to have documents useful to my quest and as nothing is digitized, it does not facilitate the work!
archives search at Biblioteca Nacional
I continued with the institutions dedicated to music in Cuba, and believe me, they are a lot! When you are used to doing fieldwork, you are not surprised to be sent from place to place, but it remains unfortunate, even if all these places are in your fieldwork list! But you also know by experience that even if you do not get anything the first time, nothing prevents you to come back later and maybe be luckier next time!
After having visited these different places: Instituto Cubano de la Musica, Centro de investigaciones y desarollo de la musica cubana, old and new EGREM studios (EGREM: Empresa de Grabaciones y Ediciones Musicales), Centro de investigaciones de politica international, Embassies of Guinea and Mali, I have to admit that, regarding my primary quest, my first week is not very encouraging. Indeed, I am mostly received by this kind of answer: “Musicos de Mali, aqui en Habana?! No hay nada!”… Well, I am pretty sure there is something somewhere and I am determined to find it out! I am sorry people, you will see my face again I’m afraid!
The positive thing is that the evocation of ‘Las Maravillas de Mali’ sounds however not so unfamiliar to some other people I met. An old man at studio Egrem recalled the group, even the colors of the cover of their disc recorded in 1967, and although he told me that there was nothing in the EGREM archives, I got from him the promise to look for some tracks again next week. Thanks to him, I got an interview with a lady who also has known of them as she was married with an Ivorian music producer involved in the musical relation Cuba-West Africa in the 1970s. I will also have to return to the Malian and Guinean embassies to follow up the seeds I sowed there.
Apart the visits to these institutions, I am also trying to encounter the Cuban salsa scene. If someone was looking at me from the outside, he could see a white European woman wandering around Havana’s streets at night, following the sounds coming from places hidden from sight, accepting to follow some complete strangers who suddenly decide to become her guide. In so doing, I got my first salsa dances in the street the day after my arrival and I went to a very nice salsa place in Vedado called La Gruta, which does not appear in the travel guides. There I danced Cuban salsa of course and also a bit of bachata, and I watched the quite long show animated by different groups of dancers. I experienced another salsa night at La Casa de la Musica and today I am about to attend Los Van Van’s concert in a place called La Tropical and I am very excited to see them ‘en vivo’!
Among the numerous activities I did this week, I think that what struck me the most is certainly the rumba performance I experienced for the first time at El Jelengue with a group called ‘Rumberos de Cuba’. With such a name, no doubt about what it was! Even though I had previously watched rumba videos on Youtube, it was completely different to be in it, to feel the involvement of singers, drummers, dancers and spectators. It was undoubtedly ‘fuerte’ as the lady sitting next to me was exclaiming regularly! I had never seen so many shoulder undulations and shakings, in every kind of position, so fast and during such long sequences!
Rumba performance
During this first week, I tried to understand how things work here, how a foreigner in general and a lone white woman in particular could deal with the basic aspects of life. I feel now able to pursue my research and hopefully be more successful next week. Nothing new about this since ethnographic fieldwork is indeed also like that: being alone in an unfamiliar country without any of your usual means of communication, looking for something nobody (or almost) cares about, getting lost by trying to find a place for which the address you have is something like ‘calle 3ra e/ 10 y 12’ or ‘calle 13 e/ M y N’ or again – this one was hell: ‘calle 36-A, e. 7ma y 5ta’; drinking cocktails with potential informants in which, unfortunately, the proportions are more rum than anything else! Indeed, forget about your previous European experiences of Cuba Libre or Mojito– how they do it here is like this: ¾ of the glass is filled with rum and the remaining quarter with ice and the rest of the ingredients, and this is when you have said: please not too much! ☺ Sitting on conga chairs: only in Cuba?!
Despite some postcards clichés that you cannot avoid, the old American cars and the women with a huge cigar at their mouth, violent rains due to the hurricane season unexpectedly mark this first week in Havana… As an interesting resonance, the undulations of the Rumbero’s shoulders and the thunder rolls of Cuban tropical storms welcome my first week in Havana! (Chango ‘ta veni– adds Ananya!!) Photo 5: Car in Havana
In August 2014, the Modern Moves team collaborated with London’s Batuke! Festival of Afro-Luso dance culture. This month’s Moving Story presents a kaleidoscope of our individual responses to the weekend, which included classes, parties, and participation in the Notting Hill Carnival on Monday.
Four very different perspectives here, which are not shy to reveal the intensely personal impact the festival had on each of us—and each one emphasizing the ‘exhilaration’ alongside the ‘learning’. 1. THE (JOYFUL) WOUND OF HISTORY- Ananya
Batuke 2014: In a basement room in central London, a group of dancers are going through the steps of the Angolan dance ‘Rebita’. The Rebita involves men and women promenading in a circle. When the ‘Commandante’ (here, the teacher Mestre Petchu) calls us to attention—‘atenção!’— we shift our steps from tempo to contratempo. Stepping into the circle with a crossed step, we shift back, face our partners, and flex our torsos towards each other. After this movement, we resume our Rebita promenade.
What we were performing in that group was the infamous gesture of ‘semba’— which Portuguese and other colonial authorities found the most scandalous element in the dances they observed amongst the Africans they encountered in the region that is now Angola, as well as amongst those transported to Brazil to work as slaves. It is a gesture that – despite this heavy weight of disapproval—has survived and lives on in various social dances across the Afro-diasporic world; it has even given its name to the modern dances ‘samba’ and ‘semba’.
A very specific experience that recurs in my dance research is the feeling, while I’m dancing, of being transported to another time and place. This uncanny encounter between my dancing body and a history that is not mine per se repeats itself often enough for me to not want to dismiss it as the product of an overheated romantic imagination. In the course of my research I constantly ask myself about ‘methodology’. What do we scholars actually do with social dance? How do we use living practice to reveal the past, and why should that past be of any importance and interest to the present?
The Batuke festival presented me with two moments of cutting through space and time. The first was the class in Rebita and Angolan carnival rhythms (such as kazukuta) that Mestre Petchu and Vanessa offered. An exhilarating session of men and women facing each other, led by Petchu and Vanessa; we moved by mimicking their gestures. The heat, the beat, the advance and retreat- the collective energy that warped the present- Petchu and Vanessa coming together briefly in couple hold to dance a few semba steps. I was somewhere in Angola, sometime when the rebita and kazukuta were transforming into semba.
The second class released a different energy. Kwenda Lima led a large group through Caboverdian rhythms: mazurka, coladeira, and batuke. As with the other class, we sometimes formed couples, sometimes divided into male and female groups. The atmosphere was defined by Kwenda’s mix of childlike joy and complete control over the archive he was opening. It was delightful to move from the mazurka, with its clear links to Central European partner dance, through the lively coladeiras and finally our fantastic finale of the batuke (more meaningful for us by being one of the songs in the Muloma soundtrack). Facing each other, keeping the rhythm by continuously slapping our thighs, we performed for each other, gave each other strength.
Once again I was translated to an ‘elsewhere’– an island in Cabo Verde, where women sang work songs and produced percussion out of their bodies—because they either did not possess percussion instruments, or because percussion was forbidden (as with the ‘patting juba’ traditions of the American South). That evening I discovered massive bruises on my thighs produced by the energetic batukeira that I had momentarily become. I remembered the wound that never heals on the ankle of Achille the Caribbean fisherman, in Derek Walcott’s epic poem Omeros? Yes, the wound of history– but also the mark of intense pleasure and a physical understanding of what it means to feel the batuque.
There were other moments, too, when the unexpected conjunctions of Afro-diasporic history passed through my body as participant and spectator. Jessica from New York paying homage to her Haitian heritage by dancing the yonvalou (voudou movement in honour of the snake god Damballa) at the start of her kizomba show with her dance partner Phil (also of Haitian heritage via Montreal); Nuno Campos and Iris de Brito teaching us to sing in Criolu (‘Sodade’) and Kimbundu (‘Muxima’), the sounds and words forming in our mouths and throats; all of us at the final class chanting in call and response format, participating in impromptu animations, and cheering on those who entered the drum circle to delight us with their quicksilver movements.
It’s unusual to find a festival that finds space for discussion, history, and reflection, as well as for dance pedagogy. When these elements are integrated into a festival it facilitates a different kind of learning experience. Dance and music illuminate each other in a mutually enhancing manner. The learning breakthroughs for me came in Phil and Jessica’s ‘kompa to kizomba’ presentation, and towards the end of Petchu and Vanessa’s seminar on Carnival. In the kompa presentation we were asked to dance in two-step to different genres- kompa, semba, zouk and merengue, while in the Carnival seminar, different couples danced social semba, funana, samba and carnival semba to the same song.
As each presenter asked members of the audience to dance to demonstrate the co-existence of similarity, difference and continuity, many things that I had only read about in texts suddenly came alive and made real sense.
2. ‘TIME GOES BY SO SLOWLY’- Elina
After a long weekend of dance classes and parties at Batuke! Festival in London from 22nd to 24th August 2014, anyone who has experienced so many different kinds of body activation would be both exhilarated and exhausted.
It was also an intensive brain ‘boot camp’ — as this word is now used in the dance context — that allowed me to experience and to think more deeply about how Afro-Luso dance culture, particularly kizomba, is now so popular among a very diverse range of people.
Besides the dance classes I attended, from Kwenda Lima’s Kaizen class to Coupé décalé (offered by an Angolan dancer by the way), from Rebita and Semba to Cape Verdian Mazurka and Coladeira, the parties taking place in the evenings were also a space where you could experience another relationship to dance. People are no more in training clothes and running shoes, but dress up according to the different themes (‘Union Jack swag’, ‘Great Gatsby’, ‘Miami Beach’), ready to apply on the dance floor what they learned in the day. The multiplication of possibilities to connect with dance in different ways during the festival allowed me to think about the complexity of spatiotemporal dimension in this frame.
As multi-layers of time are already entangled in the context of dance floors, the kizomba scene adds another dimension that could be related to the world of electronic music: the music is deliberately mixed in such a way that you can barely feel when a ‘song’ ends and another starts, especially during tarraxinha sets.
This also implies that the change of dance partner is not obvious at all and reshapes the relationships between the dance couple and the energy produced on the dance floor. You do not see a moving tide with hands and arms flying around like in a salsa party, but in the contrary, you can see a slow undulation of bodies, head against head with closed eyes, that seems able to never end. Indeed, if the dancers are both enjoying the dance, they can keep dancing without feeling any need to look for another partner for a while.
Thus I discovered during the Batuke! parties that some of the codes valid in the salsa world – for instance- are not accurate here. I am afraid that my ‘salsa’ tendency to move away from my dance partner at the end of the song was surely felt quite rude sometimes. You have to penetrate a world that is not only a space for a completely different kind of couple dance and music but has also its own rules. If you try to apply the ones you know previously without keeping this in mind and accepting your ignorance, you may be ‘chopped’ ¬or seem to ‘chop’ someone by mistake — to use a word from the Vogueing scene that I’ve learnt thanks to Madison!
Thinking about this phenomenon when we are used to dance according to a very specific setting which involves the change of partner after each song, then suddenly, discovering the possibility of being ‘locked’ with a complete stranger for about half an hour or more raises many questions: how the partners feel that it is the time to release each other? Who is responsible for ending the dance? Are both men and women feeling bad for being released only after one song? Besides, how important is the influence of the music production in this setting? Are the possibilities offered by electronic sounds ‘responsible’ for expanding the dance?
This slow dance, which is experienced by an international audience and could be considered, for many reasons, as a product of the globalization process in itself, thus confronts the realities of the globalized capitalist world where – in short – accumulation and speed are emphasized.
The notion of ‘song’ duration is transcended by the need of people to connect themselves with another body through the length of the dance. The longer the better to be completely immersed in a kind of transcendental space, where the two bodies are building a little story, song after song, without any words or even any eye contact sometimes, but with the sharing of a close body contact and the feeling of moving in a compatible manner.
My global assessment of the kizomba parties I first experienced so completely at Batuke is that they completely invert the balance between the couple dance part and the solo dance parts (on Afro House music) as I have experienced as a teenager during the first parties I ever had that we called ‘booms’ at that time. You were mainly dancing in solo but were secretly waiting for the ‘slow’ couple dance moment. At Batuke! parties, it seems that I had to forget all my expectations to be able to go beyond the dance culture in which I grew up!
3. ‘LAS PENAS SE VAN CANTANDO’- Francesca
Batuke! definitely represents an exception among the many festivals of kizomba, in terms of the effort to represent Afro-Luso culture in the most complete way and in terms of the quality of the professionals chosen for the event.
My impression of the teachers was really positive. I realised that they were chosen not just for the quality of the shows that they could produce –which is one common criterion of choice in this kind of event – but especially for their pedagogic qualities and their ability to move in a comparative way between different dances from the most traditional to the most modern ones throughout the Afro-diasporic world.
Some classes — the Kompa, Zouk, Coupé-decalé, traditional dances of Cape Verde, Rebita, Sabar — were really important opportunities to understand how the most contemporary dance evolved, and other activities like the seminars and the singing class very interestingly complemented this approach t o African culture and rhythm. I must say that very few organizers invest in the introduction of these elements in the dance festivals. Among the different classes that I participated in, I found the following ones particularly interesting:
New York Ginga by Jessica of Kizomba NYC: A comprehensive and interesting class by someone who was for me a lovely discovery through Batuke!. She explained basic movement technique for ladies’ ‘ginga’, starting form the opposition between chest and hips and the position of the knees, which is something fundamental to obtain the correct movement but that most teachers forget to explain. She then proceeded to the description of very simple movements as the frontal wave and hip rotation during the second basic, but she was able to deconstruct the movement to demonstrate very clearly the coordination between the changing of weight and the lateral step in order to make the process clear to even absolute beginners.
In the second half of the class, she applied some tango steps –following her own description of the work – to the ladies’ and men’s saidas. Despite my doubts about the fact that this kind of improvisation very hardly can work in couple dance and that very often women in kizomba have neither the time nor the occasion to plan correctly their own embellishments, the exercises were very useful to train quicker change of weight, balance recuperation, and a little improvisation using the contratempo.
What was evident to me – and it was also confirmed by the couple demo provided at the end of the class – was that the sequence could be applied only partially, and not easily, in a couple’s spontaneous interaction; yet it represented a very good training exercise. (video available)
Dancehall: This class brought together some nice movements that I recognized as belonging to very different African traditions. The typical traditional African movement of the hip circle was combined with the opening and closing of the knees– elements characteristic of some dances from the southern Congo areas that have evidently been developed in different ways in Jamaica adding to them the special cadence of ragga music and a deep bounce at the moment the movement is linked to another one. The basic ginga of capoeira was also used in the mini-choreography that we danced during the class, the basic step reproduced once with the original cadence and then twice at double the speed.
This dance beautifully demonstrated how Jamaican dances unify the idea of a fight with the idea of smooth and provocative movements that can use similar gestures with a completely different attitude. The teacher himself, Safwaan Ess Daboogie, said that he is constantly surprised by the presence of many heterogenic elements that he discovers in dancehall. Traditional kinetic codes are being constantly renewed in these street dances.
Singing: this class to me really represented the spirit of the festival: led by the teachers Iris de Brito and Nuno Campos we spent one hour trying to memorize and sing Creole and Kimbundu lyrics of the two songs Sodade and Muxima, and we received an explanation of the importance and meaning of the two songs that are really emblematic for the two cultures of Cape Verde and Angola. The experience was fascinating: when we try to reproduce the melody of a song in the singing we immediately feel our body interiorizing the rhythm and the cadence; consequently this starts coming out naturally even in the dancing gestures and in the posture of our own body.
Nuno’s explanation of ‘Saudade’ in Cape Verdean culture as a suspended moment, a calm but uncertain wait really clarified the Cape Verdean spirit and was maybe the most profound cultural topic that we touched: he described Sodade as an accepted sorrow, not dramatized, not desperately assumed, but the brief and intense sound of a drop, constantly falling over the echo of a wide but peaceful loneliness.
Final class: The best idea of the festival, and a moment in which we shared our own work and presence there, giving something back to ourselves and to all the group, to fellow participants and to the teachers, celebrating our own presence and energy. This final class has already become a classic and permanent element in the structure of the festival and is definitely a liberating moment in which people can experience the purest essence of dance and music. The dance can be improvisation on the drums, collective moment following a leader, or even just following with our own body the percussion without almost moving.
Dancing to the sound of live drums and without specific structure to follow is an experience that takes people to another level of interpretation of music and of their own movements. In the same way the experience of playing for somebody else for the first time is something really powerful that puts the dancer in a new position and stimulates new cognitive capacities of interpretation of the music and very physical conception of the rhythm.
Notting Hill Carnival: an amazing experience– one of those moments in which the body is part of the dance and part of the music and we can no longer separate them. People from all cultures participated and mixed in the event. We could recognize people that were not born into the cultural groups that paraded, wearing the same costumes with a sense of pride and love. I felt positively surprised by people’s capacity to embrace a new culture to the point of rebuilding the image of their own body and trying to live it in a new way. This was absolutely evident in the Brazilian parades, where people of all provenances were sharing the exhilaration of feeing the freedom and joy of their own body beautifully dressed and decorated, without any taboo due to aesthetical or social rules. It was truly a suspension of the common regular order and the opening of a new dimension in which the body seemed to surpass its limits and capacities and transform itself into a collective entity that was dancing shaking singing and screaming together.
This moment can be a very rich learning process for newer generations within a particular culture, since we actually experienced movements that were suggested by other people in the crowd without even seeing them, but just by means of the vibration of the bodies, without even knowing what our body was doing. Simply being part of a Carnival group is already a way to learn, and we learn by responding directly to the bodies of the other members of the group that impose on us their movement. The Batuke group was really full of energy and well organized and we danced in the rain for almost six hours without stopping. Nobody left till the moment when we decided to leave.
A very good experience was also the one of seeing represented the symbols that I discussed during my seminar on Maracatu on Sunday: seeing kings and queens opening the parade, Brazilian groups playing stick fights (Maculele), and having our own parade opened by an African folkloric group that had at their head a sort of joker figure with a very long stick pointing at the sky, decorated with colourful strips. Maybe he knew, maybe not, that he was recalling some unknown ancestors from another world, geography, dimension… anyway, we knew he was in the right place.
4. DANCE, RECOVERY, REDISCOVERY- Madison
As someone who can spend hours in nightclubs – so long as I’ve had an adequate ‘disco nap’! – during the Batuke! Festival I found myself experiencing a completely other sort of exhaustion. I participated in a number of classes, from Kwenda Lima’s Kaizen Dance and Cape Verdian Dances to Sabar from Senegal and AfroMix, but after each course, and sometimes during the middle of the class, I had to stop to catch my breath or sit out entirely. This was my first Batuke! Festival as well as my first hands-on exposure to many of these Afro-diasporic dance forms, and part of the incredible learning experience was staying in tune with my body, how it was moving and what it was telling me.
What’s the difference between dancing by yourself to music in a nightclub and being taught choreography as part of a group? How does the body labour differently in each situation?
The best class for me was the Sabar class, mostly because I loved the presence of the drums (and I would) as much as I loved the movements. The whole time there I kept thinking about Barbara Browning’s concept of ‘infectious rhythms’, where cultural transmissions occur through various types of ‘infections,’ with the powerful rhythm of the drum playing a key role. I loved the interplay between the dancer and the drums, with the dancer in many ways ‘conducting’ the drums. I noticed, too, that at the penultimate Batuke! Finale workshop, as each participant danced by the drums, there was definitely a sort of call-and-response, a direct communicative link between the body and the instrument, or the body as instrument.
If the dancer made smaller movements, the drummer made smaller sounds. If she or he made big movements, the drummer made bigger sounds. Certain sounds even lent themselves to all types of booty pops and pops, and this interplay between the body and the drum really made me think about the work a DJ does on any dance floor in inciting you to move, and to move in particular ways.
What I loved most about the festival was the sense of it being a shared space of learning and cultural transmission. People were there to learn. I bought homemade black hair care products and asked the person who sold it to me the best way to take care of my hair. But in terms of the dance itself I’ve already said that this was my first exposure to many of these forms, and even then I could already see how many of the moves percolate throughout contemporary popular music – and I’m thinking specifically of the global popularity of popping and locking, twerking, booty popping, grinding and all the rest.
But it was also a shared space for expressing one’s own connection to the diaspora. French, Spanish, Portuguese and German was spoken, in addition to English, of course. I was asked by several different participants ‘where I am from’, a question that most brown bodies are used to being asked. When I told folks that I was from New York, which is what I always say, the answer was never sufficient enough and people always dig deeper.
‘No, but what are your origins? What is your cultural background?’
And in that instance I say what I always say: my father, who I have never had any contact with, is Jamaican, and the rest is unclear. My mom made various kinds of curries and oxtail, culinary delights that in America are as much a part of Southern Style Soul Food as anything. I feel more African-American than anything as I have never really had any direct ties to Jamaican culture, not least because of rampant homophobia.
When I said this to one person in particular who asked me about my ethnic origins, she rightly told me that it doesn’t matter whether I feel any connection to the culture. It’s in my blood. The way I move and the way I dance is already impacted by my Jamaican roots because ‘it’ is in my blood.
The festival was also a shared space for experiencing connectivity and the universality of the human experience. More than one person I talked to emphasized the power of kizomba to highlight the feelings of being human. Though Kizomba does privilege heterosexuality and traditional gender roles, which admittedly I do have serious issues with, I did notice at least one lesbian couple, and another gay male I talked to told me that when he dances with a girl in kizomba, clearly for him he is not interested in a sexual experience but more in the spiritual feeling of connecting with another body. There’s something about being so in tune with another person that gives you an out-of-body experience.
Kwenda Lima’s exhilarating and fun Kaizen Dance class ended with an unexpected therapy session where his philosophy to life, as mirrored by the dance, was expounded on. Participants eagerly talked about their feelings, love, feeling free through dance, with some people in tears. Immediately I began wondering about the interplay between physical exhaustion, sweat, tears and confession all within the same dance class. How do all of those emotions relate together?
——-
Some questions are best answered by us performing the answers.
We hope this report has made you both think about dance and want to experience, whether for the first time or the hundredth, the exertions, exhilarations and epiphanies of the Afro-dance floor!
All photos courtesy of Kizomba United Kingdom.
The Modern Moves team thanks Iris de Brito for the opportunity to work with Batuke 2014.
This Moving Story was put together by Ananya Kabir on the basis of individual reports from Modern Moves team members Elina Djebbari, Francesca Negro, Ananya Kabir, and Madison Moore.
‘es que la Habana tiene el swing; es por eso que me llama’ (‘it’s because Havana has the swing; and that’s the reason it calls out to me’- Manolito y su trabuco). Modern Moves team member Elina Djebbari responds to the call of Havana- she has just begun a month in this city, to carry out research on her new project about Cold War links between West African musicians and dancers and their Cuban counterparts. She will also investigate for Modern Moves the evolution of nightlife in Cuba in relation to ‘Socialist time’. During the days in the archives, every night in the archives of the dance floor, and of course, this being Cuba, ample opportunity to note the still-present role of the street and the neighbourhood in the formation of social dance: this is the way we work it in Modern Moves! Check out the first of her weekly ‘dispatches from the field’, now on our Moving Blog, to read about her experiences! http://http://www.modernmoves.org.uk/dispatches-field-week-1-elina-djebbari-havana/
What an amazing evening on the 14th of November, 2014! Once again, the Modern Moves team transformed the Anatomy Museum of King’s College, London, into a space for thinking bodies and dancing minds. Bringing together Professor Ato Quayson of the University of Toronto and Ms Magna Gopal of New York, our first Moving Conversation saw a packed house listening with rapt attention to our guests talking to each about about lives in diaspora and dance, leading into a long discussion on the dynamics of salsa from the perspectives of Ato and Magna. Mojitos and canapés followed as the space was cleared to allow the after party to take off: a brilliant set by DJ HaiHan Tan, also of King’s College London which was enjoyed to the fullest by London’s best social dancers as well as guests from the North of England! Here, now, is the full report!
Moving Conversation #1: 14th November 2014
Report by Madison Moore
On November 14th, 2014, a little more than a year ago, Modern Moves held our first Moving Conversation to a packed house in the Anatomy Theater at King’s College London. Shaking up the boundaries the dance floor and academia, Moving Conversations are the bread and butter of the Modern Moves experience. It’s where the dinner party atmosphere meets the dance floor. For our first installment we were delighted to facilitate the improvised brilliance between Magna Gopal, one of the leading instructors and performers in the global salsa industry, and Ato Quayson, Professor of English and Director of the Center for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto and author of Oxford St. Accra: Urban Evolution, Street Life and Itineraries of the Transnational, now out on Duke University Press.
The two connoisseurs of their respective fields only met for the first time that day, but had an illuminating conversation about dance, origins and sensuality. “I would say that a huge part of my dancing,” Gopal said, “is a result of where I started. I started in Toronto, Canada and the dance culture there is very, very diverse, culturally diverse.” As a woman of Indian background, participating the culturally diverse salsa scene in Toronto allowed Gopal to express herself fully “without feeling that I didn’t fit in because I’m not Latin.”
One element that linked them immediately was the fact that for both of them dance (or writing about it) was not an automatic career path. Gopal, for instance, was pursuing an undergraduate degree in Economics and International Relations but was completely seduced by the salsa scene. At a certain point she started receiving so many invitations to teach that she realized it wasn’t feasible to keep a full time job <em>and</em> travel five days a week to teach salsa. So, like most artists who realize that their passions and their day jobs don’t mesh, she dropped everything and gave salsa a go, risking everything to pursue her art, going against the dreams her parents had for what she might do.
Quayson, who grew up in Ghana, jumped in: “I had to keep my dancing quiet. My father would have strangled me if I told him I wanted to be a dancer. ‘Are you out of your mind?! We all dance!’”
The conversation was animated by several performance clips of Gopal working the dance floor. In one, starring Magna Gopal and Reda, Quayson, was particularly interested in the fluidity of the Reda’s movement. “He’s very fluid – there’s very little staccato gestures. It’s very fluid, and of course you respond to that fluidity.” But the other aesthetic element that stood out to him was the nature of the salsa “shine.”
“The shine is very fluid and is integrated into the dance,” Quayson said, “and there are some shines that are not integrated. But this was very integrated.”
“Reda is a phenomenal dancer,” Gopal responded eagerly. “His background in dance is hip hop, contemporary, salsa and afro, so a lot of his movements are a combination of those elements. In addition to that he’s also very musical. When you hear the song and you see the movement you see that connection. You feel like you’re also in sync. But a lot of the time you see a dancer as one thing and the music as something very different. “
But this “shine” was different from another of Gopal dancing with Gordon Neil:
For Quayson this style of “shine” was less fluid, more like a “dance off” as he put it, but even more crucially he felt that here the “shine” was about an ideal. “When you break out there is an ideal of what is African. They are incorporating an ideal of what it is to dance like an African” into the “shine” itself.
Throughout the conversation Gopal spoke on the importance of connection on the salsa dance floor and, more, of showcasing that connection to the audience so that the dance can be affective. The most powerful moments were when the two talked about feelings, emotions and affect. In many ways Gopal’s remarks about connectivity were her own “theory” of the dance floor.
“When you’re connected with your partner and you’re connected with the environment and everything is just flowing naturally,” she said, “you can almost feel like you’re inside that other person’s soul. And that connection is profound.” But feeling close isn’t quite as simple as having two bodies pressed together. Two bodies together do not a connection make, as anyone who has been on a bad date knows. For Gopal, that’s the misconception: just because two human beings are touching on the dance floor doesn’t automatically mean they are connected. Physically touching is not the same as <em>being</em> connected, even if that connection is fleeting and only lasts one or two dances before that person disappears into thin air.
Quayson agreed. You can boogie or shake it down, he said, but that’s not the same as connecting, which he felt is an affect produced distinctly in partner dances.
Another crucial element of dialogue had to do with gender, sexuality and sensuality, issues Modern Moves explores in detail. There’s a wide-held idea that women are supposed to be “sexy” in the way they dance, echoing feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey’s famous critique that women’s bodies are nearly always staged “to be looked at.”
Gopal had strong words about the way female sexuality looks on the dance floor.
“Because salsa originates from Latin culture,” she said, “there’s an emphasis on the woman and the sensuality and sexuality of the female figure. I find that a lot of women in salsa are learning that it’s all about how you can showcase your body” – the staging of Mulvey’s notion of “to-be-looked-at-ness” – “and how sexy you look and that that’s what’s going to give you the power and attention. There are many other elements to a strong female beyond her sexuality that include playfulness, that include assertiveness, that include power and strength, not just softness all the time.”
The audience asked engaging questions, particularly picking up on Gopal’s interest in staging a connection with your dance partner. One question wondered that if a connection starts before the dance, are there signs or cues we can read that will let us know that the connection will be a good one? Like any human interaction, Gopal noted, there are just certain people we gravitate towards. Pushing the topic of connection even further another moved pushed the conversation away from the dance floor and towards the stage, wondering about how a connection between dancers performing on stage connect to each other and to an audience.
“If art is constantly catering to an audience,” Gopal said, “no one would put anything out there because there’s always going to be someone saying ‘I don’t like it.’ So the idea is to be as sincere as you can be to whatever it is you’re feeling like expressing and then having the conviction and the strength and courage to put it out there.”
At the end of their lively discussion, in true Modern Moves style, we served Mojitos and canapés, shook it down, boogied, and danced to salsa with a special set by HaiHan Tan, a salsa fanatic and (at that time) a doctoral student at King’s. Now, with this year’s installments of our academic dinner party, the best is yet to come.
Why do we need parties? What (or who) makes a great party? What energies does it unleash? How is it a change maker in the world?
On the 7th of November 2014, I joined Madison Moore at a boundary-crossing panel discussion on ‘music, fashion, and the power of (queer) nightlife’ that he organised for this year’s American Studies Association conference in Los Angeles. Madison brought together for the occasion professional academics (me, Matthew Morrison, and Victor P. Corona—both of NYU), and professional party organisers: Amy Cakes , who organises the weekly Tuesday night party in New York, Westgay, and Loren Granic and Gregory Alexander of LA’s legendary pansexual night A Club called Rhonda. As the academics revealed themselves as inveterate party goers and the party organisers came out as keenly analytical observers, that set of boundaries was set to collapse from the very start, and things only became better in the course of the discussion.
Madison had instructed us to flaunt ‘a strong look’, and, collectively, it was all there— monochrome punctuated by red-rimmed shades, yellow trousers, and flaming pink devil’s horns; stilettos heels, flower prints and necklaces (for the men); a bit of a schoolboy look (for me). Probably inspired by our get up, we enjoyed a fantastic conversation on all aspects of nightlife, transgression, resistance, and utopia, adroitly managed by Madison as panel host. The thoroughly engaged audience was bursting with questions and comments and the allocated time slot went by in the blink of an eye. We were, I asseverate, the most fun and furious panel of a conference dedicated to ‘the dialectics of fun and fury.’ Indeed, we were the fun and the fury.
Madison started us off by asking each panellist to recount a memorable nightlife experience of our lives. Despite the diversity of our tastes and preferred scenes, a similar pattern quickly emerged: personal journeys of escape and rebellion where each panellist recounted how one party, a single door opened into an alternative world, allowed an epiphany of self-understanding at a threshold moment (usually, unsurprisingly, our teenage years or early twenties). That first party showed us the way to work against the (often benign, often invisible) policing of our lives by family, state and society, It was almost like each one of us had embraced the feeling of being enveloped in nightlife, and the possibility that during a good party night, anything could happen—in order to make possible what we wanted to be– which was, in one word, different from whatever it was that surrounded us.
Partying was about transformation, our stories conveyed: the transformation of an ordinary person to a hyper-self, in the company of like-minded people, to forge a protean community where there were only atomised units before. Whether through social dancing, finding unlikely cultural muses in the form of underground party hostesses, dressing imaginatively, or simply dressing better—partying made, in Matthew’s words, ‘a certain kind of energy go through my body’ as he discovered ‘monumental clubs in Atlanta which were havens for black, brown and queer people.’ So the stage was set for more theoretical explorations of what gave nightlife this potential for resistance and radical self-making, punctuated always by the personal anecdote, photos from one’s personal archive, or the soundtrack of a personal anthem.
Gregory told us how a good party had to have a peak moment- whether it was (the simulation, we imagine!) of the sacrifice of a virgin covered with vodka soaked fruit, or the orgasmic explosion of a glitter-filled ball; for Loren, the art of throwing a good party was ‘learning something from the elders and passing it on.’ These articulations converged to expose the party as ritual—where the bacchanalia is actually part of a deeper solemnity, indeed a necessity that has always been part of human social organisation. Matthew, in turn, spoke eloquently of work and labour unfolding through rhythm, of the party as reconnecting the sacred to the profane.
Special lighting effects, amplified sound, infrared vibrations coursing through one’s body, and altered and heightened sensibilities, with or without ‘a little help from one’s friends’ –ecstasy in all senses of the term- emerged as manifestations of ritual as the central aspect of dance. The transformations enabled were just another form of possession, the intake of substances as aspect of transformation a sacramental necessity. Through these analogies, we came to the collective understanding of partying as a form of religious expressivity. The panel anchored this seemingly Jungian flight of fancy to the historical connection between the Black Church and house music: ‘the DJ takes you to church’, as Loren reminded us.
Indeed, a recurrent theme was the collaboration between black, Latino and queer subcultures in creating a zone of micro-level resistance to the metronomes of capitalist time. The racialised, radicalised, always queer body is inscribed with a history that unfolds through the polyrhythmic possibilities inherited from the slave’s percussive language. In the push and pull of commodification that comes with capitalism, the dance floor’s radical histories are always in danger of erasure and submergence. To bring them back to the bodies on the floor, to unite those bodies in political pleasure and pleasurable politics, is the duty and responsibility of some figures specifically associated with a good night.
The panellists agreed enthusiastically that the DJ is the techno-shaman, the club is the church, and the turntables are akin to the sacred Afro-Cuban bata drums. These perspectives confirmed our sense of the ritualistic space of the dance floor. But like all rituals, energy has to be managed, and for this, the DJ is key. The DJ booth is a sacred space, a vodou poto Mitan, and the party’s end goal is transformation through the optimal channelling of the crowd’s energy. Loren, describing himself watching a diverse crowd from the DJ booth, being reconnected – by him- to the queer, black and Latino roots of the dance floor- by his choice of the very music that was played in mythical New York clubs. ‘It’s a beautiful thing to show people that super rich history.’
In the process, the crowed is enfolded into that history, made part of it. This is what I, too, love about the dance floor- its ability to collapse the time of history into the time of the now. And it isn’t just the music that is important here, but the aesthetics and the mood, starting with the door people. Thus the host of the party emerges as another key player. For Amy, presiding over a party is an ‘out of body experience where I’m hovering and watching- I’m providing a service to people, providing a space for them to transform and change their lives.’ At Westgay, she invites pioneers from earlier party scenes. Vogue legends come in to teach people how to ‘do it properly’. Through such cultural transmission, an oral, ephemeral and underground history is passed on to new generations.
The promoter also emerges as an important player in ensuring theatricality and spectacle at a good party. Drawing on his experience of ‘A Club Called Rhonda’. Gregory Alexander described how, if working a look is the return of energy, it is equally important to work the club’s look. ‘Hours of work and lots of money’ goes into putting in the energy and expecting people to return it. This ‘return of energy’ usually takes the form of flamboyant and individualistic dressing up—often as a way to express- and balance- one’s masculine and feminine sides. Rhonda, a fictional character that comes out of Gregory and Loren’s combined imagination, is a ‘superbeing’ who is part of every clubgoer, whether gay, straight, or of any other form of identification.
The Rhonda party logo of a pair of legs, which harks back to a nylon ad from the 1950s, reveals the dual tendencies of self-fetishization and nostalgia that encapsulates the promoters’ attempts to create a safe space of shared love of spectacle. The party promoters agreed that they encourage and reward those who make the effort ‘to come to the tenth degree of themselves’. The conversation confirmed that parties like Rhonda fulfil a deep need to find spaces that ‘let people do their thing. To ask why is there such a need is to go back to the party as a space for resisting the commodification of pleasure that is an intrinsic part of the capitalist machine.
Indeed, if dress codes are the hallmark of capitalist formations of a docile workforce, and the moulding of the modern subject by patriarchy and heteronormativity, a party helps us break those shackles even momentarily. Through some powerful images of ‘club kids’, Victor reminded us of the provocation of the party goer traversing public space through the subway ride to the party, all dressed up, or back home. The utopian impulse of the party can be best realised not by niche scenes, though these are important to nourish safe spaces for a range of alternative subjectivities, but, by the need to break segregation in dance life.
A club, Loren said, should push boundaries and allow people to be what they are not allowed to be by social norms, that are, ultimately, the pathways to creating the docile subject. Yet a party is not a contradiction-free utopia. As some audience members spoke of the very real possibility of violence that surrounds party culture, I was reminded of Jacques Attali’s thesis in his book Noise: A Political Economy of Sound that all music contains in it a form of violence, a necessary rupture before we move to a new state of reconciliation. While the physical space of the club and its interpellation in specific material conditions puts pressure on the idea of utopia, it only confirms that a party is always a space of contradictions: is it about glamour or post-glamour? Danger or safety? A place to be exhibitionist, or a place to blend in and be invisible (and comfortable)? This is, perhaps, the reason that the best parties are often in spaces on the brink of transformation through gentrification. The party, full of the energy of possible transformations, is a place where we can say, with New York’s DJ Juliana, ‘my entire being is a resistance to culture. I am the middle finger to normality’.
The Modern Moves team has been very busy during the first week of November, presenting at, convening panels for, and attending three different conferences. From the 6th-9th November, Madison Moore and Ananya Kabir were at a panel on ‘Music, Fashion, and the Power of (Queer) Nightlife’ at ‘The Fun and the Fury: New Dialectics of Pleasure and Pain In the Post-American Century’: the Annual American Studies Association meeting in Los Angeles.
During those same dates, Leyneuf Tines and our visiting Researcher Livia Jimenez Sedano were representing Modern Moves at the annual ADAD conference Re:Generations 2014, at Bournemouth.
All this simultaneous travelling meant some hectic long-distance and cross-time zones communication for our first Moving Conversation later this week, but we are definitely all set for this stellar event!
Friday 4th May 2018 Anatomy Lecture Theatre (day) and Great Hall (evening) King’s College London, Strand Campus, WC2R 2LS Five years of Modern Moves draw to a close. Celebrate with…
Our fifth Moving Group was dedicated to an exploration of tango music and dance, and it involved a double bill. First, we heard Dr Kendra Stepputat, ethnomusicologist from the University…
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