Tag Archives: Afro Diaspora

MAGIC NIGHTS OF LISBON I: A LONTRA by Livia Jimenez Sedano

March 13, 2015 Modern Moves Leave a comment

The first time I heard about A Lontra disco was the night that Luísa Roubaud, one of the best experts in the dance scene in Lisbon and a great colleague and friend at INET-MD (Instituto de Etnomusicologia), talked to me about it. We were enjoying a night out with some of her friends who used to go to African music clubs since the eighties. Having witnessed all the transformations of the last decades, they were making a contrast between nowadays´ kizomba fashion night life and the golden times they remembered in the 70s and the 80s. As memories started popping up, their eyes shone when talking about A Lontra, a mythical dance club that opened in Lisbon after the outbreak of the independence wars of Portugal’s former African colonies. The owners were a married couple that came from Luanda and landed in Lisbon in 1975, running away from the war of independence in Angola, like other more than 500.000 people after-25^th April 1974 (see Machado 1974). These frequent visitors of A Lontra remembered that the couple consisted of an incredibly beautiful Black African lady (Dinah) and her husband, a White Portuguese gentleman (Carlos Correia). Just like in fairy tales, the beauty of Dinah was well-known and admired in the kingdom of the African nights of Lisbon. They insisted that I should go and speak to her to know the whole story from her lips. Since that day, I had been looking forward to meeting her and making her an in-depth interview. I had seen the front door with the old metal sign representing an otter (that´s the meaning of “Lontra”) many times when passing by Rua de São Bento, and it was the night of Saturday 28^th February that I decided to visit the place.

DOOR OF A LONTRA

METAL ICON OF A LONTRA

As I entered and approached the bar to ask about the politics of consumption, an ageless beautiful lady dressed in an elegant black suit came along walking slowly to attend. At that very moment, I said to myself: “no doubt, there she is”. Indeed, she was the legendary Dinah. I was lucky enough to get an appointment for an interview to know more about the history of the place and its secrets.

A Lontra was opened in 1977, right after Angola achieved its independence. This means that it was one of the first African discos of Lisbon. Like all the people who went to Portugal running away from the African wars of independence, they had to restart their lives from zero. Until they could find a way to make a living, they depended on public subventions aimed at “retornados” (“returned people”) and on the hospitality of their extended family. As they were experienced in managing discos in Luanda (such as the ones they owned, Cave Adão and Veleiro), they decided to start up a new business in the same branch. It was directed in principle to an audience of “retornados” that missed Africa and their lifestyle there. Gathering for listening to their beloved music became an urgent need, and A Lontra came to offer a home to alleviate homesickness through dancing together. The following images show some of the original spaces of A Lontra.

FIRST BAR, A LONTRA

SECOND BAR, A LONTRA

DANCE FLOOR, A LONTRA

A Lontra is situated in an emblematic place (Rua de São Bento 157), less than 5 minutes from the Assambleia da República, the most emblematic political institution of Portugal. It was not long time before some deputies, as well as intellectuals and artists heard of A Lontra and came to satisfy their curiosity. This nucleus of the political, artistic and intellectual elite of Lisbon became a faithful group of clients: these were the golden times of A Lontra, between the 80s and the 90s. In those days, DJing was combined with live music. Among other treasures, Dinah still keeps a large chest full of old vinyl discs of African music:

THE CHEST OF VINYLS

SOME OF THE OLD VINYLS (WE SEE IMAGES FAMILIAR FROM OUR RECENT VISIT TO COTONOU!)

Dinah also possesses a beautiful collection of art handcraft bought during travels to Angola, which are also displayed in the disco.

ELEPHANT WOODEN CHAIR

FEMALE FIGURE IN WOOD

MASK IN WOOD

Another jewel that she keeps carefully is a collection of pictures of those days. Some deputies used to gather in A Lontra for a drink after their sessions in Assambleia da República. Sometimes, they held meetings in a private room that Dinah gently opened for them. It means that important decisions for the future of Portugal were taken inside A Lontra´s walls.

A LONTRA, A NIGHT IN 1996

Through the 70s and 80s, more African houses opened up in Lisbon. Dinah and her husband Carlos opened a second house in 1980, “Cave Adão”, following the style and fame of the disco they had opened in Luanda, and in 1989 Dinah opened the disco “Rainha Njinga” (an epical Angolan queen known for her fierce resistance to the Portuguese colonizers). The clientele changed through time, and A Lontra started being visited by more and more people from Cape Verde. Vinyl music changed to CD, and later to digital files in the DJ´s computer, and the styles and ambience of the house changed too. With the recent boom of kizomba music and dance throughout the world, A Lontra adapted to the new times and DJs started introducing the most recent hits of kizomba. This is an excerpt of the fieldnotes I took that night:

“The night starts with loud afrohouse music, what indicates that the audience will probably be mainly people in their twenties. As expected, young boys and girls start coming since approximately two o´clock at night. The first beats of recent kizomba hits make some couples jump to the dancefloor. There is a pair of couples doing school-like steps, but the rest are dancing free style. Two boys leaning on the bar encourage themselves and finally leave their glasses on the counter to go and invite some of the girls that gather in groups by the edge of the dancefloor, but they refuse. Only when one of them insists and pulls a girl´s arm she accepts with a facial expression of resignation. Anyway, she abandons him in the middle of the song. It seems that it´s a hard job for boys. Then the DJ turns to Brazilian and international commercial music, such as Enrique Iglesias´ “Bailando” hit. Girls go crazy dancing in groups and having fun. The moment of funaná creates a new atmosphere: there are not many people dancing in couples, but mostly girls dancing among themselves and joking with and through the music. There is a girl dressed in a stripped blue and white tight dress who dances in an amazing and crazy way, moving her hips and feet in every possible way without ever losing the beat. Dinah is looking at her from the counter and smiling with pleasure. Then the DJ moves to batuque and people get even crazier, shaking hips and bumping navels on the dancefloor. Popular music from Cape Verde, mostly from Santiago, is played for a long time and intertwined with musical blocks of kizomba and afrohouse.” (Fieldwork diary, 28^th February 2015) (To know more about batuque music and dance in Lisbon, see the work of Ana Flávia Miguel and Jorge Castro Ribeiro, INET-MD)

In conclusion, A Lontra can be proud of being one of the oldest African houses of Lisbon still open today and of having witnessed the recent history of Lisbon. It has resisted the changing times through adapting to the social and cultural transformations of the city. The dance steps of artists, politicians, intellectuals, curious visitors and people of all ages and from every corner of the PALOPS, have written on its dancefloor the history of relations between Portugal and Africa for at least the last 38 years. But, unlike an old museum, music has kept A Lontra young and alive. When asked about the secret for this, Dinah smiles and says: “this is something you do because you love it”.

Livia Jiménez Sedano is currently a member of INET-MD (Instituto de Etnomusicologia-Centro de Estudos em Música e Danca) and her work is being funded by FCT (Fundação para a Ciencia e Tecnologia) of Portugal. She is a collaborator in the Modern Moves Project and will become a full member of the team in September 2015.

REFERENCES:

Machado, Fernando Luís (1994) Luso-africanos em Portugal: nas margens da etnicidade. Sociologia: Problemas e Práticas 16: 111-134

Featured image: Archival photo of A Lontra, a night in 1996

The Moving Blog

To Ouidah: Memory, Movement, Pythons, Mermaids. By Ananya Kabir

March 3, 2015 Modern Moves Leave a comment

Take the Africa Express. Ouidah.

Deep red earth and lush green vegetation: the road to Ouidah, an hour or so out of Cotonou, Benin, takes you past the most incredible colours.

In the historical city of Ouidah, the power of nature mingles with the tragedies of modern history and the resilience of the sacred.

We at Modern Moves know about the sacredness of pythons. I have devoured, from cover to cover, many times over, Katherine Dunham’s account of her complex relationship with Damballa, serpent god, which first started during her fieldwork in Haiti. In Ouidah, I saw the same coiled and terrifying beauty, the same egg yolk stains proclaiming sacrifice and offerings.

Our tour companions from Nigeria and Ghana were both drawn to and terrified by the pythons. I have not heard a grown man scream so loudly as when the python was draped around one of their necks, and yet– he did not reject it! The python, coiled around his reluctant yet eager neck, radiated the uncanny presence of mystery in the midst of deep historical rupture.

The journey through the Route of Slaves, through the heart of contemporary Africa, had begun for our group of dancers, visiting Cotonou as part of the Benin International Salsa Festival.

TREES: OF MEMORY, FORGETTING, AND RETURN

Trees: the tree under which future slaves were paraded to be sold; the Tree of Forgetting, and the Tree of Return. These are now part of the structured journey of memorialisation that has been created by the postcolonial State of Benin in reparation for the complicity of the Kingdom of Dahomey in the transformation of human beings into commodities.

The lieux de memoire combine mercantile and sacred dimensions. Can the sacred ever come to us unmediated in modernity?

The sacred can confront and defeat banalisation. Of this I am convinced, as we drive past statues whose obviously recent vintage does nothing to diminish their strange and disquieting power.

Perhaps this strangeness is merely a product of the distance between the belief systems they belong to, and what I know. But having grown up India, I am comfortable with the idea of syncretism, of the mingling of one God and many gods, of many possible manifestations of the sacred. I am a believer and an atheist, a lover and a sceptic. What I respond to in Ouidah is an accretion of strange sacrality, the confusions of modernity, and the power of the human imagination to contort, distort, resist, and reclaim.

This is the same aesthetic that is so powerfully present in Haiti. In the car the radio bombards us with a combination of African salsa and zouk, including retro zouk numbers that clearly sound out the debt to Haitian kompa. In the haze of monumentalisation, a fresco-ed wall flashes past us. I read the magic words ‘Bois Cayman’. Stop! I implore. This petite escale is not part of the tour we have paid for. But the guide recognises the urgency in my voice. ‘Why did you want to stop here? What is Bois Cayman to you’? I look at him in amazement. ‘are you joking? This monument recognises the most important moment in the history of slave rebellion in the Americas and we are not stopping here?’ We are now complicit spirits.

We walk around the Memorial Zomachi. Panels on the walls depict in painful detail the departure of the slaves, their captivity, their degradation, and their rebellion in Haiti, the world’s first Black Republic. We enter through the gate, but the panelled walls enclose only nothingness.

INTERMISSION: ‘BLACK C’EST LE SWAG’

The void asks us to meditate, to commemorate, to reflect. This is also what the State asks us to do. But the void’s request is easier to heed.

…. for some of us.

My companions are busy posing. Their postures are those of hip hop, of swag, of attitude- new incarnations of Black Power. They have come on this tour to discover a shared history, they tell me. What kind of discovery involves noisy, even celebratory posturing? Then it strikes me: theirs is an act of collective reparation in and through the body.

Melancholia comes in many colours. What we feel in response to a history that we did not shape but yet feel as ours can require words that are beyond European lexicons. As postcolonial subjects we feel the European words in our mouths and reshape them with our tongues . Our bodies play out different affective trails. Memory is physical, its burden lightened through laughter, through movement. Through posture. Through swag.

Beyond the sepulchral, monumental, cavernous lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) of French metropolitan historians, can we not posit the possibility of ‘mouvements de mémoire’ (movements of memory)?

(Salsa: when this dance of the African diaspora returns to Africa, it is precisely the movements (in multiple senses) of memory that take place).

The void elicits from us our own methods of commemoration .

THE MERMAID CALLS

Portals: The Door of No Return. A vast number of Africans left the shores of Dahomey for the plantations of the Americas. The final monument in Ouidah that we are led to is, fittingly, the Door of No Return.

I note the now-familiar routine. The guide intones the horrors of the slave trade. The visitors strike their poses. Elina and I wander around, taking pictures. The sand is hot beneath our feet. The sea is out there- it seems close, but the sand is far too hot to walk to the water.

The guide is talking about Mami Wata. She is the water goddess. I say, in the Brazilian way, ‘Iemanja’. He spins around. Once again, he is surprised by me. ‘How do you know of her? Where are you from?’ I’m just an Indian woman who lives in the world and loves to know about everything. Oh and I dance. And like to think through dance.

We stand by the shore. I hear the guide describe the mode of worship appropriate to Mami Wata. ‘Are there temples to Mami Wata here?’ I ask. He peers into my face and his voice drops. ‘She doesn’t need temples. She is here, she is everywhere.’

My own voice drops in synchronicity. I feel we must speak low. ‘Do you see her then?’ The guide looks at me. ‘I sense her presence everywhere. At night, I see her here, on the beach. She is a mermaid…. she has no legs, just the body of a fish….’ Then…. ‘she is like you.’

I am no mermaid. Perhaps I am more J. Alfred Prufrock:

‘I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.’

Prufrock has ‘seen them riding seaward on the waves/ Combing the white hair of the waves blown back/ When the wind blows the water white and black.’ Trapped in the modern dichotomy between reason and enchantment, he (or possibly the poet himself here) declares, sadly, ‘We have lingered in the chambers of the sea/ By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown/ Till human voices wake us, and we drown.’

In Ouidah, however, we linger (unable to stop taking photographs), touched by some secret knowledge of the sacred that still persists on that sea shore– on the other side of which so many thousands woke up to be drowned- but also survived through the persistence of cultural resources.

Africa shows the way. Ex Africa aliquid semper novi.

All photographs by Ananya Kabir.

Thank you Elina Djebbari for being such a perfect travel companion, Thank you, Ines Ahouansou and Steve Deogratias Lokonon, organisers of the Benin International Salsa Festival, for arranging this memorable visit to Ouidah.

The Moving Blog

Tribute to Cape Verde in Lisbon

July 30, 2014 Modern Moves Leave a comment

From July 16 to 18, Modern Moves team members (Ananya, Madison and Elina) went to Lisbon for a special encounter with Afro-lusophone music and dance cultures.

Unfortunately, Francesca was not there as she was giving dance classes in France (yes, MM team members are often playing musical chairs!), but we met Livia Jiménez, Spanish anthropologist now working at the University of Lisbon as a postdoctoral fellow with a project analysing interethnic relations and ethnic constructions in contexts of social dance (through kizomba and bachata). It is an understatement to say that we had some topics to discuss!

She led us to lunch in a secret place, on the 8th floor of a building near Marques de Pombal. We were excited to discover there the Associação Caboverdeana restaurant where we could enjoy “almoços dançantes” (live music from Cape Verde and people dancing in the middle of lunch) only on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

(Video Courtesy of Livia Jimenez)

The taste of the typical Cape Verdian meal cachupa watered with a nice vinho verde, the beautiful voice of Zézé Barbosa singing moving morna songs and energetic funana and coladera pieces on hearing which we could not stay seated, the amazing view of Lisbon from the large windows and the joyful atmosphere in this unexpected dancing place transformed this moment into a special day for Modern Moves.

As Ananya explained us that it was in these kinds of places that kizomba was born, among people sharing a certain nostalgia for Afro-luso culture, we were able to feel more deeply the historical power of such hidden venues. Even more, when we learned that this place is not only attended by people from Cape Verde but also by all sorts of Lisbon-dwellers, e. g some mature gentlemen who served the Portuguese empire, including some who had even fought in Angola on the eve of its independence, we could feel how music and dance can be a site for people to reconnect themselves with a part of their personal life histories, and for those histories to become part of a larger story.

Before this unforgettable lunch, our immersion in the Cape Verdian heritage in Lisbon had already started with Kwenda Lima’s show Muloma on the evening of our arrival and oops, we did it again on the second night of our stay.

When we entered the venue, the Malaposta Cultural Centre, all our senses were attracted to the distinctive smell of incense pervading the space, the sound of the rhythms played by a jembé player on a corner of the stage in front of the heavy velvet curtain, the red and white flowers and candles in the foreground of the stage, aesthetically arranged.

All these items were creating a very special atmosphere even before the beginning of the piece. Indeed, the entire show was going to unfold like a ritual, from the start to the end, from the two little girls dressed in white coming from the back to the stage holding a plate with lit candles to the ultimate scream of one of the dancers, a birth and a death.

The piece, which lasts one hour, is divided in three parts and performed by five female dancers and Kwenda. Apart from their physical movements, the evident work that went into the assemblage of the soundtrack has to be acknowledged as it definitely contributes to create a powerful and moving atmosphere, carrying different kinds of spirituality, from the Middle East to Africa. These different musical ambiances were unified by the dancers’ moves (undulations) and some ever-present sounds like the layers produced by synthesizer, cello or bass and the use of breath throughout.

The quite slow tempo of the music, the natural colours (brown, magenta…) and blurred shapes of the costumes, the lights like dawn and sunset, the feline moves, the whispers and the growls, all was there to suggest the (lack of?) border between human and animal, the primitiveness of sexual instincts and the primal need for spirituality.

The mix between latent eroticism, spirituality and nature of the first part reminded me of the famous Nijinski’s piece L’après-midi d’un faune, with regards to the work on the virility of the male body and to several scenes, when copulation was suggested or when Kwenda was promenading in the middle of the female dancers (the nymphs?) who were on their knees in an attitude of prayer in a sort of pagan ritual. In a striking tableau, Kwenda dances in the foreground with a calabash while another dancer moves slowly across the backdrop. Both almost nude, they suggest —among other things— the emptiness of materialism and the difficulty of dialogue.

The hinge between the two dancing parts is a video screening, which first celebrates nature and mother earth — an ongoing concern of Kwenda’s, but suddenly switches to images of manmade disasters.

In the third part, the video element continues, but screens fragment, mysterious images multiply and the predominant colours change to red and white. reminding us of the orisha Chango. All the candles are now lit, and calabashes and straw brooms are incorporated by the dancers. A single dancer swirled fabric around herself, whirling dervish-like; in the final scene, this use of fabric by all the dancers reminded me in a way of Loïe Fuller’s Serpentine Dance.

This piece is symbolically complex and uses many items from different sources to critique capitalism, consumerism, and ecological neglect. It provoked numerous questions in us, besides also simply moving us. Kwenda Lima, born in Cape Verde, performing in Lisbon for an international audience, offered a syncretized Afro-contemporary dance piece that has its place on a globalized stage. And as Ananya said to him after the show when he asked if we were surprised to see another part of his choreographic work, we were especially very happy to discover a “continuation” and the embodiment of his philosophy, which we had already discovered through his kaizen classes.

Even though Muloma was the main goal of this trip to Lisbon, we not only enjoyed the Cape Verdian ‘dancing-lunch’, but also visited Jazzy Studio and the B. Leza club —in a word the main places in which Afro-lusophone music and dance culture in Lisbon is performed.

And even if the locals may not be particularly interested in what we were looking for, you could not walk in Baixa Chiado without encountering some Capoeira dancers (from Sweden!) in the street or listening to a Cape Verdian orchestra in front of Café a Brasileira. Yes, in Lisbon you can’t avoid the African connection, and it is for the best!

ELINA DJEBBARI

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