Black Performance Theory by Carl Paris (in DeFrantz & Gonzalez, 2014) offers a critically important tool to look at the dance work under discussion as it introduces various frameworks within which Black (African) expressive works can be interpreted and in doing so, establishes
the dynamic nature of Black Performance. This makes it a key source of my own exploration into my own creative process with Alive Kids.
As discussed in Chapter One, Schechner (2002) provides ideas on a critical foundation for my explorations around Black South African traditional dance, culture and spirituality.
Schechner’s ideas are further offset through an engagement with the call by Paris (in DeFrantz
& Gonzalez, 2014), for a complex engagement with the multiple meanings of spirit. Particularly useful to this engagement is Paris’s assertion that spirit is understood variously as an unseen power, such as God, a divinity, a generative life force, a soul force and a cultural ethos of a people, all of which have distinctive interpretations across different cultures (Paris in DeFrantz
& Gonzalez, 2014:100). Black Performance Theory (2014) is a collection of essays edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez and establishes ideas around Black expressive culture as an area of academic inquiry and acknowledges the emergence and dynamism of Black performativity (Paris in DeFrantz & Gonzalez, 2014:100). While set very much in the context of the USA and the concerns of the African Diaspora, Black Performance Theory offers interesting ideas and negotiations of Black/Blackness, Diaspora, Black sensibilities, performance, and theory: what they entail, where they happen, how they happen, and their implications (Paris in DeFrantz & Gonzalez, 2014:100). A primary claim made by DeFrantz and Gonzalez is that Black sensibilities emerge in performance whether Black bodies are present or not, but underlying this point is that Black performance is always enabled by Black sensibilities, expressive practices, and people. While the collection spans a wide variety of performative practices, I focus my interest on two essays that explicitly deal with African dancing bodies and Black sensibilities within mainstream performance dance. The first essay written by Carl Paris, explores the question of imminent spiritual potential in the works of postmodern Black male choreographers (Paris in DeFrantz & Gonzalez, 2014:100). The second essay is by DeFrantz himself and, “explores slippage from Africanist performance histories to global hip-hop corporeality’s” (DeFrantz & Gonzalez, 2014:100). Both essays, though differing in topic and critique, discuss the transformational nature of the African Black dancing body on, through and by the mainstream.
In his essay, Reading ‘Spirit’ and the Dancing Body in the choreography of Ronald K. Brown and Reggie Wilson, Paris engages a variety of concepts around Black dance, Black theology, and anthropological sources. He begins his argument by discussing the role of spirit and the
spirituality in the African Diaspora worldview and how it permeates all aspect of Black life.
Combining the inherent spirituality of both Black life and modern dance, Paris then interprets the work of Brown and Wilson, demonstrating how they merge African cultural elements and modern dance to produce choreography that links the negotiation of identities within Africanist cosmological and cultural identity (Paris in DeFrantz & Gonzalez, 2014:100).
In the introduction, DeFrantz and Gonzalez provide their definitions of “Black”. DeFrantz describes it as the manifestation of Africanist aesthetic and action engaged to enlarge capacity, confirm presence, to dare, while Gonzalez describes it as a response to histories and a dialogic imagination that responds to imagination about black identities (DeFrantz &
Gonzalez, 2014). In so doing, they engage with how this sense of self interacts with traditional culture and the histories that produced it, and at the same time, they use the spiritual element of the dance to transform the contemporary sense of self.
Mantsoe’s Konkoriti, Koena’s Point of View and my own work Alive Kids all express cultural feelings, access traditional dance, beliefs, history and cultural traditions that draw from what South African scholar Clare Craighead refers to as African Black dance (Craighead, 2006:19).
Within the South African context, Maxwell Rani writes, “Black dance refers to dance originating from indigenous African Black populations” (Rani, 2018:311). “Black dance” as a term, has often been used pejoratively as a label in the field of American dance criticism and aesthetics (Craighead, 2006:19). I argue that the cultural politics around the Black African dancing body as represented in Mantsoe, Koena and my own works conveys spirit and meaning through community and cultural representation. Their work has been created as a form of self-expression, a way of retelling and reliving history, a ritual for worship and a form of performed celebration. Mantsoe, Koena and I have something in common; our works attempt to challenge identity constructions and African dancing bodies formed through the dominant narratives of Blackness. According to Paris, Black Dance choreographies are underscored by community and a unification aspect (Paris in DeFrantz & Gonzalez, 2014).
These ideas of how black identities are placed within a specific culture are shared by Stuart Hall (1996,) who argues that identities are shaped by cultural practices and representations.
These ideas around identity construction and representations echo my work with reference to Mantsoe and Koena and the confluence of both my own years of contemporary dance
training and cultural learning I have within Black South African traditional dance, culture and spirituality.
Koena and Mantsoe suggest ways in which contemporary dance choreography can be fused with African traditional rituals and spirituality. According to Maxwell Rani (2018), traditional Black dance is part of a form of communication that allows individuals or groups to express feelings and beliefs and to preserve history and cultural traditions (Rani, 2018). It is also a form of expression that is often passed down from generation to generation for religious, social or ceremonial purpose (Snipe, 1996:68).
To conclude, it is also important to mention that I treat both Mantsoe and Koena’s works as
“text” to be investigated and engaged with in this chapter. My dance work Alive Kids (discussed in the following chapter) and those of Mantsoe, Koena as discussed above, write stories on the African black bodies of dancers through the use of rituals and spirituality. In this negotiation of Black identities, there also lies a connectivity and a community. This chapter has argued that contemporary dance in its local context serves as one manifestation of a growing African contemporary aesthetic. The next chapter will interrogate my own dance work Alive Kids as a case study that offers an opportunity for self-reflection and how both Mantsoe and Koena directly (and indirectly) have influenced the creation and development of this dance work. I will offer an autoethnographic study (explained in Chapter Three) of my own choreographic process for Alive Kids that looks at the fusion of African rituals and contemporary dance.