This dissertation elucidates the contemporary dance studio and stage in twenty-first century Senegal as privileged sites of knowledge production about gender and sexuality. Entangled within local and global dance lineages, funding structures, and modes of circulation, contemporary choreographers perform their bodies in ways that challenge predominant narratives, both those imagined globally and those locally accepted, about gender and sexuality as they intersect with blackness, Africanness, and Islam. This project examines pedagogical models and select performances by a number of artists at the forefront of contemporary dance in Senegal, including Germaine Acogny and her École des Sables, Andréya Ouamba, and Fatou Cissé among others. It follows a recent trend by contemporary choreographers to center women, gender fluidity, and dissident sexuality in their work against a backdrop of increasing sexual regulation in the public sphere. The project draws connections between the artists’ present-day pedagogy and choreography and a broad reorientation away from ethnocentric dance models and towards new forms of internationalization in the 1970s-1980s. I argue that the local-global entanglement and experimentations with gender and sexuality are mutually constitutive characteristics of contemporary dance in Senegal. Contemporary choreographers adhere to a philosophy of danser autrement, or dancing otherwise, as they offer performances that play with the boundaries of gender and sexual legibility. Choreographers tactfully negotiate the realities of increased sexual regulation and neoliberalism in Senegal just as they negotiate the demands placed upon their racially marked bodies on international stages to create space for alternative ways of being on the stage and in the world. Primarily based on ethnographic research, my findings draw from approximately eighty interviews with artists and arts administrators, participant-observation in workshops, observations during rehearsals and performances, and performance reviews, programs, and other materials collected from public and private archives in Senegal and France. This project deploys theories of African postcolonial cultural production and theories of gender and sexuality deriving from the African continent to understand the potentiality of performances that challenge existing gender and sexual frameworks, recuperate indigenous performatives, and imagine alternatives. This project seeks to expand understandings of the transnational circulation of concert dance, the significance of the multiple meaning-making capacity of contemporary dance, and the ways in which gender and sexuality are imagined in Senegal outside of dominant culture.

Creator

• Swanson, Amy Elizabeth

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-2x53-fm06

Subject

• Gender studies
• Dance
• African studies

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• etdadmin_upload_662490
• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:14644

Keyword

• Sexuality
• Gender
• Contemporary dance
• Performance studies
• Senegal
• Germaine Acogny

Date created

• 2019-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright