Of Solitude, Tragedy and Memory... but also of Encounters, Reflection and Opinion.
Jun 27, 2013
When Nollywood invaded Paris.
Feb 27, 2013
Defending my own Name. 'Qaddish'
Nov 11, 2010
Award and its Liability
"... and the laureate for the solo category in the 8th edition of the danse l'afrique danse is - Qudus ..."
I can't remember hearing my surname and probably the title of the winning work before I blanked out, none of the claps found their way into my ears, I turned my face down and muttered few words to thank my God. Could that be it? In one word, SUCCESS. I think I already had a feel of it and I know its temporality, I had learnt to clamp down on my pulse. I sensed the excited juice just about to start flowing and immediately I froze it back to normality. Keep still. Be still as water and hang on to your centre I told me. I rose my head up to realise the array of eyes directed towards me, as if something was badly expected of me. Those who didn't know who I was, thought I wasn't present, because all these took me about 3 minutes before Selim my Tunisian friend dragged my bag from me and poked me to go unto the podium.
The clapping and the screaming of my name were gradually taking form in my ears. Walking to the podium that was just 10 meters away, seemed like the longest walk I ever made. As I walked towards the podium, I felt a burden of responsibility on my shoulders and saw myself taking each step closer to the middle of a "disagreement" I have been rigorously engaging through my blog, my small talks in conversations and whenever the opportunity comes for me to air my opinion on certain logic of existence that appears to me illogical.
The decision - whether or not to partake in this biennial choreographic encounter - had lingered for more than three years before I eventually decided to participate. The decision came slowly along with a thought pattern that was gradually taking form with my understanding of the role of an artist, in his community and within a larger (global) context. My trouble with this phenomenon has been very much linked to my trouble with the term "Contemporary African dance" and my impatience with patterned, predictable reasoning and my refusal to ply the well trodden path.
This biennial has largely added to the systematized manner of thinking for most African choreographers, who systematically arranges themselves within this arrogantly defined box especially in place for them. This aggressive Africanist sentiment have informed the way "we" treat, analyse or consume works coming from Africa, it has succeeded in narrowing perspectives and producing rigidities in place of a creative openness to discovery and knowledge. I personally think that the moral purpose of this festival must be either restored or redefined for it to meet up with the practices and the artistic preoccupation of a new generation of artists who are presently freeing themselves from past attachments and rejecting the notion of a single identity or a single awareness, but rather a composite of cultures, identities and affiliations which marks the advent of new forms, beauties and new interests totally deracinated and dislocated from one place and one time.
As Kettly Noel (the festival director) handed me the microphone, followed by a “please be very brief” the microphone in my hand became a weapon, a tool to distinguish my voice from the voiceless, to gracefully place my words where they belong. I turned my face out into the audience, and suddenly words fail me in the sight of the numerous eyes, looking either down or up upon me. For the first time in my life i felt the intricacy of addressing an ambiguous crowd, where I have to speak and speak well, give hope to some and send a clear message to others. I was overwhelmed by emotion, i could feel myself exercising a deep breath control to stop the down flow of tears from my eyes, and finally I summoned my sinews and my nerves to my rescue.
I spoke “... I don’t know what to say... hmm, initially i didn’t wanted to partake in this competition, the only reason i decided to be here at this time, is to be able to inspire. The African youth has been over-traumatized with questions of political injustice, economic imbalance and societal pressure that they stopped dreaming, my dreams are what got me here today, I urge all you young, brilliant creative artists here today, to continue to dream, you are good enough and I know that very soon change is gonna come."
I recognize that I have moved long beyond compromise and it strikes me more and more that my experience as an artiste, is unique among the one billion Africans spread across the globe. As i walked back to my seat, the numerous congratulations that escorted me didn't help in containing the tear drops; I could hold it back no more. So why did i cry? It remained a question I ask myself till now. Here I am, me, who had to choose between dance and home at some point, me, who had to fight not for recognition but for a mere space of expression. Me, who refused to be "the good boy" because I had a dream, now, I am assuming a place of authority and becoming an example for an entire generation of artists. I can feel the burden of this responsibility already.
Sep 8, 2010
My trouble with Contemporary African dance
Contemporary dance in Africa – in my definition – is not a specific dance technique, but a genre of dance performance that employs systems and methods that could be traced to traditional Yoruba-total-theatre of the 50s (also known as Yoruba folk opera). Contemporary dance however, draws on here-and-now influences, as well as newer philosophies of movement that depart from traditional dance techniques, by deliberately omitting structured forms and movements or NOT.
African dancers, the other dancers
More than a word or mere geographical expression, Africa has become an enigma, a place, a succession of depressing event and a human condition which makes dreams and hopes evaporate to zero. Africa has since turned to Europe’s latest invention which has with time, incessantly distorted from a place of fantasy to exotic beings, from the future project to a shore of material civilization, landscape of contrasting images and extraordinary experiences. Now that these plenty fantasies are disappearing as our communal history come of age, and gone are those days; those days that the contemporary African never saw, those days that is never part of our contemporary history books, those days when Europe never existed in our narratives, I’m talking about those days we let to be ruined by European sophistication, re-made by Europeans and significant for the persuasion of the European thinkers, students and visitors.
The choice of African in contemporary “African” dance is therefore, with a touch of derision and as well canonical. Aside the fact that it suggests a honest geographical location and a common historical narrative, it also makes the unforgiving blunder of plunging into an ideology that thrives on reductionism, which seek to reduce the African peoples, all 1 billion of us - no matter our various cities, nations, cultures, religions and other rhetoric of identity that isolates us from one another, it doesn’t matter, it suggests that – we can all be shrivelled into a geographic, moral and cultural pod. Many thanks to such aggressive manner of addressing the other, now it is possible for artistes and other creative minds to imagine from Europe – and other infected corners of the globe – a factual or fictitious African personality, an African scenario, an African dance or an African mode of living, and be entirely understood without consequences. Before I am misread, I distinguished between Africanism and Pan-Africanism.
It was during my days at the circus school in Chalons en champagne that I initially came into a direct contact with such aggression tainted by a reversed Afrocentric prejudice. Between 2001 and 2006, I travelled widely throughout Europe – especially in France – as a dancer in Heddy Maalem’s company. The feeling that gets to one during those period of tours were somewhat ennobling, for the relationship I had with people and western culture were timed and based on an artificial construct, which I will later realize fully and totally despise when I will decide to stay in France for my studies. I found it rather too difficult to grasp the point or the least sense, behind any individual, claiming to have a legitimate knowledge of who I am, even, before taking time to meet me, though it never bothered me, for I couldn’t just claim responsibility for other people’s ignorance. As a result, it took me a long time to eventually realize that rather than ignorance as I had dismissed it to be, it was in fact, power that was at play in première degré.
The Power of stereotyping
In today’s world, supremacy is mostly associated with knowledge than it is with military or economic power. Knowledge in this term therefore, means rising above immediacy, expanding beyond space and time, beyond the self and the local, into the foreign and distant. Africa, as the object of such knowledge becomes intrinsically vulnerable to analysis and risks to be repeatedly analysed through such misdirection; that even in 4000AC, Africa will still be referred to as the future continent, this “Africa” then becomes a fact which, with time transforms itself into a standard image. Hence, to have such prejudice over me is to dominate me and have authority over me. To have such authority suggests that I have less autonomy over my identity and individual destiny. It will become extremely difficult to analyse – or approach – my works as an artiste without referring to Africa or a colonial time past, but on the other hand, my contemporaries who happens to be Europeans don’t talk about their reality and situation in relation to colonialism, slavery or other vices in our shared historical inheritance.
I found it rather curious and snobbish that all other guises are often ignored, all other forms of insular reflection and whatever that could have possibly condition the being of our works, ignored. The experience of growing up with different cultures at parallels, being educated at the borders of a world at war, and conflicting interests. Growing up at a period when pop culture and globalization is getting to its immorality peak. All these don’t tend to matter. Hence that trademark: African, in contemporary “African” dance is pregnant, pregnant with ambiguous meanings, pregnant with a non forgiving gaze of the “other”, impregnated by an uninformed self appraisal, misguided by the early foreign eyes that saw it, told its story and showed its story to the world through rational caricature, and in a funny way we in turn see ourselves through such portraits.
This consciousness will from onward augment my need for a distinguished identity, with a peculiar voice, my personal history must be understood – at least by myself – and be rationalized within the context of a larger historical and social experience. Until then, anything I multiply myself with, will still remain my-whole-self, for every other thing is ONE. I require no alibi for my un-civilization which might appear un-African.