Dance Circles

Movement, Morality and Self-fashioning in Urban Senegal

Hélène Neveu Kringelbach

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781782381488
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

Senegal has played a central role in contemporary dance due to its rich performing traditions, as well as strong state patronage of the arts, first under French colonialism and later in the postcolonial era. In the 1980s, when the Senegalese economy was in decline and state fundingwithdrawn, European agencies used the performing arts as a tool in diplomacy. This had a profound impact on choreographic production and arts markets throughout Africa. In Senegal, choreographic performers have taken to contemporary dance, while continuing to engage with neo-traditional performance, regional genres like the sabar, and the popular dances they grew up with. A historically informed ethnography of creativity, agency, and the fashioning of selves through the different life stages in urban Senegal, this book explores the significance of this multiple engagement with dance in a context of economic uncertainty and rising concerns over morality in the public space.

Chapter 1

Cosmopolitan Performing Arts in Twentieth-Century Senegal

In the second decade of the second millennium it may be difficult, at first glance, to see the agency of the state as significant in shaping artistic life in Senegal. Dance and music festivals are mostly funded by international sources, and the state is no longer a major patron of the arts. The controversial FESMAN (World Festival of Black Arts) held in Dakar in December 2010 at great cost and subsequent debt should not hide the fact that the flagship arts institutions of the post-independence period have either closed down or are threatened with closure. The biennial state-funded FESNAC, the National Festival of Arts and Culture held across Senegal since 1997, features dance, music and theatre competitions but it is notoriously underfunded. Participants in the 2005 FESNAC in Tambacounda spoke of performers having to sleep rough in schools and being left for long hours without food or water. Long gone, too, are the days when Léopold Sédar Senghor invited artists to the presidential palace and called them his ‘dear children’ (Harney 1996). Senegalese performers must now spend part of their lives abroad in order for their work to circulate. Yet most of them maintain connections to Senegal, and Dakar has a buoyant performing scene in which the state continues to play an important, albeit more complex role.

This chapter opens with historical sketches on the antecedents of the sabar genre I discuss further in Chapter 3. There are few written sources on the topic, and therefore this aspect of the historical context is necessarily limited. I then move on to the emergence of the modern performing profession in the colonial period, which introduced important transformations to the existing practices of specialized categories of performers (praise-singers, or griots in French) by promoting new audiences, new patrons and connections with arts worlds outside the region. This chapter examines the political agendas that have moulded the Senegalese choreographic arts into the social worlds they are today: at once locally grounded and outward looking. It is also suggested that the centralization of the modern performing arts in the Dakar region is a consequence of this history.

Women and griots: echoes of past dance circles

There are echoes of sabar performance in northern Senegal going back to at least the seventeenth century, when European travellers first mentioned dances performed to the sound of drums beaten with a hand and a stick (Tang 2007). Oral histories and the sparse written sources available do not paint a clear picture of what sabar performance may have looked like in the past, but it is likely that there was a suggestive dimension to the style early on. Thus in 1789, Lamiral (1789, cited and translated in Charry 1992: 33), gives a slightly more detailed account of an event very similar to a contemporary sabar, but with a more balanced presence of youths from both sexes:

The boys and girls gather together in the middle of the village, they sit in a circle and in the middle are the musicians who entertain the party with dances and lascivious gestures. They pantomime all the caresses and raptures of love, the griottes approach the onlookers and seem to provoke them into an amorous combat, the young girls accompany them with their voices and say things appropriate to the matter at hand: they all clap their hands in time and encourage the dancers by their clapping. At first the music appears slow, the dancers approach one another and back off, the rhythm doubles, the gestures become quicker; the musicians thunder and the movements of the dancers get faster and faster, their bodies take all sorts of shapes; they hold each other and push each other away: finally out of breath they fall into the arms of each other and the onlookers cover them with their pagnes [skirt cloths]; during this time the drums make such a racket that it is impossible to understand anything that is said.

Several decades later, in Wolof-speaking regions, Abbé Boilat (1853: 323–324, translated from French) also witnessed what was probably the antecedent of contemporary sabar events:

On moonlit evenings, the local drum announces the dance towards the end of the meal; the women seem electrified by this music, they rise all of a sudden and come running at great speed; soon the men follow. The first sequences are performed by the young men, the women sing and clap; suddenly they rush and perform dances that decency prevents me from describing here, and which are nothing but the representation of the most brutal passions. The Clerics and their families never take part in those festivities.

Christian attitudes to West African dances at the time, as well as Boilat’s desire to convince his readers of his own moral purity, mean that the suggestiveness hinted at is not to be taken literally. Yet the observation that Muslim ‘clerics and their families’ did not take part suggests that mixed-gendered entertainment dances were already contested on moral grounds. There is also a suggestion that women were often the most enthusiastic dancers, even though Dakarois informants in their eighties remember that in their youth, men danced a great deal more during sabar events than they do today.

It is indeed likely that the current association between female societies and sabar dancing, which I return to in Chapter 3, has historical antecedents. Among Wolof speakers for example, age-sets (mbotaay) and female groups of friends (ndey dikké) have long formed the basis of networks of solidarity, even organizing collective work, such as washing, millet grinding or wood and water collecting (Sarr 2002). Most importantly, they helped each other to gather the resources needed to fulfil social duties in the context of family ceremonies, circumcision rituals and funerals. For the Pulaar speakers of the Fuuta Toro, Wane (1969: 27–28) highlights the importance of the female age-sets (fedde rewre) for similar purposes. According to oral historian and storyteller, Massamba Guèye, sabar dances used to be performed by married women when they gathered for domestic work. In the intimate space thus created, they were able to exchange secrets, playfully compare their bodily ‘assets’ and solve family conflicts, much as adult women do today. Historian, Ousseynou Faye, suggests that mbotaay were the closest antecedents to the modern tours, or closed festive events organized by women’s groups (see Chapter 3), and did not have a direct equivalent among adult men because men already held power through more formal institutions. For him the mbotaay, therefore, always involved a subtle contestation of male power (Faye, personal communication, Dakar, October 2002). During the colonial period, the urbanization of the region gave rise to urban societies modelled on rural female societies. Women’s sections of political parties, for example, were created at the initiative of women themselves, and played an important role in Senegalese politics from the 1940s onwards (Ndiaye Sylla 2001). Other organizational forms have appeared under the impulse of the state, such as the ‘Groupements de Promotion Féminine’ created in rural areas in the 1970s in order to integrate women to development projects. Women’s associations have multiplied further since the 1980s (Dahou 2004), and many organize their sociality around dance events.

Another enduring aspect of dance in northern Senegal, which comes across in missionaries’ and travellers’ writings, is that performing in public, and with skill, has long been perceived as the prerogative of the griots. The emergence of a modern performing profession in colonial times has transformed this, but for many families there remains an underlying sense of ‘griot-ness’ in the act of dancing and singing for others. This is an important aspect in the context of this study, and a grasp of the transformations at hand requires, first, an explanation of traditional status hierarchies in the Senegambian region.

The first Arabic and European travellers had already reported the existence of endogamous groups with specialized trades in the wider region (Tamari 1997), which became known as ‘castes’ during the colonial period, in reference to the Indian case. Though the term fails to reflect the West African specificity (Wane 1969; Dilley 2004), for reasons of convenience I follow Roy Dilley (2004) in using the term ‘caste’ or ‘caste-like’ as shorthand. Sociologist, Abdoulaye-Bara Diop (1981), has given the fullest description of the Wolof model, albeit from the point of view of the higher-status groups. He identified two overlapping but distinct components in Wolof hierarchies, the first determining status (‘castes’), and the second determining political power (‘orders’). The orders consist of the royal and aristocratic lineages (garmi and jàmbur), the common freemen (baadoolo) and the slaves and their descendants (jaam). Diop describes the ‘castes’ as based on a complementary opposition between two main ranks, the géér and the ñeeño. The géér represent the majority of the population (eighty to ninety per cent), with the ñeeño making up the rest. In the past they included the sab-lekk, or performers, and the jëf-lekk, or artisans (blacksmiths and jewellers, leatherworkers, woodworkers and weavers). Among the sab-lekk were the géwël (musicians, praise-orators¹ and genealogists-oral historians) and the ñoole (buffoons). In Wolof, géwël literally means ‘the one for whom a circle is made’ (Panzacchi 1994). The sab-lekk included sub-groups distinguished by the style and function of their songs and by the instruments they played. Over time, Diop says, they were all subsumed within the géwël category, whose role was to validate the status of their patrons through a skilful combination of praise-oratory, drumming and dancing. Whereas drumming was the domain of géwël men, dancing was mostly associated with women, and singing as well as praise-oratory could be performed by either sex. In theory, the ñeeño were endogamous. The Haalpulaar’en of the Fuuta Toro, in the Senegal River valley, had an even more complex stratification system. Highest was the category of the tooroBe (singular: toorodo), the descendants of Muslim Clerics who took power in the Fuuta Toro in the late eighteenth century, and who initially included people of all backgrounds (Wane 1969). The Mande/Mandinka areas were similar to the Wolof model, and there the nyamakala were comparable to the Wolof ñeeño. By contrast the Jola, the Bassari and the Manjaco, in the Casamance, are said to have more egalitarian modes of organization.

Though on the whole, occupations are no longer determined by these hereditary categories, to a certain extent public performance rewarded by money remains associated with ñeeño or nyamakala status. This is occasionally expressed in the Senegalese printed media (Nouvel Horizon 2003: 39):

Dance is not well perceived in our society, this is a well-known fact. […] The phrase ‘A non casté [géér] does not speak, sing or dance’ would be repeated over and over again to those who wished to transgress this tradition. Dancing is strictly reserved to Griots, who are by vocation and by definition ‘public entertainers’.

This association has long extended into perceptions of everyday movement and speech. As I have argued elsewhere (Neveu Kringelbach 2005, 2007a), dance, non-dance movement and speech form part of the same continuum of performance, which corroborates Wendy James’ (2003: 78–79) point that ‘the performative and experiential aspects of the various formal genres of patterned movement, ritual, marching, and dancing are not just a spill-over from the ‘ordinary’ habitus, but derive their power partly by speaking against, resonating ironically with, this very base’. In Dakar, ways of dancing, moving and speaking may either reiterate status by birth or contest it. Thus restraint (kersa) is generally perceived as indicative of géér status, as is coolness. In Wolof this is reflected in the distinction between the speech style of the géér, waxu géér, and that of the géwël, waxu géwël. Waxu géwël is often described as ‘loud, high-pitched, rapid, verbose, florid, and emphatic, with assorted phonological, morphological, and syntactic devices linked to those characteristics’ (Irvine 1989:261). Géér who speak in such expansive ways are therefore at risk of being assimilated to géwël, as expressed in the condescending phrase ‘ya ngiy géwëlee’, literally ‘you are becoming griot-like’. People often say they can tell from the way a person walks, dresses, speaks and dances whether this person is a géwël. By contrast, the speech style which indexes high status, waxu géér, is slower, spoken with a lower tone of voice, less emphatic and generally considered more thoughtful.

Beyond the seemingly rigid nature of the regional status hierarchies, there has always been a degree of flexibility to this, as I discuss in the next chapter. But over the course of the twentieth century, the single most important factor in the emergence of a modern performing profession, less tied to griot backgrounds, was colonial school theatre.

Musical theatre between colonial schools and European stages

The history of modern musical theatre in West Africa is intimately linked to the Ecole Normale William-Ponty, set up by the French authorities in Gorée in 1915 to train indigenous schoolteachers and administrators. Moved to Sébikotane, east of Dakar, in 1938, it attracted students from all over French West Africa. In 1935, Charles Béart, a Frenchman who had taught in Bingerville in Côte d’Ivoire, introduced theatre to the Ponty curriculum, and was soon appointed director.² The students were asked to spend their holidays writing plays to illustrate their ‘native’ traditions, with the aim of encouraging them to preserve a connection with rural life. Indeed while these students epitomised the successful évolués,³ there was also a fear that they might lose touch with the populations they would have to teach or administer on behalf of the French. This concern was evident in Béart’s (1937: 14, translated from French) writings:

Some pupils have asked the Director of the William-Ponty School to lend them the costumes made for the [end-of-year] party so that they may ‘play’ during the holidays. Tomorrow, as civil servants, they will meet their village brothers with sympathy, they will study the art forms neglected for so long and they will return them to their rightful place. It will be precious for those of us who care about Africa, because we will know it better; it will be precious for those who will find comfort from the minor worries of the profession in this unselfish and generous activity – the schoolteacher who will have discovered a new and enchanting legend or who will have transcribed an old epic song will soon forget that he has quarrelled with the major’s interpreter.

The Ponty training probably exceeded French expectations in producing an elite of schoolteachers who were close to the populations they worked with. Vincent Foucher (2002: 148) says of the growing engagement of schoolteachers in politics in post-1945 Senegal that this was helped by their coverage of the territory and their good relations with the local populations, since they were ‘not engaged in the direct exercise of colonial authority’. If it is difficult to assess the role theatre played in this political awakening, it certainly provided the Ponty students with opportunities to express anti-colonial sentiments in subtle ways, by imagining and staging the lives of resistance heroes. Bigolo, for example, was written by Casamançais student Bouli Dramé in the late 1930s and staged and choreographed by another Casamançais, Assane Seck (Ly 2009: 416), who was to become an academic geographer, a politician and a Minister of Foreign Affairs after Independence. Bigolo is a drama set in the Casamance during the French colonial conquest in the late nineteenth century. Bigolo is a courageous soldier who has defeated the French in battle. While the Casamançais soldiers dance and sing to celebrate their victory, word comes that the French retreat was just a ploy, and that they are heading back for a new attack. In a fit of rage, Bigolo destroys his fetish, which he believes to have betrayed him. He returns to war and is eventually defeated and killed as a punishment for his destructive action (Bingo 1953). Although we know nothing of Bigolo’s dances and songs, the plot leaves sufficient room for various interpretations: the villain may be the French army or it may be Bigolo himself, who is not sufficiently cool-headed to control his anger, and eventually betrays the spirits who have protected him thus far. Before attending the lycée in Saint-Louis, Seck grew up near Sédhiou, in the Casamance (Seck 2005), and was undoubtedly familiar with the region’s choreographic and musical practices. It is highly likely, therefore, that the songs contained an even more ambiguous message than the text in French.

In the same vein, in 1936, in the presence of the Governor of French West Africa, Jules Brévié, whose dance programme had been such a success at the 1931 exhibition in Paris (see Chapter 1), the Guinean students performed L’Entrevue du Capitaine Peroz et de Samory. This was a play which celebrated the courage of nineteenth-century Wasulu leader, Samory Touré, a well-known anti-colonial figure (Mouralis 1986). Whilst being works of historical imagination, many of the plays dealt with the moral dilemmas caused by the radical transformation of local societies under colonial domination. This was the case, for example, of the 1936 play Le Retour aux Fétiches, a drama on the misfortunes of a Porto-Novo family, in what was then the Dahomey (later to become Benin), who had abandoned their traditional divinities (Mouralis 1986).

The Ponty plays were interspersed with musical interludes and short choreographic pieces which the colonial administration perceived as innocuous folklore. Mbaye (2004) notes that the French staff controlled and sometimes censured the plays, but this rarely affected the musical interludes. French actor, Henri Vidal, who had witnessed the play Téli Soma Oulé by Lompolo Koné from Burkina Faso, echoed this tame view in a commentary written for Traits d’Union, the magazine created to promote the work of the network of ‘cultural centres’ set up across French West Africa from 1953 onwards:

This is an exclusively folkloric play, which allows the incorporation of men and women dancers who, as direct descendants of the legend characters, will dance what their grandparents danced in front of the famous chiefs of the time. (Vidal 1955: 66, cited in Mbaye 2004, translated from French)

The students were divided in their attitudes towards the colonial enterprise however, and musical performance provided a creative space where they could momentarily set aside their cultural and political differences. This came together beautifully in evening performances outside the school, when the students were asked to put together comedies, singing and dancing for official celebrations organized by the local chapters of French political parties. Of course, the printed press reported on these soirées in glorifying terms for the colonial authorities (Paris-Dakar 1947), but for the student-performers this must have been a fine balancing act between anti-colonial activism and the desire to be closer to the centres of power. After all, Dakar was then the capital of French West Africa (see Chapter 2), and this was where the future of the Empire was being conceived.

One of the reasons why modern theatre involving acting, music and choreography took root so quickly was the existence of regional performing traditions of a similar kind.⁴ Before the arrival of Charles B...