Introduction

A fascination with aesthetic aspects and with the graceful movement of bodies has dominated our views of dance. Dance is characterised by a ‘regime of visuality’, in Rafael Palacios’s words, which pushes both spectators and dancers to share the enjoyable sensations linked to observing bodies that move with music.Footnote ¹ In the West, dance is often seen as entertainment, stirring something within us, transmitting energy or exuding transgressions. However, early anthropological approaches to the world of dance in non-Westernised societies demonstrated that, alongside music, dance was integrated into a broad system of social relations that supported religious and ritual practices (Boas Reference Boas1930; Chernoff Reference Chernoff1979; Hanna Reference Hanna1988; Robb Reference Robb1961). Dance was also central to collective celebratory expressions that reinforced processes of identity boundary construction.

Since the 1970s, dance has garnered interest in anthropology, leading to four basic approaches that remain today. The North American Boasian approach sought to record native dances and introduced philosophical concerns about movement, power and race. The folklorist approach, developed in Germany and France, was concerned with describing and formally classifying dance, but lacked a historical component. The linguistic approach to dance was characterised by formal descriptions of movement patterns. And finally, a more holistic approach included analysis from social anthropology, medical anthropology, cognitive science and cultural studies, exploring the connections between dance and factors such as ethnicity, sexuality, gender, body, migration, identity and transnationalism (Kringelbach and Skinner Reference Kringelbach, Skinner, Kringelbach and Skinner2014: 6–8). This approach views dance as an ‘embodiment of social life’ (Hughes-Freeland Reference Hughes-Freeland2008: 1) that is both aesthetic and political, both narrative and performative.

An ethnography of dance begins with the premise that dancers, choreographers, spectators and researchers inhabit aesthetic systems rooted in cultural conventions (Kaeppler Reference Kaeppler2000). Dance ethnography focuses on how participants name and describe movement and conceptualise dance and its purposes. It analyses the formation of ‘affective atmospheres’ (Anderson Reference Anderson2009), which produce effects on audiences and dancers, and it investigates the relationship between movement and embodied knowledge (Reed Reference Reed1998).

This chapter delves into dance in relation to ethno-racial elements, the representation of identity and the development of anti-racist agendas. The focus is on how the Colombian Afro-contemporary dance company Sankofa Danzafro develops anti-racist narratives through a particular aesthetic and a political positioning that criticises racism’s impact on Black lives in Colombia. Among Sankofa’s anti-racist strategies are i) challenging stereotypes about Afro-descendant people, emphasising the importance of ‘listening’ to the message of the dance, rather than highlighting the aesthetic visuality of the performance; ii) exploring how the embodied knowledge present in Afro-Colombian traditions can be used as a creative resource and a source of ‘Afro-referentiality’; and iii) combining traditional and contemporary Afro-Colombian rhythms and movements to create musicality and choreography within an anti-racist narrative framework. We will identify these strategies in a recent Sankofa Danzafro choreographic creation, Detrás del sur: Danzas para Manuel (Behind the South: Dances for Manuel [referring to Manuel Zapata Olivella], 2021).

We start by viewing dance as a ‘place of enunciation’, both political and aesthetic, which aims to break into the racialised social space of art and ideas of race, particularly concerning Black people in Colombia (see Chapter 1). In theories of enunciation, discourses are ways of intervening in the world through language (Van Dijk Reference Van Dijk2019). However, discursive meanings are not transparent; they depend on the context of communication, on extra-linguistic factors – social, ethnic-racial, political, emotional, and so on – and on the relationships among speakers and listeners. Therefore, discursive meanings exhibit a certain opacity (Benveniste Reference Benveniste1971). Our focus is on how Sankofa Danzafro’s dance moves between this opacity and the transparency of its messages. This interplay of opacity and transparency characterises anti-racist proposals based on dance, which also depend on the degree of engagement between the company and its audiences.

We approach Sankofa’s work from the perspective of what Jacques Rancière (Reference Rancière and Arditi2000) calls ‘artistic practices’ linked to political processes of the production of subjectivities that seek to destabilise established orders of the ‘sensible’ (that which is sensed and which makes sense) and its visibility in art and society (Rancière Reference Rancière2005). In terms of a ‘place of enunciation’, we argue that Sankofa’s work has a discursivity that is both performative and narrative (Austin Reference Austin1990), and is characterised by a bodily and spatial materiality (Butler Reference Butler1993), reflected in the spaces and acts of dancing. From a discursive perspective, performance contributes to the construction of affective atmospheres (Anderson Reference Anderson2009; Wetherell Reference Wetherell, Maxwell and Aggleton2013) in which the assemblage of bodies, movements and aesthetic elements generates anti-racist effects.

We reflect, first, on the role of movement and engagement in constituting the ‘affective atmospheres’ that produce an ‘anti-racist emotionality’. Next, we discuss different perspectives that shape the politics of the category ‘Afro’ in its relation to Afro-contemporary dance and anti-racism in the work of Sankofa Danzafro. Third, we describe the anti-racist strategies that guide the construction of Sankofa Danzafro’s narratives, focusing on the work Detrás del sur: Danzas para Manuel.

The Joyful Song of the Parrots: Bodies and Togetherness – An Anti-Racist Emotionality?

In the spring of 2021, following the most challenging period of the COVID-19 confinement, mobility began to be restored in Colombia. Although life had not returned to normal, people could now travel and see friends and family. Carlos Correa was able to accompany the dancers and director of Sankofa Danzafro as they left the city of Medellín for an artistic retreat in Tumaco, a town surrounded by tropical rainforest on the southern Pacific coast of Colombia. We went there to finalise the choreography and music for Detrás del sur. Over twenty-two days, the members of Sankofa formed, as dancers would say, ‘one body’ (see Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1

Sankofa Danzafro dancers in their rehearsal retreat in Tumaco, March 2021

(© Carlos Correa Angulo, by permission).

Sankofa’s dancers are young Afro-Colombians whose families come from rural areas of the Pacific and Caribbean regions of Colombia. Most of them have been directly or indirectly impacted by the armed conflict and violence in those territories, without this defining their identities. In fact, these events are rarely mentioned when the group is together (although some of Sankofa’s artistic creations tackle these themes, for instance, the 2018 piece Fecha límite [Deadline]).Footnote ² Some were born in the city of Medellín and others have migrated alone or with their families to the city in search of better opportunities or fleeing violence. Among the dancers, we can find stories with elements in common where family tragedies, structural violence in the region of origin and experiences of racism intermingle with personal entrepreneurial projects, attachment to certain musical styles and religious traditions (including a type of Afro-Catholicism particular to Colombia’s Pacific region). There is also lots of dancing, laughter and endless parties, with an abundant repertoire of Afro-urban rhythms and genres that they enjoy and reference in their personal dance explorations or with other companions. The most popular genres include salsa choque, exotic, popping, break dancing, funk, locking and krumping.Footnote ³

The dance performance Detrás del sur was inspired by the book Changó, el gran putas (Changó, the Biggest Badass, 1983) by Afro-Colombian intellectual and writer Manuel Zapata Olivella (see Chapter 1). The book narrates the genesis of Afro-descendant communities in the Americas. Not easily classified as a novel, Changó, el gran putas adopts an epic style that, in the words of the book’s prologue writer, Darío Henao, summarises 500 years of the history of Black people in the Americas by re-interpreting historical facts through ‘mythical realism’, a style that combines ‘imagination and myth to reconstruct the memory of Afro-American peoples using the Yoruba cosmology of the Bantu peoples of sub-Saharan Africa’ (Henao Reference Henao and Olivella2010: 12). Because it narrates this history using Afro religious, spiritual and epistemic frames of reference, the novel has recently been recognised by literary historiography in Colombia as an expression of the anti-racist work that Zapata Olivella developed over more than four decades. It makes extensive use of ‘Afro-referentiality’, one of the anti-racist strategies adopted by the Black movement in Colombia.Footnote ⁴

Rather than being an adaptation of Zapata Olivella’s book, Detrás del sur is an embodied and danced version of the book based on reflections provoked by its reading. Sankofa’s choreographer and dancers experienced an ‘affective connection’ with the book’s depictions of exodus, struggles, the geographies of pain, helplessness and the need to come together that are experienced by the book’s characters after being violently uprooted from their place of origin in Africa and forced to settle in the Americas. According to some writers on anti-racism (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2005; Eddo-Lodge Reference Eddo-Lodge2021), affective connection is what characterises the durability of a global Black community with an Afro-diasporic consciousness imbued with the trauma of enslavement and the struggle for freedom.

During the retreat’s working days, which lasted up to eight hours, Rafael Palacios organised several exercises of exploration and creation based on the book. Dancers, musicians, and others present experienced the creation of affective atmospheres, which were characterised by ambiguity and indeterminacy when people tried to describe their affective-emotional states (Anderson Reference Anderson2009). There was also a ‘non-conscious experience of intensity’ (Shouse Reference Shouse2005) that at times generated emotions connected to personal memories of painful events and everyday experiences of racism. Carlos Correa recorded the creation of these affective atmospheres in field notes:

The formation of affective atmospheres involves ‘ways of naming collective affects’ (Anderson Reference Anderson2009: 78), which have the ability to be transmitted from one body to another and between human and non-human entities (Brennan Reference Brennan2004). This transmission occurs in spaces charged with affective forces, as ‘currents’ emerging from ‘bodies affecting other bodies and yet exceeding the bodies they emerge from’ (Anderson Reference Anderson2009: 78). The analytical distinctions between affect, emotions and feelings are not entirely clear (Shouse Reference Shouse2005). In the ethnographic episode here, several elements converge that are part of the so-called affective turn characterised by an ‘interest in embodiment, emotions, and aesthetics … and the in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon’ (Caze and Lloyd Reference Caze and Lloyd2011: 3).

Among dancers, musicians and Sankofa’s director, the conscious exploration of emotions leads on to the formation of narratives wrapped in an anti-racist emotionality. The allusion to events of everyday racism mingled with reflections on the uprootedness and exile of people in Changó, el gran putas brings about the establishment of an affective atmosphere charged with meaning, on the one hand, and affective ‘intensity’ on the other. We argue that the affective dimension of creating Detrás del sur has several phases in which each dancer first engages with the novel, then with their experiences of daily racism, next with other dancers and, finally, with the affective atmosphere formed by relations between human and non-human entities (dancers, birds, music, sound, movement, corporealities, space, territory, etc.).

Our argument, in line with Anderson (Reference Anderson2009: 79), is that dance is an ‘aesthetic object’ that displays an ‘affective quality’ with a gradation of ‘intensity’ specific to a given context. Dance works with emotionality and affectivity in the same way as with the tension between the subjective and the objective. There is a back-and-forth between two oppositions, ‘narrative/non-narrative and semiotic/asignifying’, with emotion being associated with narrative and signification, and affect with non-narrative and asignifying (Anderson Reference Anderson2009: 80). The dancers’ initial difficulty in expressing in words what they were experiencing with their bodies is illustrative of this tension between the narrative and the non-narrative, the verbal and the nonverbal, the cognitive and the bodily, emotion and sensation. We encounter these tensions when we investigate embodied phenomena of movement, such as dance, from the perspective of affectivity.

During the creation process of Detrás del sur, there were different intensities of engagement that formed affective atmospheres, configuring an Afro-referential anti-racist emotionality that emerged from the collective space generated by sharing experiences of racism. Sankofa Danzafro’s anti-racist strategy analyses the bodily sensations and emotions generated when the traumatic experiences of everyday racism are intentionally embodied. Knowing how racism is felt through movement, body memory and intersubjective experience is the first step in developing a dance-based anti-racist consciousness among the company’s members.

Engagement is a process charged with affectivity. In the process of creating Detrás del sur, there were different degrees of engagement that are configurations of anti-racist affectivity. The first register of engagement occurred with the reading of Manuel Zapata Olivella’s book, which situates the origins of Afro-descendants in the Americas in a collective experience of pain that is deeply emotional and leaves traces in the bodily memory. Second, there was an engagement with the characters in the book and their stories. These stories are characterised by the collective ‘trauma’ of enslavement and by collective struggles for freedom, adaptation and the creation of new conditions to live in a situation of domination. Trauma and tenacity, pain and bravery, mourning and courage are mixed together. These feelings can be defined, according to Eric Shouse (Reference Shouse2005), as sensations ‘that have been checked against previous experiences and labelled’, and that allow ‘making sense of the world from experience and not from representation’ (Besserer Alatorre Reference Besserer Alatorre2014: 13).

An intersubjective relationship and affective connection is formed between the Black dancers and fictional characters who share traumatic experiences of racial discrimination and a common struggle against domination and racism. This emotional identification is preceded by an experimentation with sensations, music and movements that create a spatialisation of affectivity. In this phase of engagement, the aesthetic-material interaction between dancers, music and movements involves movements that embody the sensations produced by racism, felt as the ‘curse’ that connects their own life experiences with those of historical fictional characters with whom they share a common origin. The work of exploring sensations through body and movement is what Shouse (Reference Shouse2005) calls ‘affect’, whose ‘abstractivity’ makes it transmissible in ways that feelings and emotions are not.

Now, one of the ways in which affect circulates and impacts on others is through assemblages of bodies (Anderson Reference Anderson2009; Massumi Reference Massumi1995). Dancers’ individual explorations lead into collective explorations of a shared sense of being part of a painful event that is both historical and contemporary. The interaction with the music and with elements of the environment such as the roar of the sea, birdsong and weeping contribute to an anti-racist emotionality that forms when individual sensations are made conscious as the dancers come together and can then be described in emotional terms – anger, pain, uncertainty, etc. This anti-racist emotionality makes conscious the painful emotions that racism provokes in the lives and histories of Black people and embodies them in order to remove their paralyzing force. To do conscious work with emotions through the body is to learn to control them. Racism works with a surreptitious emotionality, producing discriminatory events and racialisations that reproduce racial stereotypes and structural racism. When the Sankofa dancers in Detrás del sur choose to inhabit the place of the emotional pain that racism causes, as a historical and contemporary experience, they are undermining its manifestations and, consequently, dealing with the problem. Thus, examining how racism feels in the body is a way of confronting it from a conscious emotionality, which seeks to counteract racism by working with the body and its capacity to construct narrativity through dance.

The ‘Afro’ in Afro-Contemporary Dance and Anti-Racist Perspectives

The definition of ‘contemporary’ has been the subject of debates both within and outside the field of dance (Siegmund Reference Siegmund, Conde-Salazar and Martínez2003). When and where does the contemporary begin in dance? Does the contemporary refer to a temporal, technical or aesthetic notion?

According to Adeline Maxwell, the consensus is that contemporary dance emerged from a break with the aesthetic ideals and techniques of classical ballet, when Isadora Duncan, Lote Fuller and Ruth St. Denis in the USA, alongside Rudolf Von Laban, Mary Wigman and Kurt Jooss in Germany, proposed various innovations – for example, dispensing with the pointe shoes in ballet, making movements on the floor – that led to new forms of dance, which ‘quickly moved from experimentation to academization’ (Maxwell Reference Maxwell and Maxwell2015: 23). Contemporary dance became institutionalised as a supposedly ‘universal’ dance with its own aesthetics and ways of creating narratives and rhythmic patterns.

Sankofa defines its project as ‘Afro-contemporary’.Footnote ⁶ Although it shares with contemporary dance a temporal frame that places it in ‘the now’, for Sankofa being contemporary entails challenging the racism experienced by Black people today. In Afro-contemporary dance, the ‘Afro’ is a contested field where notions of difference and particularity overlap. Eduardo Restrepo (Reference Restrepo2021: 21–22) identifies four meanings around the term Afro. First, Afro can subsume ‘Black’ by emphasising racialised aspects of difference. Second, Afro can refer to ancestry, kinship and a community of common origin. A third emphasis is on ‘traces of Africanness’ that might be identified in the transnational Afro-diasporic community. Finally, Afro refers to cultural traits characteristic of Black communities, without these necessarily being African in origin.

Behind the politics of naming and conceptualising such ideas as ‘Black’, ‘Afro’, ‘African origin’, ‘Afro-diasporic’, ‘African’, and ‘Afro-descendant’, there are both racialisation mechanisms and sensibilities that underlie political subjectivities (Lao-Montes Reference Laó-Montes2009). Some meanings of ‘Afro’ become dominant for certain contexts, while others quickly fall into disrepute or disuse, depending on the confluence of national and international actors, who may be internal or external to Afro-descendant mobilisations (Wade Reference Wade and Restrepo2013).

In the field of contemporary Afro dance, where Sankofa Danzafro is located, anti-racism is expressed primarily by the decision to be explicitly ‘Afro’ through the embodied practice of dance. This means that contemporary Afro dance seeks to be associated with affirmations of Afro identity at local and Afro-diasporic levels. Transnational ethnic affiliations play with the overlapping political meanings of Afro. Thus, for example, in the case of Sankofa Danzafro, at times the Afro is emphasised as belonging to an Afro-diasporic community, at other times there is an open affirmation of common ancestry, or the racialisation of a re-signified Blackness, or an ethnic affirmation that politicises ‘Black culture’. These moorings and displacements of the meaning of Afro in the positionings of Sankofa and its dancers are emphasised according to the contexts of interlocution, whether those are funding institutions (almost always state-owned) or festivals and tours with their diverse audiences.

The contemporary aspect of Afro-contemporary dance is framed by the intention to explore, based on the current conditions in which dance is performed, the traditions – the past – that influence its dramaturgy and narratives. As discussed at the conference ‘African Contemporary Dance? Questioning Issues of a Performance Aesthetic for a Developing and Independent Continent’, held as part of the JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience festival (Durban, 2004), the term ‘Afro-contemporary’ seeks to establish a methodology for critically examining tradition and engaging it in a dialogue with the challenges faced by African societies (Douglas et al. Reference Douglas, Sichel, Liadi, Noël, Danster, Cuvilas and Linyekula2006: 107–112). In simpler terms, Afro-contemporary dance is seen as a creative technique.

The JOMBA! conference debates about Afro-contemporary dance, involving renowned African choreographers, are echoed in the ideas of Rafael Palacios. For Palacios, tradition is not an immutable flow coming from a static past. Rather, he conceives it as a dynamic space for the exploration and deep understanding of Afro-descendant cultures. In various conversations, Palacios has emphasised tradition as a ‘place to return to through investigation’.

This critical approach to the past is fundamental in Afro-contemporary dance and is of vital importance for Sankofa as a company. The word sankofa originates in the systems of thought of the Akan people of present-day Ghana: it means going back to the past, to the roots, as a way to understand the present and envision the future. Sankofa is symbolised by a bird whose feet are pointing forwards, while its head is turned backwards to grasp an egg with its beak. Thus, revisiting the past is a way of creating one’s own history, which is constructed from the perspective of Afro peoples in all their heterogeneity and uniqueness. The politics of history, which arises from examining the past, is an essential condition to face the problems that currently affect the Afro-diasporic community.

The director, choreographer and dancers must therefore investigate tradition, enquire into its meanings, contextualise its uses, and not simply ‘learn the technique’. The investigation of tradition is the first step in an anti-racist process of decolonising dances and bodies and liberating their potential. A critical examination of tradition leads to an awareness of the aestheticised racialisations that persist and are reproduced by Black people themselves in some of their dances, albeit with the aim of dismantling them, locating their origin and showing that they resulted from a process of domination that tamed subjectivity and shaped the expression of Black identities. From this anti-racist perspective, the expression ‘decolonising the body’ refers to exploring the forms of domestication of the body in Afro dances, a process that can be seen in various elements: these include body postures and clothing that express a relationship of submission (for example, typical costumes of Afro-Colombian dances in which female dancers wear aprons, dance with their heads bowed, assume a posture of servitude, etc.). The domestication of the body is also seen through the surveillance of sexuality, controlling dance as an incitement to sexual debauchery. This idea about dance justified many of the prohibitions of Black dances during and after the colonial period. From these mechanisms of control, the rhythmic capacities and potentials of Black bodies were diminished and subordinated through the imposition of forms of dance considered less ‘erotic’ and more ‘civilised’.

If the ‘Afro’ in Afro-contemporary dance implies an examination of the past, it also refers to techniques of creation and methodologies of dance research based in Africa. There is a genealogy that locates the origin of Afro-contemporary dance in the Mudra Afrique school, in Senegal, in the context of the struggles for the decolonisation of Africa and a unity based on the ‘common destiny’ of all Afro-descendants as proclaimed by Pan-Africanism (Adi Reference Adi2018; Shepperson Reference Shepperson1962). Under the premise that through knowledge of the past (one’s own history) and awareness of the present one could confront the challenges that the future would bring to African peoples, in 1977 Léopold Sédar Senghor and Maurice Béjart set about the task of founding the Centre Africain de Perfectionnement et de Recherche des Interprètes du Spectacle Mudra Afrique (African Performing Artists Centre for Development and Research, Mudra Afrique). Germaine Acogny, considered the mother of Afro-contemporary dance, originally from Benin, was appointed director of the Mudra Afrique school, becoming its most emblematic figure.Footnote ⁷

The Mudra Afrique school as led by Germaine Acogny around African dances can be defined as a postcolonial cultural production, whose intentions, in Acogny’s words, were to combat stereotypes about Afro bodies and ‘colonial ideologies reinforced by professional dance training institutions’ (Swanson Reference Swanson2019: 50). In her ethnography of Acogny’s École des Sables, Amy Swanson identified several principles taught there that give identity to Afro contemporary dance: the creation of a movement vocabulary by adopting a known dance structure, but endowing it with an African aesthetic; the inclusion of aesthetics influenced by the natural environment and the surrounding dancers; and the search for traditional knowledge to find routes to narrate the present (Swanson Reference Swanson2019: 50–54). The emphasis on dissociated movement, the transmission of a collective flow of energy when dancing, the undulation of the body, whose central axis is the spine, circular formations and diagonal steps are some of the elements that characterise Germaine Acogny’s technique and that are employed by Rafael Palacios in his dance training, along with variations that he has introduced.

The Mudra Afrique school and Germaine Acogny laid the foundation for many African dancers from Senegal, Ghana, Kenya, Benin and Burkina Faso, among others, to enter the institutional system of African dance education with high standards of quality and training. Afro-contemporary dance arrived in Colombia in 1997, introduced by Rafael Palacios; he had had over five years of training in France and Africa, under Acogny herself and Irene Tassembedo, one of Acogny’s first disciples, who has her own school of Afro-contemporary dance in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. That same year Sankofa Danzafro was born in the city of Medellin, Colombia. By the mid 2000s, under the influence of Palacios, a handful of Afro-contemporary dance companies emerged on the national dance scene, with the main ones located in Medellín, Cartagena, Cali, Barranquilla and Bogotá. Among these, Sankofa Danzafro stands out for its explicit political commitment to the fight against stereotypes, which is at the genesis of Afro-contemporary dance from the Mudra School to the present day. The company’s main motto is ‘We dance not only to be seen, but to be heard’, emphasising the anti-racist character of their works.

Afro-contemporary dance quickly went from experimentation to standardisation after its entry into the market of global dance cultures, characterised by an exoticising fascination with everything defined as ‘African’, which turned Afro-contemporary dance into a commodity consumed mainly by the USA and Europe, and more recently by Latin America (Kringelbach and Skinner Reference Kringelbach, Skinner, Kringelbach and Skinner2014; Maxwell Reference Maxwell and Maxwell2015; Samuel Reference Samuel2011; Swanson Reference Swanson2019). Added to this is the danger Rafael Palacios warns against of the ‘emptying of meaning’, which, by decontextualising Afro-contemporary dance from the subjects and territories where it is practiced, not only loses sight of the political and contested epistemological meanings that are expressed through the dance, but also ignores the racism that Afro dancers face as racialised subjects in the world.

Sankofa’s Contemporary Afro-Colombian Dance and Anti-Racist Strategies in Detrás del Sur

During 2017, while Rafael Palacios was pursuing a master’s degree on epistemologies of the South in Ecuador, he directed La mentira complaciente (The Complacent Lie). This Afro-contemporary work focuses on how Black people have to ‘embody’ racialised social stereotypes about their sexuality, histories and identities in order to be integrated or ‘consumed’ in the art market and especially the field of dance. During the exploratory exercises, the director asked each dancer to experiment with an element that would be part of the dramaturgy of the work: the loincloth. Several of the dancers expressed their concern about having to wear a garment that has symbolised the barbarism that supposedly characterises Black populations. Palacios explained that he wanted them to become corporeally aware of what it means to wear/embody a stereotype that has for so long denigrated Afro populations. The aim was to awaken a degree of attention to corporeality and to the sensations – the autonomous manifestation of affectivity (Massumi Reference Massumi1995) – provoked by the sensation of having to wear a denigrating garment. The dancers would then have to combat those sensations using movement and dance channelled through ‘technique’ – that is, the dance knowledge they had already learned from traditional dances in their regions of origin – to transform them into something new, endowing them with ‘narrativity’, that is, with the ability to express contemporary human experience from a specific positionality (Torres Perdigón Reference Torres Perdigón2021).

This exercise of bringing attention to sensation allows us to analyse several constitutive aspects of Sankofa Danzafro’s Afro-contemporary dance project: working with embodied knowledge in a conscious way; seeing movement as an expression of multiple materialities; co-producing spaces that can be both physical – movements in a place – and intersubjective – shared interior and imaginative space.

One of Sankofa’s dancers who has been dancing in the company for more than fifteen years said that he felt suffocated and overwhelmed when he first wore the loincloth. So he decided to turn to prior knowledge he had about a traditional dance, currulao, from his home region, Tumaco, a city on the Colombian Pacific coast. Among the genres of currulao, there was a work dance that was performed during the rice harvest. The dust from the rice caused the skin to itch and this gave rise to a type of dance that he learned as a child. While he was doing his dance explorations with the loincloth, he felt his own body remembering the movements and body sensations of the rice harvest dance. He began to make movements that connoted annoyance, irritability, discomfort. For example, to the rhythmic beat of male and female cununos (a type of conga drum), he would shake and brush invisible dust off his skin, scratch in desperation, pull at his sweaty clothes to remove them, contort himself, make rapid hand and foot movements that then gave way to a state of surrender, only to return with greater vigour, like someone seeking to get rid of an itchy sensation all over his body. All these bodily sensations were associated with the unpleasant feeling of wearing the loincloth. The stereotypes that materialised in the loincloth caused itching. This is what Sankofa Danzafro’s contemporary Afro-Colombian dance project is all about: to make use of embodied knowledge to allow rhythmic explorations that challenge the discomfort caused by ‘carrying/embodying’ racial stereotypes, which can then be contested using conscious and reflexive movement in front of audiences observing Black dances, who receive a message that has to be ‘heard’.

Detrás del sur: Danzas para Manuel

According to Derek McCormack (Reference McCormack2008), dance analysis encompasses the body, space and cultural geographies, as well as the various ways in which bodies move. Because of this, both dance and ‘danced movement’ are culturally produced and express an attitude that is both social and political and must be analysed beyond representation and meaning (Thrift Reference Thrift, Keith and Pile1997).Footnote ⁸ Dance performance does not always attribute a particular significance to each movement. As Rafael Palacios says in the epigraph at the beginning of this chapter, the movements and the cadence of dancing bodies express a pleasant gracefulness that often only relates to the dramaturgy or choreography of the work. However, when it comes to anti-racism in dance, sequences of movement, interpretation of gestures, music and dramaturgical elements such as lights and costumes weave a narrative that delivers a concrete message to audiences. In that sense, to dance is to tell a story.

Detrás del sur: Danzas para Manuel is divided into five acts, mirroring the structure of Zapata Olivella’s book. These acts do not obey a spatio-temporal linearity. Instead, they present a narrative unity that emphasises Afro-descendants’ contestation of the structural conditions of racism they face. The acts mix together rhythms arising from experimentation with the music of Afro-Colombian communities (of the Colombian Pacific and Caribbean regions) and fusions of Afro-urban rhythms. The names and order of the acts changed during the development of the work, but at this early stage the first act was ‘Muntu’: it addresses the emergence of the Afro diaspora in the Americas, the role of race mixture as a founding metaphor, and the birth, rebellion and death of Benkos Biojó (associated with the orisha Changó in Zapata Olivella’s work).Footnote ⁹ The next act, ‘Diaspora’ (also called ‘The Ship’), symbolises the transatlantic voyage and the dispersion of Africans and their descendants in America. Here an atmosphere of desperation and agitation is depicted, combining strong and emphatic movements with contortions and elevations. The following act, ‘Unction’, represents the orishas and ancestors in communion with the Afro men and women, highlighting how they bestow wisdom, knowledge and value on the muntu. In Figure 4.2, the middle figure represents muntu, who anoints the figures on either side, who are the children of muntu. The scenes are characterised by movements that imitate the atmosphere of flora and fauna, the environment and the integration of humans and nature, one of the characteristics of muntu as a philosophy and religious system. Hand movements and extensions of the torso are emphasised, along with jumps and long strides: the choreography conveys a sacred playfulness. The next act, ‘Epic 1’, represents the struggles with which the children of the diaspora fought to achieve their freedom, the fights and battles fired by rebellion. The movements and rhythms are a mixture of traditional Afro-Colombian dances and African rhythms characterised by rapid beats and explosive percussion; the choreography is based on energetic movements that require dexterity, speed and precision. The movements on stage combine several horizontal planes and the attitude of each dancer denotes pride, vigour and strength. Finally, ‘Epic 2’ depicts the struggles waged by Black communities in the present against forms of exclusion and racism and the social protests in which they participated during the 2021 national strike in Colombia.

Figure 4.2

Scene from ‘Unction’ in Detrás del sur by Sankofa Danzafro, on stage at the Joyce Theatre, New York, 2024

Figure 4.2 long description.

Figure 4.2 Long description

Mid-stage stands a female dressed in skin-tight shorts and a crop-top. On her head she wears a net that covers her entire face and from which hang long strands reaching to her knees. She represents a maternal origin figure. To her right, a female dancer, wearing a long flowing robe, squats down with body erect and arms outstretched; she also has a net covering her head and face. Opposite her is a male dancer, wearing trousers and a long sleeveless top, who adopts a position mirroring hers. He also has a net over his face and head.

(photo by Steven Pisano © Sankofa Danzafro, by permission).

Combating Stereotypes: Message and Performance

So far, we have focused on how anti-racist sensibilities are generated by affective and emotional responses among dance company members without addressing the issue of audiences, whose affective responses are also implicated in Afro-contemporary dance’s anti-racist perspectives (Correa Angulo and Alarcón Velásquez Reference Correa Angulo and Velásquez2024). As we have noted, Sankofa Danzafro’s motto is ‘We dance not only to be seen, but to be heard’, which means that strategies of creation and performance are ultimately oriented to audiences. As already mentioned, in Afro-contemporary dance – and in dance more generally – a regime of visuality predominates, particularly situated in the gaze of the spectators. As a result, the messages conveyed by the dance are often diluted by the intensity of the spectators’ aesthetic gaze on the bodies. These messages are characterised by a tension between the opacity and the transparency of their meanings, which are thus not always clear to the public and are only gradually assimilated. For example, Figure 4.3 is from a scene that, at the time, the dancers called ‘The Birth of a Warrior’, which shows a woman and the son she has just given birth to: this evokes the (re)birth in the Americas of both Changó and Benkos Biojó, referring to various meanings in Zapata Olivella’s novel. These references can be opaque for some and transparent for others, depending on their degree of familiarity with the novel.

Figure 4.3

Scene from ‘The Birth of a Warrior’ in Detrás del sur by Sankofa Danzafro, on stage at the Joyce Theatre, New York, 2024

Figure 4.3 long description.

Figure 4.3 Long description

The male dancer wears trousers and a long sleeveless top; his arms hang down by his sides. The woman, visibly pregnant, wears a long flowing robe, with her braided tresses piled up on her head, secured with a tied sash. She embraces the man, drawing his head to hers with both arms.

(photo by Steven Pisano © Sankofa Danzafro, by permission).

Although stereotypes do not operate exclusively in visual mode, they tend to work in the sphere of the visible, which serves as apparent evidence that they refer to ‘reality’. In Detrás del sur, on the other hand, there is a communicative intention that is expressed not only in the aesthetic choices of the dramaturgy, but also in the invitation to the spectator to ‘hear’ a message. In one of the musical pieces in Act 3, ‘Unction’, the vocalist repeatedly instructs the audience ‘oíd, oíd’ (hear, hear) while the dancers perform slow steps with exquisite elastic movements. This is based on the first lines of an intense poem in the first part of Changó, el gran putas: ‘¡Oídos del Muntu, oíd! / ¡Oíd! ¡Oíd! ¡Oíd! ¡Oíd! / ¡Oídos del Muntu, oíd! / He visto en sueños a Changó’ (Ears of the people, hear! / Hear! Hear! Hear! Hear! / Ears of the people, hear! / I have seen Changó in dreams). The command to hear is directed at the children of muntu, that is, to Afro people, but on stage, due to the immediacy of the performance, the instruction involves the audience. Similarly, in the first act, ‘Muntu’, a character emerges from the back of the stage reciting an unintelligible message. He shouts and makes emphatic intonations with his voice; he interpellates the audience, looking them in the face and telling them, ‘Listen, understand.’ But no one can understand, because the character speaks in jeringonza, a Spanish form of pig Latin, incomprehensible to the uninitiated. This choice of language represents the misunderstandings in communication between dancers and audiences.

One of the challenges in combating and dismantling stereotypes is the difficulty of ensuring that audiences ‘listen’ to the Others who are the objects of stereotyping. The action of listening is made possible by affective charges that underwrite the communicative aspect of the message (Van Dijk Reference Van Dijk2019). The primacy of the exoticising gaze that focuses on the dancing Black bodies thus makes it impossible to truly hear what is being communicated. The viewer’s gaze returns again and again to the bodies, their appearance, their skills, the amazing abilities they demonstrate while dancing: the unspoken premise is, ‘They are Black bodies: that’s why they can dance like that’ (see also Chapter 7).Footnote ¹⁰

Sankofa’s anti-racist work seeks to break with the gaze and its primacy in the shaping of stereotypes. As Mary Louise Pratt (Reference Pratt1997) points out, the gaze is laden with an exoticisation that makes possible the emergence of the stereotype. Víctor Segalen (Reference Segalen2017) states that exoticism arises from the operation of the senses, especially those of sight and smell, in a way that distances what is being sensed. Exoticism implies a gaze and, therefore, distance. It arises in encounters that occur in contexts of power inequality and the colonisation of bodies, territories and resources, and that, in the voluminous canon of travel literature, are represented as involving an element of surprise. The genesis of the stereotype is thus based on surprise, although once a stereotype exists, this element disappears insofar as a stereotype implies complete predictability.

Breaking with the exotic gaze is perhaps the most ambitious objective of an anti-racist strategy such as Sankofa’s. To this end, in Detrás del sur, there is a careful narrative that also generates effects of surprise, but with a very different valence. A spectator of Sankofa’s work said this:

It took me by surprise. Because you expect to find Black bodies doing one thing and suddenly they’re showing through dance, something else. We were expecting them to do one thing and they did the opposite. It was a rather uncomfortable and surprising feeling.

(Alex, focus group 1, April 2021)Footnote ¹¹

Sankofa’s works generate an anti-racist effect on the audience by using the effect of surprise in reverse. Audiences are surprised when they see Black dancers enacting a story that, far from being mere entertainment, makes viewers question how they have imagined Black people in ways that may be deeply stereotypical and that imply unequal power relationships.

In the material and symbolic reproduction of racial systems, not only are discourses generated, but also ‘structures of feelings’, as defined by Raymond Williams in the 1970s, which link mechanisms of racialisation with emotions and sensations (Berg and Ramos-Zayas Reference Berg and Ramos-Zayas2015: 655; Sharma and Tygstrup Reference Sharma and Tygstrup2015). So an emotional dimension shapes the creation of stereotypes and racialised representations that become, with use, conventional ways of knowing and relating to others (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2015).

However, racial stereotypes are not always active, just as racism is not always actively affecting Black people all the time, but needs specific spaces and moments for it to operate even without being noticed (Lentin Reference Lentin2016; Moreno Figueroa Reference Moreno Figueroa2010). There are moments when racial stereotypes are activated and deactivated during the performance, according to the audience’s degrees of connection to the narrative. In the interviews we conducted among Sankofa audiences, some participants emphasised that at first they did not understand what the works were about, but were dazzled by the dancing, the costumes, the lights and the scenery. Then, later during the performance, they suddenly felt that the message of the dance directly challenged them and made them question the image they had of Afro-descendants.

It’s something you don’t expect. There’s a moment when you realise that the dancers are talking about the racist way they are viewed by white people. Sometimes you feel uncomfortable because it’s like you’re being singled out. You realise that the whole performance is a message that seeks to show us how Afro people are treated and how they are seen in society. Then you ask yourself about the way you have looked at them up to now. It is not a performance that you go to just to see them dance and have fun; there is discomfort.

(Diego, focus group 2, May 2021)

Provoking discomfort in audiences happens when they are challenged about their imaginaries and representations of Afro-descendants. The message makes use of all kinds of histrionic and dramatic resources to achieve this effect, including satire and the exaggeration of erotic behaviour. Being ‘heard’ is often achieved not with words, but by enacting an anti-racist argument that challenges the audience at the emotional heart of their stereotypical prejudices.

In Detrás del sur, the aesthetics can be described as ‘typically Afro’. The dancers wear red cloths that wrap the body but leave the men’s torsos bare, while masks allude to an iconography that has become representative of Africanness in the global dance market (Samuel Reference Samuel2011). However, this aesthetic gradually paves the way towards a narrative that is told through dance and that has at its core forms of resistance that reveal the agency of Afro-descendant communities in overcoming historical and contemporary vicissitudes. In each of its acts, the work shows Afro communities as subjects of knowledge with forms of self-government and with religious and thought systems that have practical utility in facing the problems of daily life. The performance moves back and forth between past and present-day struggles.

Afro-Referentiality as a Creative Resource

During the creative retreat in Tumaco to develop Detrás del sur, a documentary film was made with the title Detrás del sur: Danzas para Manuel. Prácticas artísticas antirracistas (Behind the South: Dances for Manuel. Anti-Racist Artistic Practices).Footnote ¹² The documentary outlines how Afro-referentiality can be deployed as an anti-racist strategy in the several ways: these include the strengthening of bridges among Afro-descendant people; the centring of muntu and ubuntu; and the creation of work in el territorio (the territory).

Conclusion

Whether we dance to the rhythm of music or to the rhythm of life, dance is a cross-cultural expression that tells us something about the subjects who dance, their cultural practices and the stories inscribed on their bodies. The message emphasised by Sankofa Danzafro challenges the persistence of racism and its expression through stereotypes, exoticised images and the lack of recognition of Afro referents in current epistemologies. At times, Sankofa Danzafro directly alludes to racism by questioning stereotypes and elaborating narratives that dignify Afro-descent through its works. At other times, it does so through the enhancement of Afro-Colombian identities, their histories, their geographies and their knowledge embodied in dance. In this sense, Sankofa Danzafro’s Afro-contemporary dance project has a double purpose: to dismantle the racialisation of the Afro in dance and to decolonise the body by directly combating racial stereotypes about Black people. It does the former by directly questioning stereotypes and the undervaluation of Afro dance by means of conscious explorations generating an emotionality that leads to a narrative that ‘has to be heard’. The latter is achieved through a critical review of tradition to see how parts of it reproduce colonial structures that may be present in their aesthetics, movements and performance.

In Detrás del sur we can see how the anti-racist strategies in Sankofa’s creative processes construct a message that provokes sensations and questions in audiences, especially with respect to stereotypes about Afro-Colombian people, Afro-referentiality as a creative resource and the development of an Afro-representative aesthetic. These anti-racist effects are achieved in the racialised field of dance by an engaging with the audience, to varying degrees, to create an affective atmosphere combining bodily movements and sensations, which is consciously projected onto audiences to surprise and unsettle them. An open question is whether anti-racism in artistic practice is limited to an ‘effect’ that has the capacity to ‘affect’ the viewer only in the moment (Besserer Alatorre Reference Besserer Alatorre2014), or whether it produces a narrative that can survive the fleeting immediacy of performance (Taylor Reference Taylor2002, Reference Taylor2020). What is certain is that the anti-racist narrative constructed by Sankofa not only uses dance as a vehicle, it also employs other elements of discourse. Postings on social networks, synopses of the works in the handbills, the interviews given by the dancers and the director, all contribute to and complement the anti-racist strategies of the dance performance.