Nadine Sieveking

‘C’est d’abord moi’: performing the identity of a professional female choreographer

ABSTRACT Within the ideological frame of ‘global art’, contemporary dance promotes norms of social and gender equality and celebrates cultural diversity in the form of highly individualized representations of collective experiences and aspirations. This inherently contradictory legitimizing ideology has opened up opportunities for female choreographers from Africa, an underrepresented category in this genre. Focusing a woman artist from Burkina Faso and one from Senegal, I examine how they use cultural and gendered differences as resources to position themselves on international art markets in a way that reflects ‘the dialectical doubleness of mediation’ (Mazzarella, William. 2004. “Culture, Globalization, Mediation.” Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (1): 345–367). In representing on stage the social conditions out of which their work has emerged, they potentially forge a career, thereby recursively remediating these social conditions. At the same time, they contribute to the creation of a translocally and transnationally embedded space where difference is shared, made and unmade on discursive and embodied levels in the performances of a cosmopolitan professional community.

Introduction: Performing space in urban Africa

January–February 2011, Tahrir Square, Cairo. Hundreds of thousands gathered on a square that had been named tahrir (liberation) in commemoration of previous Egyptian revolutions. History was made in a place that already marked earlier histories. The square was, again, transformed into a space of historical importance and was, again, signified as a revolutionary site of liberation. Closer to the ground, however, the unfolding experiences were not as straightforward as the post factum story renders them. The square was transformed into a focal point of political, urban, historical, national, symbolic and global importance by people having backgrounds and aspirations of their own. They wrote key pages of their own life histories as much as they wrote world history, urban or national history. The square enabled the emergence of a particular social space signified through practices that can be understood as performative: the square was occupied, speeches were staged, drama and intimacy were shared on Facebook and Al-Jazeera, and people slept, cooked, cared – in short, lived – on a square that gained political importance by becoming part of daily life, part of the city and the nation, drawing on history and global connections, and at the same time shaping a more promising place in which to live their lives.2 Over 6,000 km to the south, 35 years earlier, the Soweto uprising intensified the confrontation between the apartheid regime and its opponents. For more than a