African Diaspora Explored through Dance

Lovely D. Nicolas stomps and dances across the Lowell Lecture Hall stage as her mother, Elizabeth A. McAlister, speaks at the podium. McAlister, Associate Professor of Religion at Wesleyan College, is weaving together Haitian history, dance theory, and how she met her daughter at a dance celebration in Haiti. Nicolas, with swinging hips and jerking shoulders, gives her mother’s words powerful bodily life. Then a rattling drum rhythm kicks up, and suddenly Nicolas is urging the audience to dance in the center of the stage. For five minutes, the music transforms the hall into a pulsing crowd of shuffling feet and moving bodies. McAlister and Nicolas’ piece, entitled “Move Your Words,” kicked off—and epitomized—the Committee on African Studies’ African Dance Diaspora symposium, which convened from March 25 to March 27.

“We were intent upon having not just a series of panels in which people read papers. We also wanted presenters and participants to get up and demonstrate what they’re thinking about these things,” said Senior Lecturer in Folklore and Mythology Deborah D. Foster, who organized the event with Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) Social Anthropology doctoral student Sharon Freda Kivenko.

With an emphasis on interdisciplinary education, the symposium examined “embodied knowledge”—the habitual motion patterns of a culture, from how we dance to how we sit and walk—and the cultural effects of the African Diaspora.

For much of March 26, panels held in the lecture hall drew together interrelated cultural elements of the Diaspora—the term given to the outward global migration of Africans from the Continent. “[The symposium is] bringing together people whose strengths lie in different areas, but we’re all interested in processes where music is present and being physically articulated. We’re figuring out what’s vital in these processes—and it’s not going to fit in just one discipline,” said GSAS Music doctoral student Corinna S. Campbell, who also helped organize the symposium.

Harvard professors and graduate students convened with roughly 20 visiting professors and artists, and read papers for events titled “Embodied Knowledge,” “Bodies in Time: Synchrony in Music and Dance,” and “African Dance: Migration and Cultural Transmission.”

For Foster and Kivenko, it was essential to integrate performance and art into the symposium. March 25 brought McAlister and Nicolas to the stage, as well as filmmaker Alla Kovgan for a screening and roundtable discussion of her experimental documentary “Nora.” On the night of March 26, music group Uhuru Afrika turned the Cambridge Queen’s Head into an African dance celebration.

Closest to the event’s ethic, interspersed dance classes pulled spectators from their seats and allowed them to physically channel the art forms they had been hearing described. A master class from acclaimed dance company director Ronald K. Brown explored dance on March 26, as did a dance workshop offered by Florida State University dance professor Jawole Willa Jo Zollar called “How We Got to the Funk.”  Yale Theater Studies lecturer Lacina Coulibaly and Boston-based drummer and choreographer Sidi Mohammed “Joh” Camara also brought movement and history to those of all skill levels. Participants danced the popular 1960s dance move Mashed Potato and the traditional and contemporary styles of African Mande dance in the middle of the lecture hall stage, where they grooved to West African rhythms and James Brown.

“We really [wanted] to offer this to the public at large, as an opportunity to not only sit and watch, but also to really learn about a part of the world and an important cultural space through their bodies,” Kivenko said.

“The symposium provides integration across disciplines, and it’s also trying to do away with these superficial body-mind splits,” Campbell said.

Foster and Kivenko, as well as Interim Dean of Arts and Humanities Ingrid Monson, first envisioned this symposium several years ago after working in Africa. This year, everything fell into place, and they were finally able to host the event. Four graduate students returned from field work in centers of Diaspora culture, and the Department of Education awarded the Committee on African Studies a Title 6 grant of $2.5 million.

Though the symposium has barely finished, Foster is already looking to the future. “This symposium at Harvard follows other such gatherings on African Diaspora dance,” she said in her opening remarks at the start of the conference. “Do we dare hope for an annual gathering on this topic?”

Like Foster, Director of the Office of the Arts Jack C. Megan is enthusiastic about hosting this type of event in the years ahead. “I think this is a model for the deeper kind of collaboration we can undertake,” Megan said. “As Harvard strengthens its commitment to arts practice, there is the increased possibility for innovation and exploration in new ways.”

—Staff writer Austin Siegemund-Broka can be reached at asiegemund-broka@college.harvard.edu.