Sörgel's new book looks at the work of a broad range of contemporary African dance theatre choreographers and dancers. It deals with an often neglected conversation on issues surrounding definitions of African/contemporary dance. It exposes the reality that due to the centralization of a select few (typically Euro-American) artists, the taught canon of contemporary dance ‘do[es] not sufficiently acknowledge the impact of Africanist dance forms on modern and contemporary dance’ and their position within ‘a much more complex genealogy of global movement practices that circulated across the Circum-Atlantic during the Middle Passage and later migratory movements in cross-fertilization with European and Asian dance cultures’ (p. 7).
The central chapters look at the work of twelve choreographers working in continental Africa and the diaspora: Alphonse Tiérou, Zab Maboungou, Germaine Acogny, Faustin Linyekula, Franck Edmond Yao, Gregory Maqoma, Robyn Orlin, Nora Chipaumire, Alesandrea Seutin, Susanne Linke, Salia Sanou and Seydou Boro. Sörgel identifies the primary audience of these artists’ work, as well as the curators of the festival circuits they perform within, to be predominantly white. The analysis studies how dialogical relationships are built on these racialized axes of power between performer/spectator/curator.
A running theme throughout is the meaningful role of time–space relationships within the pieces studied. Sörgel contends that the works deconstruct a key misrepresentation of ‘African dance’ as fitting into binary categorizations of traditional (historical) or modern (contemporary). Interconnected with this observation is an analysis of ‘the underlying choreographic tactic that asserts the power of life in death as a decolonizing strategy to counter capitalist necropolitics’ (p. 124). Drawing from Mbembe, Sörgel explains that necropolitics ‘emerges as part of the process of colonial modernity’ (p. 51) wherein white supremacy rests upon the death and killing of those who are oppressed and Othered. This poignant analysis highlights how the works manifest forms of empowerment and self-realization through the themes of death and connectivity with ancestors.
It is important to note that as much as this is a book about contemporary African dance theatre, it also very much about whiteness and how it is ‘built on discursive objectification of the seen as an outside’ (p. 3). The book's publication comes at a time when Dance and Theatre Studies, and indeed the world, are beginning a shift in consciousness thanks to the work of largely BIPOC activists, artists and scholars surrounding decolonization and anti-racism. In writing this book, Sörgel – herself a white European scholar – is engaging in the urgent work of decolonial awareness building from a white positionality. She explains, ‘What I needed to deal with was my own slow awakening to the necessary deconstruction of Africa, via a phenomenological detour that radically interrogates my own cultural socialization and embodiment of whiteness’ (pp. 1–2). Sörgel carefully unpicks the systems and processes which enable the white gaze to function, recognizing the complexities of how it factors within practices of spectatorship. She employs the idea of un-suturing whiteness, which creates the image of a thread slowly unwinding around a thimble, losing tension as it does so, with each unravelling presenting new dimensions to contend with. Her thoughtful approach to un-suturing her own white gaze offers an example and a call to action to others in similar positions. The theoretical analysis of whiteness and capitalist–colonialist necropolitics is not entirely new, but it is lamentably amiss in swathes of literature coming from a white positionality within the fields of dance and theatre studies.
Something that worked well in Sörgel's theorization is how she discusses affect in relation to the white gaze. The analysis develops a complex theorization of the subject area, infusing perspectives from phenomenology (Henry, Waldenfels) and critical race theory (Mbembe, Yancy) to study the works from intersecting perspectives. The analysis highlights how the dance works themselves activate the processes of racial un-suturing that she describes. She explains, ‘Spectators are … invited to meet the performer on his or her terms and to co-create a new way of looking at our coexistence in this un-making of colonialist discourses and ways of thinking and knowing the world’ (p. 123). One could take issue with a book on contemporary African dance theatre focusing so closely on the white gaze for the way this risks marginalizing blackness. The book treads a thin line between un-suturing whiteness in order to challenge its power versus overemphasizing its role and missing how contemporary African dance theatre also resonates beyond this frame of analysis. Sörgel navigates this carefully, with theoretical rigour and reflective integrity. Indeed, it is the insights developed from this nuanced reflective stance that make the book a remarkable contribution to urgent debates and methodological approaches for dealing with whiteness within Dance and Theatre Studies.
