Reading Hélène Neveu Kringelbach's ethnography, Dance Circles, took me on one of the most intellectually stimulating journeys that I have ever experienced. She examines performance not only as an aesthetic and choreographic practice, but also in relation to its tremendous capacity to shape sociality by fashioning individual selves and fuelling dialogues within the collective, against the backdrop of global arts circuits and in light of history. Four performance genres – sabar, urban popular dance, neo-traditional performance, and contemporary choreography – are selected to demonstrate how performers, who often engage in these styles concomitantly or at some point in their lives, use their creativity to fashion individual selves and to move through different social statuses (p. 2, 207). Neveu Kringelbach's book is a wonderful read, not merely because she is an anthropologist with a long history of working on Senegal, but also because she is a versatile dancer. These combined experiences account for her ability to write about embodied practices with clear kinaesthetic and visual imagery. This book demonstrates profound intelligence and makes some innovative points.
Forcefully present in the narrative, the performers, whose lives onstage and offstage overlap, ‘put on new personas as they move across social fields' (p. 7). Girls performing innovative sabar movements in the centre of the géew (circle) rather than on its margins ‘become women, and therefore potential daughters-in-law, sisters-in-law and co-wives' (p. 84). Through this women-controlled event, social juniors perform sexually suggestive movements such as the lëmbël to confidently show their most daring selves. In so doing, they mark their entry into the domain of female social competition and invert their normative presentation in the Senegalese public sphere, where deference (kersa) and modesty (sutura) towards men and women of a higher status are expected (pp. 78–9, 83–5).
Neveu Kringelbach questions the extent to which contemporary dance workshops transform the offstage lives of participants. What does it mean to be an ‘African’ who performs contemporary dance? Many who engage in this emotionally charged exercise of self-definition consider themselves ‘Africans' because their works are grounded within the neo-traditional or sabar performance genres (p. 171). But they are also ‘Africans' because of the ‘“market-led” requirements to construct a scripted “Africanity” as a straightjacket’ (p. 172). As international audiences want to hear what ‘African artists' have to say, performers must be able to explain their choreographic practice in French or English (p. 173). In a choreographic world obsessed with artists' intellectual delivery, this study stresses that it is those with limited education, often women, who struggle to achieve visibility (p. 173).
As an object of passionate debate throughout Africa, but mostly ignored in scholarly analyses of dance in the continent, embodied morality forms an original central thematic thread of the book. During the 2003 French-funded choreographic competition the Rencontres Chorégraphiques d'Afrique et de l'Océan Indien, the second-prize laureate Augusto Cuvilas presented a piece in which five women appeared on stage fully naked, sparking heated comments on indecency. Some assumed that Europeans, who had historically entertained an objectifying fascination with naked black bodies onstage, had manipulated Cuvilas, and therefore utterly devalued the choreographer's exploration of his creativity and identity beyond the scope of his African-ness (pp. 159–61).
Neveu Kringelbach also discusses the recorded urban popular dances that circulate on the internet and television and generate comments on the degeneration of urban youth, who wear bold outfits and make suggestive movements (p. 98). In a predominantly Muslim country, being seen to perform in the media constitutes a threat to one's moral and religious respectability, especially for women (pp. 109–15). Related to this development, since the mid-1990s, politicians and religious leaders have co-opted this negative coverage of popular dances to manipulate citizens' disgruntlement with the old elites by asserting their own moral superiority (pp. 116–17).
Finally, the book deals with the politics and the economics of performance production in a way that illustrates the complexity of the Senegalese performing arts industry over time. From Leopold Sédar Senghor's co-option of neo-traditional genres as instruments of cultural production and control, to the varying uses of neo-traditional performance for nation building, Senegalese postcolonial nationalist expressions and cultural politics have remained tied to France. Since the erection of the Pan-African dance school Mudra-Afrique in 1977, France has been financing the choreographic arts via training, workshops and space and through cultural agencies attached to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (pp. 52–3, 150–1). Performers must respond to the artistic demands of these institutions, a point that raises concerns over creative agency and posits the unsettling issue of choreographic standardization. Neveu Kringelbach does not shy away from this problem when interviewing a dance officer, but one wishes that she had explored this issue further (pp. 157–8).
This book is excellent because the author destroys the enduring belief that dance is innate to Africans. Generous space is given to learning processes, questions of transmission, and performers' reflective practice. She does a better job than anyone I have read so far when writing about the meanings of being seen as an African and the meanings of being whoever one decides to be. Historians of dance will draw on innovative themes of inquiry in their field. Anthropologists will marvel at the dense ethnographic detail. This grounded ethnography indeed invites a careful reading. In other words, one does not leaf through this book, but must really read it.
