This paper attempts to consolidate some of the key philosophical concepts at play in choreographies created across the continent of Africa within the genre of contemporary dance. Rather than trying to trace movement vocabularies to European or African origins, I read what may lie behind the steps as being rooted in Indigenous philosophies of the human body and the more-than-human world. By examining some of the aesthetically diverse works and words of Faustin Linyekula, Germaine Acogny, Mamela Nyamza, Dada Masilo, and Vincent Mantsoe, I delineate some common themes undergirding their processes. With an analysis rooted in de/anti/post-colonial, Indigenous, and Africanist scholarship, I suggest that understanding dance as anchored in notions of cosmology, transcendence, feminism, circular time and processes of becoming in witness, are some of the ways African Contemporary Dance draws from time-honored philosophies to respond to current circumstances and envision a world beyond colonialism.
Rainy Demerson is a dance artist and scholar invested in global intersectional feminism and decolonial embodiments. She has produced her work in New York and Senegal and it has been presented in festivals across the United States and in Trinidad, Mexico, and South Africa. Demerson’s pedagogical praxis is informed by many years of teaching youth as well as formal study in the Dance Education MA at New York University. She also holds an MFA in Dance from Hollins University and a PhD in Critical Dance Studies from University of California Riverside where she published her dissertation, Decolonial Moves: Re-Membering Black Women in South African Contemporary Dance. She taught at several American universities before joining the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill in Barbados. She is also part of the guest faculty in the Hollins University MFA in Dance.