Acogny, Germaine (1944--)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Esther Baker-Tarpaga
Keyword(s):  
West African ◽  
Research Center ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Rwandan Genocide ◽  
African Dance ◽  
Classical Ballet ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Leopold Sedar Senghor

In a career that has spanned over forty years, Germaine Acogny has contributed to modernism in dance by merging culturally situated West African dances from Senegal and Benin with Western dance forms such as the Graham technique and classical ballet to create a new African dance aesthetic. Her work emerged from an African postcolonial framework, and her pedagogy codified a modernist Africanist technique. In the 1960s when African dance was viewed by some Western audiences as primitive and timeless, Acogny advocated the necessity of viewing African dance as evolving and changing. Senegal’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and French choreographer Maurice Béjart appointed Acogny director of the Senegal-based Mudra Afrique that trained African-based choreographers and teachers. Acogny has taught and performed globally and is the founder of École de Sables (School of Sands), a training, residency, and research center in Senegal. She also founded the Jant-Bi (The Sun) Company in 1996. She is known as "Mama Acogny" because she has mentored numerous young dancers and choreographers in Africa and globally. She has also been referred to as one of the founders of contemporary African dance. Fagaala (2003) is a notable touring work, which addressed the Rwandan genocide. It was a choreographic collaboration between Jant-Bi and Japan’s Kota Yamasaki in 2004.

Black Dance and the Fight for Flight

2011 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Fatou Gittens
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Black Women ◽  
West African ◽  
African Dance ◽  
Black Dance ◽  
Women Dancers ◽  
The Arts ◽  
West African Dance ◽  
Dance Companies ◽  
The 1960S

The arts have fulfilled a major historical role as mediums of expressivity for people of African descent during the 1960s. It is during this important decade that a number of political and artistic movements came to rise—like a pot waiting to boil over—as a result of decades of sociopolitical precedents that came to a head, sparking revolutionary responses by grassroots communities worldwide. This body of writing is an excerpt of a larger study the author conducted on the role of West African dance as performed by Black women dancers in New York City–based dance companies. Because of the techniques of djembe and sabar dance within traditional West African contexts for both dancers and drummers alike, the author closely examines these styles as leading examples of the types of physical movement within political movements of the 1960s era—movements that empowered and liberated oppressed peoples during moments of high tension.

The Making of the Moon

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Chambers ◽  
Jacqueline Mitton
Keyword(s):  
European Space Agency ◽  
Lunar Exploration ◽  
The Sun ◽  
The Moon ◽  
The Public ◽  
China And India ◽  
Space Agency ◽  
Lunar Prospector ◽  
Large Satellite ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter considers how the very existence of the Moon, the only large satellite in the inner solar system, is a puzzle. The Moon is sufficiently large that one would think of it as a planet if it traveled around the Sun rather than Earth. Much of what the public now knows about the Moon comes from space missions, beginning in the 1960s and early 1970s. Six American Apollo missions each landed two astronauts on the surface. Three of the Soviet Union's unmanned Luna spacecraft touched down on the surface and then returned to Earth. After a long gap, lunar exploration resumed in the 1990s, when NASA's Clementine and Lunar Prospector spacecraft went into orbit. Recently, the pace of exploration has increased again, with the European Space Agency, Japan, China, and India, as well as NASA, all sending missions to the Moon.

From the Bamboula to the Baby Dolls

Walking Raddy ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 89-108
Author(s):  
Jennifer Atkins
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
West African ◽  
African American Community ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
African Dance ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
West African Dance ◽  
Baby Doll

Baby Dolls embodied the rambunctious, ambulatory dance practices of New Orleans' African-American community, playing with ragtime dancing, a style in conversation with early twentieth century music. Baby Doll dancing referenced their contemporary situation, empowering them through ribald street jaunts full of dynamism, while also relating to other cultural practices like jazz funerals and connecting them to a historical legacy that traced back to Congo Square (and earlier). Essential to Congo Square, where the Bamboula dance featured prominently, was that West African dance aesthetics persevered but also blended with sociocultural ideas influenced by its New Orleans context. Improvisation was key. Dancing, whether in Congo Square or ragtime style, highlighted spontaneity and a spirited—even competitive—style that cultivated agency while acknowledging a communal presence. These moments (and movement) were vibrant, illuminating Baby Dolls as innovators within a rich, cultural tradition that left troubles behind as liveliness surged through their dancing processions.

Kankouran West African Dance Company, Washington, D.C.

2019 ◽  
pp. 104-113
Author(s):  
William Serrano-Franklin
Keyword(s):  
Community Development ◽  
West African ◽  
African Dance ◽  
Educational Vision ◽  
Dance Company ◽  
West African Dance ◽  
Dance Companies ◽  
The One ◽  
Artistic Director ◽  
The U.S

Amaniyea Payne, dancer/choreographer and Artistic Director of Muntu Dance Theatre, offers her reflections on Muntu’s more than four decades in Chicago, Illinois. There, in mid-west U.S.A., Muntu shines a bright and powerful light on African dance, due in major part to its artistic and educational vision, which has been influenced by Payne’s artistic research and global dance connections. Her research and artistic experiences display the seminal connections among Diaspora dance artists, highlighting their similar concerns regarding education of African, diasporic, and non-African peoples. Payne and Muntu exemplify the characteristic duality of professional African-based dance companies in the U.S.: on the one hand, she and the company develop and present fascinating, contemporary choreographies using traditional African vocabularies and on the other hand, they are enmeshed in educational projects and neighborhood and community development through dance.

J. G. Ballard

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Harlan Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Outer Space ◽  
Electronic Media ◽  
The Sun ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Freudian Psychoanalysis ◽  
Entire Life ◽  
The 1960S

This biocritical study of J. G. Ballard is the first book to account for the entire life and work of the eccentric, prolific SF author. Ballard began his career publishing short stories in SF magazines. Rather than explore outer space, his fiction explores “inner space,” drawing on the aesthetics of Surrealism and Freudian psychoanalysis. In the 1960s, he became associated with the New Wave movement in SF, which eschewed the principles of pulp SF in favor of literary modernism. Ballard’s oeuvre maps the unfolding of the mediapocalypse from the dawn of the Space Age into the 21st century; pathologized by the technology of electronic media, his characters are chronically harrowed by an implosion of real and cinematic landscapes as they struggle to find agency from the “death of affect” incited by the forces of late capitalism. Some scholarship has tried to remove Ballard from SF, arguing that he abandoned the genre halfway through his career, especially after publishing the fictional autobiography Empire of the Sun. As this book avows, however, Ballard began as, and always remained, a SF writer.

FROM LONG-TERM PATTERNS OF SEASONAL HUNGER TO CHANGING EXPERIENCES OF EVERYDAY POVERTY: NORTHEASTERN GHANA C. 1930–2000

2006 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
JÉRÔME DESTOMBES
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Evidence ◽  
West African ◽  
Anthropometric Data ◽  
Poor Diet ◽  
John Hunter ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Way

This article is a West African case-study of the nutritional history of everyday poverty. It draws on unusually rich statistical evidence collected in northeastern Ghana. In the 1930s, pioneer colonial surveys revealed that seasonal poor diet was pervasive, by contrast with undernourishment. They pave the way for constructing a new set of anthropometric data in Nangodi, a savanna polity where John Hunter completed a classic study of seasonal hunger in the 1960s. A re-survey of the same sections and lineages c. 2000, during a full agricultural cycle, shows a significant improvement in nutritional statuses, notably for women.

The Economy of West African Dance in Italy

2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 ◽  
pp. 27-31
Author(s):  
Claudia Brazzale
Keyword(s):  
West African ◽  
The Other ◽  
African Dance ◽  
The Past ◽  
African Migrants ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
West African Dance ◽  
Important Form ◽  
Diasporic Communities

Over the past decade, so-called African dance has become increasingly popular in Italy, growing in tandem with local West African diasporic communities and the national concern over immigration. Although the circulation of African dance provides West African migrants with an important form of self-identification and subsistence, it often revolves around problematic discourses rooted on the myth and romance with the primitive. Constructing and capitalizing on the fetishization of black bodies, African dance mobilizes complex economies of desire that rest on an orientalist fascination with the Other. While these economies reify racist stereotypes, they also enable significant communities of knowledge and interracial encounters.

Kumbuka African Drum and Dance Collective

2019 ◽  
pp. 123-142
Author(s):  
Ausettua Amor Amenkum
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
San Francisco Bay ◽  
San Francisco Bay Area ◽  
The United States ◽  
African Dance ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
History Of ◽  
Local Impact ◽  
Dance Companies ◽  
The 1960S

Halifu Osumare presents a regional history of African dance in the United States, focusing on the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Area from the 1960s to the present. Beginning with the first cohort of local Dunham-trained dance instructors in the 1950s and 1960s to more contemporary instructors hailing directly from the African continent. She analyzes how African and African diasporic dance traditions became important fixtures in the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Area, becoming powerful tools in teaching social justice through various community programs and dance companies that extended from Ghana, the Congo, Senegal, and Liberia into that region. Osumare’s research traces the formation of artistic lineages, while offering insights about the local impact of African dance instruction as a narrative history of how the Bay Area became a regional powerhouse in the African dance field.

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