Infinite Repertoire: On Dance and Urban Possibility in Postsocialist Guinea 9780226781167

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Infinite Repertoire

Infinite Repertoire On Dance and Urban Possibility in Postsocialist Guinea adrienne j. cohen

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2021 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2021 Printed in the United States of America 30  29  28  27  26  25  24  23  22  21  1 2 3 4 5 isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­76284-­5 (cloth) isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­78102-­0 (paper) isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­78116-­7 (e-­book) doi: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226781167.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cohen, Adrienne J., author. Title: Infinite repertoire : on dance and urban possibility in postsocialist Guinea / Adrienne J. Cohen. Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2020043077 | isbn 9780226762845 (cloth) | isbn 9780226781020 (paperback) | isbn 9780226781167 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Dance—Social aspects—Guinea—Conakry. | Dance—Political aspects—Guinea—Conakry. | Socialism and dance—Guinea—Conakry. | Conakry (Guinea)—Social life and customs. Classification: lcc gv1713.g92 c64 2021 | ddc 793.3/196652—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043077 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To Shashi, Jesse, Ami, Jordan, and Josh

Fare mu kolon ma. Dance cannot be known. susu adage

Contents

Notes on Orthography and Transcription ix Preface: Name-­Finding xi

Invitation: City of Dance

1

pa r t i   Aesthetic Politics, Magical Resources 1 Why Authority Needs Magic

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2 Privatizing Ballet

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3 The Discipline of Becoming: Ballet’s Pedagogy

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pa r t i i   Delicious Inventions 4 Female Strong Men and the Future of Resemblance

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5 Core Steps and Passport Moves: How to Inherit a Repertoire

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6 When Big Is Not Big Enough: On Excess in Guinean Sabar

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Epilogue: Embodied Infrastructure and Generative Imperfection

Acknowledgments  145 Addendum: Artists in the Diaspora  149 Notes  151 References  167 Index  183

Notes on Orthography and Transcription

Susu, or Sooso, is a Mande language spoken in coastal Guinea and is the lingua franca of Guinea’s capital city of Conakry. Susu was taught in schools during Guinea’s First Republic / socialist era (1958–­84) but is no longer integrated into the education system, and written material in Susu is sparse. The government made official changes to the conventions used for Susu transcription in March 1989 in order to align Susu orthography with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and in order to harmonize with other West African alphabets (IRLA 1989; Willits 1998). This new orthography is used by Guinea’s National Literacy Service (Service Nationale d’Alphabètisation) as well as by NGOs and missionaries preparing materials in Susu. Average people in Conakry, however, rarely write in Susu. When they do, they tend to use French diacritics and spelling conventions, the orthographic system taught in socialist-­era schools, or some combination of the two. My transcriptions in this book follow the new system. For presidents’ names and the names of other historical political personalities, however, I use the French system because the names may be familiar to readers and are typically written in media and scholarship with French diacritics (e.g., Sékou Touré, Lansana Conté, Alpha Condé). The following chart—­inspired by a similar one on Mande orthography by Barbara Hoffman (2000)—­demonstrates equivalences across the IPA, French, the old system of Susu orthography, and the new system and shows how current protocols align with the IPA. This chart presents my understanding of the changes made to Susu orthography after 1989 and is based on three major sources: (1) an unpublished 1989 paper on the new alphabet sponsored by Conakry’s Institute for Research on Applied Linguistics (IRLA); (2) an unpublished article entitled “A Susu Descriptive Grammar” (1998) authored by the linguist and Bible translator Brad Willits; and (3) local

x

notes on orthogr aphy and tr anscription ta b l e 1 . 1 .   Equivalencies across orthographic systems Phonetic/IPA

French

Old system / socialist era

New system / post-­1989

[e] [ɛ] open e [ɔ] open o [u] [ɲ] palatal nasal [x] velar fricative

é è ò ou ny __

e è ö u ny kh

e ɛ ɔ u ɲ x

Note: Double vowels (aa, ee, etc.) effectively double the length of the vowel sound and are phonemically contrastive.

language sections of the socialist-­era gazette Horoya-­Hebdo, which I obtained from archival research in Conakry’s national library. All Susu and French translations and transcriptions in this manuscript are mine. As Guinea was a French colony, French borrowing in Susu is common, which is reflected in the transcriptions. Susu speakers who learned French orally often leave French verbs unconjugated and interchange gendered articles. They also routinely change certain French words to reflect how they hear them; for example, the French word pastek (watermelon) is pronounced “basikɛti,” contemporain(e) (contemporary) is “contemporel,” carrefour (crossroads) is “calefur,” and so on. French words are also often embedded within Susu grammatical structures, and Susu prefixes and suffixes are added liberally to French words by Susu speakers. I transcribe these usages as they are spoken. Unless otherwise indicated, non-­English terms are always Susu. There is frequent borrowing in Conakry between Susu and Maninka, a related language spoken in much of Upper Guinea. Throughout the text, Maninka terms are indicated with the abbreviation Mka., French terms with Fr., and Susu terms that appear alongside terms in other languages are marked Su.

Preface: Name-­Finding

When I arrived at Nima’s house to go to a dance ceremony, I found her reclining on a bed that nearly filled her one-­room apartment in Matam, Conakry. Nima, who was a local dance diva, lay comfortably wrapped in a piece of colored fabric, braids swept out on the pillow. “What should I wear today?” she asked, “an African dress, or Zanet Zackson style?” I approved of the latter, curious what it would entail. She walked over to a tall pink armoire; picked out ripped jeans, a sequined white T-­shirt, and cherry-­red sneakers; and dressed herself with painstaking attention to detail. I sat down patiently on a square pouf and looked around the room. It was filled with objects that signaled Nima’s modest success as an artist. Two armoires with full-­length mirrors stood next to a rack laden with shoes arranged by color. The bed’s thick headboard featured small compartments, each with its own tiny lock, encased within a display of swirling white plastic. Large photographs in gold frames of sto­ ically posed family members and of Nima herself hung on dirty pastel walls. Shelves tucked between the armoires supported a television and DVD player covered in lace doilies and flanked by vases of plastic flowers. When Nima was finally ready, I grabbed my backpack and followed her outside and through the plastic bag–­strewn, red-­dust streets of the neighborhood. Dodging soccer balls and ducking through shortcuts, we shouted greetings: Hello! How is the afternoon? (Wo nu wali! Tana mu fenye?) / Peaceful? (Xeri fenye?) / Thank God! (Allah tantu!). The soft pattering of percussion in the distance guided us toward the crossroads where the ceremony was being held in the street. The drums grew louder until, turning a corner, they exploded into full voice as we came upon the dance event, encircled by a throng of observers. We edged through the wall of spectators into the inner clearing. An orchestra of percussionists wove elaborate rhythms while dancers, filling every

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plastic chair lining the periphery, clamored for their turns to perform. Nima didn’t wait. She brazenly grabbed the flag from the referee and shot to the solo. Her long braids flew as she tossed her head, leaping toward the musicians with a palm lifted toward the sky. She swiveled around, her body pitching forward momentarily. The lead djembe player anticipated her movement sonically as she clasped her hands together and flung her hip and right backhand toward him with another toss of the head. Crack! Dururururu katak! The drummer stood square-­shouldered, strong, and unfazed by her wild timing, his djembe voice (xui) matching each move’s affect. With a contemptuous smile on her face, Nima twirled with her knee up and red-­sneakered foot flexed and attacked the well-­known “strong man” step (the pump) with fierce clarity, flexing biceps like Mande warriors and revving the percussion into a homestretch—­pakiti-­bakiti-­bakiti-­bakiti! Her flexed fingers added feminine flair to this historically masculine movement as she turned her back to the drums, opening her solo to friends and admirers. They flooded the circle, celebrating her with their own sassy pumps; one dropped into the splits. Zanet Zackson indeed. The daughter of a prominent socialist-­era drummer, Nima grew up in Conakry’s vibrant dance and music scene. Years of daily rehearsal and intimate knowledge of the percussive music prepared her for those improvisational flashes that made her name known across the city and that joined the dance of other women innovators to help redefine the contours of normative femininity in Conakry dance. Her solos generated both delight and consternation in audiences as she upended aesthetic and social conventions through the force of embodied action. Hundreds of young people across Conakry train daily in private dance troupes and meet in the afternoons and evenings to perform solos at ceremonies. Through the discipline of troupes and the open-­ended improvisational space of ceremonies, Conakry dancers acquire skills and reputations and invest in personal futures. In the course of this activity, they also invest in the present—­using their bodies to build a creative urban environment and to perform and redefine social norms and political subjectivities passed down from the socialist generation before them. In a city where the population is young and formal employment is rare, one might expect youth to be despairing about their futures. In fact, Conakry performing artists, most of whom come from extremely modest backgrounds, manage to avoid the stagnancy and incapacity that many youth experience in neoliberal Africa.1 They do this in part by mobilizing the dancing body as a unique semiotic resource that can transform and generate the social. This book explores such semiotic resourcefulness among Conakry artists and

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illuminates how a historical connection in Guinea between aesthetics and power—­physical, esoteric, and sociopolitical—­is activated in dance to construct the urban present. Contemporary scholarship on urban Africa frequently celebrates the “resourcefulness” of city dwellers, and especially youth, calling attention to their creative improvisation in the face of uncertainty. Dancers in Guinea are resourceful in the ways often described in this literature. They use their bodies as infrastructural building blocks (cf. De Boeck and Plissart 2006; Simone 2004) and find innovative ways to supplement the formal infrastructure that the city lacks (cf. Degani 2017; Fredericks 2018). They hustle to make a living in the absence of formal employment (cf. Cole 2010; D. Hoffman 2017; Newell 2012; D. Smith 2017; Vigh 2016) and draw on networks of kin and intimates to make use of changing opportunity structures (cf. Braun 2018; Coe 2013; Cole and Groes 2016; Hannaford 2017). But Guinean artists are also resourceful in another sense: in the ways in which they organize and invent embodied signs. By making choices about which dances, movements, and ceremonies to perform and how, artists in Conakry actively mobilize affects and attachments from the past and reconfigure norms and values in the space of an emerging city. This kind of semiotic resourcefulness is an important aspect of social life that is not limited to Guinea or dance and is frequently overlooked in cultural anthropology and urban studies.2 Social/cultural anthropologists have long insisted that signs can be potent tools through which people order their worlds (Douglas 1966), represent themselves to themselves (Geertz 1973, 448), and enact social transformations through rites (Turner 1967)—­all activities that are accomplished through dance in Conakry. But signs do much more. They also perform and provoke; they are forces with material consequences. Semiosis is not a process of signaling the material world from a removed or immaterial position, as in Saussurian semiology (Keane 2003, 413; Nakassis 2016, 2). Rather, it involves a dynamic interplay among signs, what they signal (objects), and the reactions they engender (interpretants)—­any of which could be material, embodied, unconscious, or affecting just as much as they could be mental (e.g., Kockelman 2005, 239; Newell 2018; Kratz 1994; Turino 1999). By treating dance as a resource in Guinea, this ethnography investigates the vitality and resonance of embodied signs, revealing the body as a site where diverse forms of power are reproduced, generated, and contested.

m a p 1.  Location of Guinea in West Africa (map courtesy of Dr. Stephen Leisz)

m a p 2.  Central Conakry neighborhoods (photograph by Jimena Peck). 1. Downtown area: Former l’Île de Tumbo, 2. Camayenne, 3. Coléah, 4. Dixinn, 5. Madina, 6. Minière, 7. Taouyah, 8. Hafia, 9. Matam, 10. Bonfi, 11. Dabondy, 12. Hamdallaye, 13. Ratoma, 14. Gbessia, 15. Kipé, 16. Kaporo

Invitation: City of Dance

The first thing a traveler sees upon arrival in Conakry’s international airport is an eight-­foot-­tall hardwood statue of a drummer playing a djembe, the archetypal instrument of Guinean stage dance, or “ballet.” He is smiling, head tilted back and drum thrust forward in a confident pose, towering over visitors and returning nationals as they queue to have their passports stamped. He is an emblem of Guinean nationalism. For elderly Guineans, he represents a time when the country was poised hopefully on the cusp of an independent and Africa-­centered future; a time when music, dance, and theater were the primary communicative media of Guinea’s socialist state (1958–­84). That era witnessed the professionalization and nationalization of Guinean ballet—­so named to assert equivalence with European cultural forms—­and Guinea produced acclaimed national dance and percussion companies that toured the world to enthusiastic audiences. The socialist period in Guinea, while remembered fondly by performing artists, was also a time of extraordinary repression and extrajudicial punishment. From the perspective of the millions exiled or tortured under the socialist regime, that smiling statue belies a far more sinister history. The airport figure of a drummer playing the djembe therefore indexes an era differently inscribed into the collective psyches and bodies of Guinean citizens. The statue also beckons to the many Guinean artists living abroad and their foreign students who regularly come to Conakry to be immersed in the ballet scene. These artists left when the government stopped supporting them after socialism. They are returning into an artistic world that has become invisible to officialdom, as ballet now exists almost entirely outside of formal avenues for cultural and economic production. Within this unacknowledged world—­which is sonically explosive and visually stunning—­Conakry is neither the failed city

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of development narratives nor a city where the recent embrace of democracy has made citizens feel “free” in comparison to the socialist past. Rather, it is a place where creativity has long negotiated with authority and where the body is a key site for producing political, metaphysical, and social power. Guinean Ballet: From State-­Sponsored Art to Urban Youth Culture Guinea’s socialist state tapped into an indigenous history of conceptualizing artisans as capable of transforming the social fabric through their mastery of vital powers. The state sought to appropriate those capacities while disavowing their magic, yet this instrumentalization of the performing arts was far from a totalizing domination of signs and their meanings. Indeed, the postindependence government relied on ballet artists’ creative manipulations of rural dances and rhythms to generate public feeling—­a process that forms part of what I describe as “affecting” or “aesthetic” politics in Guinea (see part 1 interlude and chapter 1). After economic liberalization in the 1980s, with the disappearance of a national system for training and recruiting artists from the countryside, Guinean ballet continued to flourish in privately run urban troupes, with its connection to transformative power retrofitted for a global market and rapidly growing city. Conakry has expanded vastly since independence, growing from a population of about seventy-­eight thousand in 19581 to nearly two million today, and Conakry’s ballet performers are mostly second-­or third-­generation city dwellers. As postsocialist artists increasingly identify as urban, they reconfigure dances literally by combining steps from ethnically distinct dances and figuratively by recalibrating what kinds of encounters and identifications are stipulated in dance. The two most significant sites for the production and cir­­ culation of dance in the city are troupes and ceremonies. In both of these sites, dancers signal and contest shared values through semiotically dense activity. Troupes (also called “ballets”) are institutions where artists rehearse daily under the supervision of a director and develop professional skills for stage performance and teaching. There are two remaining national ballets in Conakry: Les Ballets Africains and Ballet Djoliba, both of which had their heyday in the socialist period but now tour infrequently and are minimally supported by the state (e.g., Juompan-­Yakam 2015). This ethnography focuses instead on the scores of private troupes founded across the city after socialism, which form the basic cultural infrastructure for training in Conakry ballet. These private troupes are vital to the reproduction of the ballet genre in postsocialist Guinea, yet they are precarious institutions supported financially by

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f i g u r e i.1.  Rehearsal for the ballet Les Merveilles de Guinée, Dixinn, Conakry

sporadic emigrant artists’ remittances and artistic tourism and dismissed as insignificant by authorities in the ministry of culture. Ceremonies—­dance gatherings in streets and courtyards that celebrate all manner of social events and rites of passage in the city—­are the other key infrastructural element of Conakry’s ballet dance scene. It is in ceremonies that artists from disparate troupes meet, share ideas, and establish novel approaches to dance. There are multiple social ceremonies involving dance in Conakry that may roughly be divided into two groups: ethnic ceremonies, which are modeled on rural prototypes and attended mostly by members of a single ethnolinguistic

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f i g u r e i.2.  Rehearsal for the percussion group Boca Juniors Percussions, Matam, Conakry

group, and cosmopolitan ceremonies, which are distinctly urban and do not delineate belonging through ethnicity.2 All these ceremonies mark major rites of passage in the city, most notably marriages, circumcisions, and births or baby namings.3 I concentrate in this book on the two most significant cosmopolitan ceremonies in Conakry—­dundunba and sabar, which are central to the creative, social, and economic lives of ballet practitioners.4 These two ceremonies also exemplify how young dancers perform shared experiences of city life across ethnic identifications and project their sensibilities to broad publics. The troupe and the ceremony, both of which operate in Conakry’s popular or “informal” economy, are deeply entwined institutions that facilitate the cultivation of artists and the transmission of aesthetic ideas in and around the city. Dancers gain competencies in each that reinforce the other, and these institutions also emblematize hierarchical authority and plebeian action as entangled social forces in Guinea. Troupes and ceremonies present different—­and seemingly opposed—­models of authority. Troupes are organized hierarchically to reinforce gerontocratic and patriarchal dominance, while ceremonies are orchestrated by youth and perform shifting notions of appropriate gendered and ethical behavior. Troupes and ceremonies enable material and meaningful circulation in the cityscape, and they cultivate

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a dialectic between authority and vitality that has long informed the political subjectivities of Guinean artists. Troupes (“Ballets”) When I came to Conakry to conduct ethnographic research in 2010, I intended to begin by mapping the venues where the city’s troupes rehearsed. This turned out to be an elusive goal that uncovered the fluid and improvisational quality of the most basic infrastructural components of the performing arts scene. I started in the ballet where I had apprenticed for three years in my early twenties, called Le Ballet Communal de Matam (henceforth Ballet Matam), located in the poor neighborhood of Matam, where many artists live on the south side of the Conakry peninsula. From there, I networked in private troupes across the city. Ballets that had thrived in the early 2000s—­when I had lived in Conakry before—­were fading or had disappeared entirely. Others had gained momentum, and nearly all had changed venues in the intervening years, sometimes multiple times. Dancers and musicians were similarly mobile. Many key figures I had known had passed away or migrated, and others had risen to prominent positions as ballet directors. The Ballet Matam,

f i g u r e i.3.  Rehearsal for the Ballet Communal de Matam, Matam, Conakry

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f i g u r e i.4.  Rehearsal space for the Ballet Soleil d’Afrique, Bonfi, Conakry

which had been one of the largest and most dynamic groups just five years before, had by 2010 been completely restructured due to the scattering of its stars across the globe and the passing of its founder-­director. The decline of Matam paralleled an upsurge in a ballet just across the peninsula called Les Merveilles de Guinée (henceforth Merveilles or Ballet Merveilles), directed by Sekou Sano and Yamoussa Soumah, which had by 2012 become the largest private ballet in the city. From 2012 to 2013, during the longest stint of my fieldwork, I rehearsed daily with Merveilles, attended ceremonies with its members, and performed in shows. I visited other ballets regularly to participate and observe. In Conakry’s ballets, directorship, membership, and rehearsal venues change frequently. Many rehearsal spaces are decaying physically, the floors crumbling apart and the roofs gushing water in the rainy season. Others disappear overnight when they are demolished or change owners, leaving a ballet to exist in name only until a new venue is located. When unable to secure a proper rehearsal space, such as a state-­owned youth center (Fr. maison des jeunes), ballet directors improvise, rehearsing their artists in barns, in courtyards of abandoned buildings, in warehouses, or simply on a slab of concrete laid in a private compound. Ballet practitioners muster perseverance and

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resolve that they describe as “heart” (bɔɲε) to keep troupes intact in precarious conditions. Private troupes and social ceremonies are ephemeral institutions that facilitate the movement of people, ideas, money, and artistic practices both within the city and between Conakry and its growing artistic diaspora. As such, troupes and ceremonies constitute a cultural infrastructure enabling circulation in the city, but that movement is not always smooth or progressive. Just as material infrastructures enable all kinds of unintended parasitic activity and noise, embodied infrastructures generate tensions, accumulations, and affects that in turn structure the conditions of possibility for further activity (e.g., Elyachar 2010; Kockelman 2010; Larkin 2008; Serres [1980] 2007). Encounters produced in Conakry’s troupes and ceremonies affect the contours of city life both within and outside delineated spaces of dance. Ceremonies After a rehearsal in the Ballet Merveilles, more than eighty young dancers and musicians who train there daily gather in a group before the elderly director Yamoussa for a dose of his vociferous commentary. He berates them about their dance, their bodies, and their comportment. “You don’t smile; your faces look like pigs!” “Anyone with dreadlocks will no longer rehearse with Merveilles!” He laments that youth today are undisciplined and don’t ask him about the history of dances and rhythms, where they are from, or what they are called. He says, “I am old! My generation is dying! And all you want to ask is ‘Where is the dundunba? When is the sabar?’ ” To the chagrin of elderly artists, young ballet practitioners in Conakry are preoccupied with cosmopolitan ceremonies and not with faithfully reproducing dances from the countryside. At dundunba and sabar ceremonies, young artists perform improvisational solos, share information, and have the chance to be seen by foreign students and producers. After rehearsing in the ballet during the day, dancers and musicians often spend the late afternoon (4 to 7 p.m.) at dundunbas, celebrating myriad social occasions from marriages to homecomings to excisions, and the late-­night hours (9 or 10 p.m. to 2 a.m.) at sabars, usually celebrating weddings. They also attend ethnic ceremonies for family or income, but dundunba and sabar are in a class of their own. These two dance events are fundamental to artists’ daily experiences and performances of the city, and they offer a suite of opportunities. Participants build reputations or “find name” (xili sɔtɔ) by executing distinctive solos at dundunbas and sabars and by hosting such ceremonies for others to enjoy (the host is generally not permitted to dance). To find name is to gain prestige and increased access to social and financial capital. Cosmopolitan

f i g u r e i.5.  Lansana Camara marking a dancer’s moves at a dundunba

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f i g u r e i.6.  Dancer Alseny Bangoura performing at a dundunba

ceremonies also generate a distinctly urban lexicon of dance moves and drum rhythms, and videos of these events circulate internationally via social media and physical DVDs carried by migrants and tourists, enabling virtual social encounters across transnational space. In the public arena of dundunba and sabar circles, practitioners debate unspoken questions through gesture, sound, and sequence. They explore how power relations across generations and between genders can transform to meet the demands of a new era: How can urban women appropriate traditionally male forms of capacity (chapter 4)? How is generational continuity embodied or ruptured in aesthetic forms (chapter 5)? Dancers also present ambivalent perspectives on the ramifying consequences of Guinea’s postsocialist cultural and economic exposure to the outside world (chapter 6). All this happens through improvisational dance and through metalevel framing in dance ceremonies5 and reveals how people who consider themselves “apolitical” and typically do not participate in formal democratic deliberations about rights and responsibilities indeed play an active role in transforming societal norms and values. Ceremonies are sites where people are testing out new social scenarios by performing them, gauging responses, and reworking them—­all in a way that

f i g u r e i.7.  Assiatou Soumah dancing at a dundunba ceremony

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f i g u r e i.8.  Abdoulaye Yansane performing at a dundunba ceremony, Gbessia, Conakry

cannot be captured or condemned as a constative utterance might. Dance at dundunba and sabar ceremonies eschews the directness of commonplace talk or text, allowing practitioners to intimate ideas about the social without committing them to discursive statements.6 While some of these ideas are decipherable only to practitioners (such as those delivered in the subtleties of specific dance movements), others are easily intelligible to nonartist observers (such as those suggested through transgressing widely accepted norms of conduct). Dance at cosmopolitan ceremonies performs new kinds of social encounters and draws intergenerational differences to the surface. In contrast with the ballet in which elderly male directors are often in charge, youth are

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the central organizing figures in dundunba and sabar ceremonies. Throughout the book, I gloss cohorts of ballet practitioners trained during the socialist period and after, respectively, as “elders” and “youth.” These distinctions refer less to strict age groups than to the ethical and aesthetic orientations developed from being trained under different political-­economic orders.7 Guinean Socialism and What Came Next adrienne cohen: What is the difference between being an artist today and during socialism? damaye soumah: The difference/distance is far like sky and earth. (A tagi kuya alo koore ‘nun bɔxi.) Following independence from France in 1958, Guinea’s first president, Ahmed Sékou Touré, and his ruling Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG) embraced a version of modernity that combined Marxist-­modern and Pan-­Africanist ideologies, celebrating certain aspects of rural African lifeways while rejecting others. This way of constructing modernity through a celebration of Africanness was not at all unique to Guinea (cf. Askew 2002; Diouf 2003, 4; Schatzberg 1988). As Ramon Sarró aptly puts it, “How to be ‘modern’ without being ‘Western,’ and how to be African without being ‘traditional’  .  .  . was a major theoretical preoccupation of pro-­independence thinkers, and particularly of Sékou Touré” (2009, 115). Marxism and Pan-­Africanism were what Mike McGovern calls “competing cosmopolitanisms” that framed the precolonial African past in very different terms (2013, 19). During the reign of Touré, dance and music became key media for the performance of these competing ideological frames. Between 1959 and the late 1960s, Guinea experienced what Lansiné Kaba calls a “cultural renaissance,” during which “the overall artistic level rose markedly . . . and art was fully linked to the politics of development” (1976, 207). Central to this flurry of cultural activity were theater troupes, ballets, and instrumental ensembles, collectively dubbed “militant theater,” as they were politically aligned with the ruling party and tasked with disseminating party messages to the population (e.g., Straker 2009b). Ballet artists were considered cultural diplomats abroad, and the programs they staged were intended to emblematize an egalitarian socialist nation, aligned with a broader project of African liberation (e.g., Hashachar 2018).8 Dance theater did not begin during socialism, but it was nationalized, organized, and politicized at an unprecedented scale during that time. Notable antecedents to socialist militant theater in Guinea were colonial-­era dramatic plays produced by

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students from all over French West Africa who attended school at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure William Ponty in Senegal. With the goal of keeping its students from across French West Africa connected to the populations that they would be teaching or administering, the school instituted a program whereby students would research an aspect of their culture of origin during summer vacation. They would later participate in authoring plays based on the material they had gathered (J. Cohen 2012, 21–­22; Mouralis 1986). The Guinean playwright and poet Fodéba Keita, who was educated at William Ponty, later founded and directed a troupe in Paris called Les Ballets Africains de Keita Fodéba, which toured the world in the 1940s and 1950s. This troupe was transformed in 1960 into Guinea’s first national ballet company, Les Ballets Africains de la République de Guinée. Keita returned to Guinea to serve in the new government as minister of the interior and became an instrumental figure in the organization of the national arts infrastructure in Guinea (J. Cohen 2012, 26; J. Cohen, pers. comm. 2019). Dance, music, and theater were integral to many socialist and anti-­colonial nationalist political agendas in Africa and beyond (e.g., Askew 2002; Braun 2019; Castaldi 2006; Daniel 1995; Neveu Kringelbach 2013; Schauert 2015; Shay 2002; Shipley 2015; Skinner 2012; M. Taylor 2008). African ballets were part of a broader global constellation of state folk dance ensembles that first began to emerge and develop after World War II (see Shay 2002). However, the Guinean government’s commitment to the arts was exceptional, and Guinea’s cultural policy provided a model for similar programs across the continent (e.g., Counsel 2009, 86, 115; Edmondson 2007, 21; Neveu Kringelbach 2013, 38; Reed 2016, 37; Schauert 2015, 15). Performing arts held great promise for political mobilization and nation-­building in revolutionary Guinea, in part because print media was limited in its reach due to low levels of literacy (e.g., Schmidt 2005b, 999). Mass media was also extremely limited, with one radio station, one television station, and one national newspaper all controlled by the party (M. Camara 2005, 26). The state celebrated and subsidized dramaturgy, dance, and music, while plastic and literary arts received less attention.9 According to Victor Azarya and Naomi Chazan, “From the outset, the Guinean regime recognized the importance of popular culture as a means of control over the population. There is a curious difference, however, between the paucity of the literary field and the richness of musical activities. Hardly any books were published in Guinea except for the multiple volumes of Sékou Touré’s speeches and declarations. No newspapers or magazines existed except for the party’s official organ, Horoya. . . . On the other hand, music, dance, and spectacle flourished with the encouragement of the party” (1987, 125). Ballet production during socialism was organized and regulated through an elaborate national infrastructure

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of hierarchically organized troupes in four tiers, beginning with the village or district level, up through sectional, federal, and national levels.10 There is no consensus in the literature on the exact number of troupes nationwide, but there were thousands of district committees, around two hundred sections, and thirty to forty federations.11 At a series of competitions that culminated in the biennial festivals called Quinzaine Artistiques (Artistic Fortnights),12 the ensembles were ranked and artists were recruited for the selective national ballets (see Counsel 2009, 79–­80). Guinea’s version of socialism was politically strategic and economically and ideologically hybrid. In the early years of independence, Sékou Touré formed alliances with capitalist as well as socialist countries.13 This kind of strategizing was not uncommon among socialist states in the third world, which exploited Cold War rivalries between superpowers in order to achieve their own development goals (e.g., Chari and Verdery 2009, 7). As early as 1959, the Guinean state made efforts to socialize the economy by focusing on government control over trade, currency, and prices; the nationalization of utilities; and the collectivization of agriculture (Rivière 1977, 103–­4). Touré’s rhetoric became increasingly Marxist over the course of his tenure, and in 1964, he adopted a legal reform aimed at minimizing the strength of the emerging bourgeoisie and limiting the growth of private business (O’Toole and Baker 2005, xli). Under this new policy, the state tightened its control on private property and income, and a new notion of class struggle was established (M. Camara 2005, 65–­70; Rivière 1977, 91). In contemporary Conakry, the period of Touré’s reign is rarely referred to as “socialism.” Rather, it is alternatively labeled the “time of Sékou Touré” (Sékou Touré waxati / Sékou Touré yamanε), the First Republic (Fr. Première République), or the time of revolution (Fr./Su. révolution tεmui / waxati). The characteristics that people fondly recall of that period, however, are quintessentially socialist—­including state provisioning of basic amenities and housing, guaranteed employment, and regular national festivals. Guineans often make stark and broad comparisons between the Touré era and what came after, and I capture their periodization with the terms socialist and postsocialist. Guinea has had three different presidents since Touré’s death in 1984: Lansana Conté (1984–­2008), who took power in a bloodless coup; Moussa Dadis Camara (2008–­9), who was in office for a single year after Conté died in 200814; and Alpha Condé, who was elected in 2010 in the country’s first democratic election. However, the most significant break that artists in Conakry identified is that from the First Republic under the rule of Touré to the Second Republic under the rule of Conté—­a break that marked the end of socialism, the rise of free market capitalism, and a sudden decline in government patronage

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of the arts. Notably, while Touré, Conté, and Dadis Camara may be described as autocrats, Condé was elected in free and fair elections, yet artists do not conceptualize the multiparty elections of 2010 as a major historical shift because procedural democracy was not accompanied by palpable changes in their daily existence. The stark difference that Conakry artists and indeed many average Guinean citizens perceive between the time of Sékou Touré and its aftermath frames this book’s attention to the lived experience of political-­economic transformation. The dancer Damaye Soumah, quoted at the beginning of this section, described the socialist past in terms of a cosmic, unfathomable distance from the present. Dance in Guinea provides critical purchase on how people forge continuity across such change while also adapting to new realities. Guinea’s socialist past has an ambivalent legacy that lives on in the everyday embodied dispositions of Guinean citizens and in the reperformance of relational dynamics and ethical ideals that thrived during that time (e.g., McGovern 2017). Potent Artisans: Demystification and Nyama In Guinea, ballet was promising as a political tool not only because literacy rates were low but also because of the esoteric and sociopolitical capacities long associated with indigenous song, dance, music, and masquerade. During the First Republic, these practices were appropriated by the nation-­state both forcefully through a state-­sponsored iconoclastic campaign and voluntarily through the recruitment of lineage bards. In 1959, the state launched a campaign called “demystification” aimed at eradicating the indigenous religions and accompanying masquerades of Guinean ethnic minorities, especially in the forest region in the country’s southeast (e.g., Højbjerg 2006; McGovern 2013; Rivière 1977; Straker 2007, 2009b). This violent iconoclastic campaign involved the destruction of masks and symbolic practices of local power associations,15 a ban on ritual activities, and the forced exposure of secret or sacred dances, songs, and rhythms. Many of these potent art forms were then appropriated by folkloric troupes for the national stage, thereby performing the transfer of rural power to a centralized state in ways that mirrored the in-­kind taxes (normes) levied throughout the Guinean countryside to feed the cities.16 Demystification exemplifies the contradictions inherent in grounding the Guinean revolution in both socialism and Pan-­Africanism.17 In order to be “demystified,” one would presumably disavow magic, yet the very reason performing arts were so resonant—­and therefore desirable to an emerging state in Guinea—­was because of their long history of entanglement with political and metaphysical powers.18 The socialist state therefore needed to dislodge

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dance, music, and masquerade from their roles in rural political hierarchies and cosmological orders without breaking their resonant capacity—­their ability to affect an entrance. Demystification was an act of what Michael Taussig (1999) calls “defacement”—­a spectacle of destruction that reveals and activates that which it claims to destroy. The powerful dances, rhythms, and masks that were taken from the countryside during the demystification campaign were reactivated in the political drama of ballet. The small body of anthropological literature on Guinea includes a striking amount of text on demystification, calling attention to the performative nature of the socialist state and to the political promise of performance. Yet demystification exposes not only how a state consolidated power through aesthetics but also how authoritarian rule and other forms of dogmatic authority are, in practice, fraught with anxiety and contingency. Infinite Repertoire investigates the cultural afterlife of state socialism in Guinea, revealing how practices appropriated by Touré’s party-­state, through both demystification and voluntary means, have been changed in the capital city over time and how iconoclasm bolsters that which it claims to eradicate—­namely, in this context, the transformative power vested in dance and music. Demystification was but one part of a broader shift whereby rural aesthetic forms and capacities were transferred physically and symbolically to the national stage. Notably, the ruling party employed lineage-­based Maninka bards called “griots” (Mka. djeli / Su. Yeli), who possessed great knowledge of music and dance, to help create the nationalized culture industry. These griots historically belonged to an artisan class of people called nyamakala (see, e.g., Conrad and Frank 1995; B. Hoffman 2000). Included in this class are griots, blacksmiths, and leather workers, all capable of wielding a vital or spiritual force referred to as nyama/ɲama, variously defined in the literature as “affecting power,” “energy or life force” (Arnoldi 1995, 106, 101), “power to act in the world” (McNaughton 1988, 71), or “occult or supernatural powers” (Jansen 2000, 1). Jan Jansen describes the capacity of artisans thus: Nyamakalaw . . . transform “nature” into “culture.” They shape or mold events to fit them into social life. This process is illustrated by activities in which nyama is liberated: the male blacksmith transforms ore into iron, and then turns it into tools; the blacksmith works with wood and turns it into furniture; the female blacksmith works with clay and turns it into pots and household utensils; the leatherworker turns the skins of beasts into clothing. . . . The griot as well as the funè (Islamic praise singer) create social identities for people by relating them to the past via their ancestors. . . . The crucial features of nyamakala are . . . related to social transformations: to social being, on the one hand, and to cultural tools, on the other. (2000, 6–­7)

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Griots are wordsmiths whose songs are not merely descriptive; they are performative—­they realize the world in which they circulate. The Touré government not only capitalized on this world-­making force by conscripting griots to work in national ballets but also subverted the monopoly griots had once had over artistic production in Mande19 communities by creating a modern category of artiste (always spoken in French) not determined by lineage. Like with demystification, the state’s approach to griots navigated a fine line between activating and canceling African “tradition.” Ballet practitioners in contemporary Conakry do not use the term nyama to refer to occult force, perhaps evidence of the socialist state’s partial success in disentangling art from magic. Even the category of nyamakala, which is so ubiquitous in the literature on Mande griots, is typically used by Susu and Maninka speakers in Conakry only to refer to certain Fulbe bards. However, while the term nyama has not been taken up by speakers of Mande languages in Conakry, the Susu term for power or strength, sεnbε, is used frequently to describe dance and dancers and covers much of the same semantic territory.20 Sεnbε has a semantic range similar to the word power in English: it can be used to describe physical, esoteric, or political capacity.21 Because of this multivalence, sεnbε is a radically portable concept. It can describe the strength of the nation, the influence of a leader, or the affecting potency of dance and music. As I explore in chapter 4, gestures evoking sεnbε are especially

f i g u r e i.9.  Griot singing

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appealing to young ballet practitioners in Conakry who activate histories of power through performance. For example, when a young woman in Conakry executes a movement that is used in the countryside to index male virility, she directs that embodied sign to new futures. This practice of cultivating and reinvesting in signs from the past in order to construct the present exemplifies how dance in Conakry is a practical semiotic resource with ramifying social and material consequences. Social theorists have long been attentive to the ways in which political-­ economic systems inform how people conceptualize and organize fundamental aspects of social life, such as time, personhood, gender, and ethics (e.g., Marx 1867; Verdery 1996; Weber [1905] 2013). Guinea offers a case in point. The transformation from state socialism to liberal capitalism in Guinea involved a recali­ bration of major relationships—­among citizens and their state, youth and elders, men and women, the nation and the rest of the world. While some people in Conakry voice their opinions about these ongoing changes through political protest or rational deliberation (e.g., Philipps 2013), Conakry ballet practition­ ers actively generate and debate the contours of shifting relationships through dance and music. By investigating the embodied, verbal, and metasemiotic discourses of Conakry artists, I bring attention to political subjectivity articulated outside the realm of formal politics and specifically through affecting encounters22 (cf. Sitas and Pieterse 2013). As Antina Von Schnitzler contends, “Such a rethinking of normative liberal accounts of the political is particularly important in postcolonial contexts, in which the formal political sphere, itself in part a legacy of colonial modes of government, is often inaccessible to large sections of the population” (2016, 9). Indeed, Guinean artists, most of whom do not attend school beyond the primary years, prefer not to delve into debates about formal politics. However, they regularly enact their ideas about ideal relationships of power and about how average people can manipulate power in its varied forms (physical, esoteric, social, political) in order to make a living—­and make living worthwhile—­in an emerging African city. Flight Socialism was a time of relative stability for Guinean artists, especially those working at the national level, who enjoyed the status of state functionaries. While they did not make a lot of money, their basic food and housing needs were met by the government, they toured often, and they were celebrated in party media as exemplary socialist citizens. Artists working in the national companies traveled widely, and the top company, Les Ballets Africains, was designated specifically for international touring. Artists rarely defected

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abroad during the Touré era because they had regular performances scheduled, they were taken care of in Guinea, and they feared state retaliation. After Touré’s death, however, artists became worried about their futures as they saw the government retreating steadily from the arts. Neoliberal reforms in the late 1980s and 1990s contributed to declining standards of living and mass uncertainty in Guinea (e.g., Campbell and Clapp 1995), followed by continuing economic and political crises in the 2000s.23 Many artists began to choose exit, defecting while on tours, marrying foreigners, or seeking private contracts and then overstaying their visas.24 While some artists remained abroad, others toured extensively in the 1990s with private or semiprivate companies and kept Conakry as their permanent home. Over the past few decades, it has become increasingly difficult to obtain visas for Guinean touring companies, and artists have been opting for permanent migration when possible. Those who live abroad help develop new international markets for Guinean dancers and musicians and fuel artistic tourism to Guinea. While Europe, the US, Australia, Japan, and Iceland were some of the most common destinations for Guinean artists in the early 2000s, now there are also burgeoning scenes for Guinean dance and music in Mexico, Chile, Bra­­ zil, and Argentina. Dancers and drummers who have traveled abroad some­­ times  bear nicknames charting the prestige of their mobility: Extérieur (abroad), Foote (white person / foreigner), Euro (European), Parisien (Parisian), Lopez (Cuban name). Migrant artists’ names dance across tongues in Conakry like little poems, often preceding the physical presence of the person: Nyata, Tokaito, Kargus, Jose—­those great legends who now live abroad. Niija, Laoulaou, Atta, Bonfils, when will we see them again? Migration is affecting the production and transmission of dance in Conakry in a number of important ways. Most migrant artists maintain significant ties to Guinea, and if they are able, they reinvest in their kin and peer groups and in the larger artistic community by sending remittances, building dance schools, founding ballets, funding competitions, and bringing tourists to Conakry to study dance and music. The prevalence of artist migration is also affecting Conakry life in more subtle ways by shifting how young artists envision potential futures, upsetting social hierarchies through wealth and prestige acquired from living abroad, and influencing the artistic practices and affecting qualities that young dancers celebrate. Despite the fact that dance propels Guinean artists out into the world, Conakry’s dance has never become so tethered to tourism and migration as to divorce it from the social life of the city. Infinite Repertoire focuses on this urban artistic lifeworld and its complex political history, offering nuanced ethnographic engagement in one of the least-­studied capital cities on the African continent.

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The Kinetic City During my dissertation fieldwork in Conakry, I befriended some expatriate Americans who worked for the World Bank, the United Nations, and other development organizations. One woman, newly stationed in Conakry, talked to me about her first impressions of the city and described it as “apocalyptic.” Compared even to her previous posts in South Sudan and Afghanistan, Conakry felt, to her, more disorganized and anarchic than anything she had known before. For many expats I met, Conakry was not only a hardship post; it was a place with no internal coherence—­to be tolerated, perhaps fixed or amended—­but not a place of beauty or possibility. They were not wrong to notice the city’s absent material infrastructure, ongoing low-­level political violence, and unreckoned waste. Yet their inability to grasp Conakry’s personality and promise belies a broader division in the way the world’s urban centers have long been conceptualized by Westerners: as developed or underdeveloped, formal or informal, exemplar or apprentice. Much scholarship on cities—­as postcolonial urban theorists have duly noted—­has been informed by a related split between urban theory, about the West, and development, about the rest (e.g., Pieterse 2010; Robinson 2002). In Conakry, the virtual absence of a middle class means that average people do not experience the city primarily through the restaurants, bars, or apartment buildings that expats frequent. Indeed, the built public infrastructure in Conakry is woefully inadequate, a fact that motivates much public dissatisfaction (especially regarding electrical outages, access to clean water, and the state of roads). But this is not the only story to be told about Conakry. An emerging body of literature in the anthropology of urban Africa destabilizes the developmentalist paradigm by taking seriously the ways in which embodied and affecting practices constitute the space of the city (e.g., De Boeck and Plissart 2006; D. Hoffman 2017; Mbembe and Nuttall 2004, 2008; Simone 2004). As Filip De Boeck describes in his work on Kinshasa, “The body is one of the few sites in the city through which the Kinois can transcend the raw functionalities of life as mere survival. The body is the site in which personal and collective geographies, experiences and imaginations meet and merge. It is a site in which desire and disgust, anxiety and dream materialize. Through all of these, it always produces a surplus and offers a road to something else, an extra, an elusive aesthetics that the harshness of the city and its infrastructures of decay do not offer otherwise” (De Boeck and Plissart 2006, 238). If movement and fluidity triumph over the built form (taking advantage of the gaps in the formal infrastructure of African urbanscapes), then

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music and dance are particularly revealing as media animating cityness. While recent monographs about African cities often engage with mobility and embodiment—­sometimes building on AbdouMaliq Simone’s (2004) provocative notion of “people as infrastructure”—­they rarely reference the performing arts (De Boeck’s attention to popular music is a notable exception). Likewise, a rich body of ethnographic work on the relationship between music or dance and urban identity in Africa (e.g., Neveu Kringelbach 2013; Pype 2006; Shipley 2013; Waterman 1990; White 2008) tends not to engage with questions of placemaking or infrastructure, which are so central to urban studies.25 By examining danced encounters in Conakry, this book develops an ethnographic account of what Nigel Thrift (2004, 57) calls the “affective register” of the city—­the shared feelings and embodied forces that produce an urban lifeworld and that enable value transformations among the city’s actors.26 In Conakry, dancers are illuminating and paradigmatic figures. They wield a capacity to direct the generative energy of the social by commanding space with the most spartan and yet most dynamic of human resources—­ the body. The dancer exemplifies the fluid and improvisational character of the city and an ethos of patient struggle or courage—referred to in Susu as waakili—that has pervaded Guineans’ sense of national identity since the movement for independence. Like many other urban actors, dancers cultivate improvisational strategies, using their bodies to create the relations and channels that support city life. But unlike taxi drivers, hawkers, or gossiping women, these artists are constantly speaking about and debating their use of embodied signs. Conakry is a peninsula choked off in the middle at a point that is less than a half mile across. The large end, protruding into the sea, was once called the island of Tumbo (l’île de Tumbo) and is the site of the original city. Today, Conakry extends well into the continent, its outlying neighborhoods dotted with newly constructed villas lining dirt roads. While there are dance troupes operating in most neighborhoods of the city, they are more concentrated in the densely populated quartiers of Matam, Bonfi, Dixinn, Gbessia, and Matoto. Several ballets rehearse in the downtown area (once the Tumbo Island), though lodging downtown is more expensive and difficult to procure for artists, whose meager incomes often cover just part of a single-­ room flat. Dundunba and sabar ceremonies are likewise more frequent and professional in the popular and ethnically mixed quartiers where artists live, though musicians and dancers are often hired for sabar ceremonies elsewhere. Those whose families live in the suburbs sometimes rent rooms with friends in order to stay closer to ballet rehearsals and to avoid spending valuable time and money on transport. The ensuing vignette follows a dancer

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named Ele, featured on the cover, whose strategies for living and working were representative of many ballet practitioners I knew. Moussa “Ele” Sylla lived with two other artists in a two-­room cinder block apartment in the middle of Matam just one block from the rehearsal space of the renowned Ballet Communal de Matam and within a ten-­minute walk of five other ballets’ rehearsal spaces. He was a key connector during my fieldwork, always willing to guide me—­in a city with no street names—­to dance ceremonies and homes of interviewees. Ele made sure I knew about events. He would call daily, yelling over the crackling line, “Fatou! [my name in Guinea] There’s a dundunba today!” and then quickly tell me where to meet him before hanging up to save phone credit. He rehearsed in two different ballets to maximize his life chances—­Nimbaya in the morning and Souraxata in the afternoon. Nimbaya was a newer ballet run by a foreign producer, and it offered the prospect of foreign travel. Souraxata was his home ballet, where he had learned to dance and where he often acted as stage director. After rehearsing all day, Ele typically retreated to his apartment to take a quick bucket shower and change into a clean and often eccentric outfit to wear to that afternoon’s dundunba. Some notable examples stood out in my field notes: • lavender plaid billowing pants (bakuti), a red and gold sash with tassels at the ends, and a white scarf in each hand • a colorful boubou and matching pants, with hot-­pink plastic slippers; “dancing shoes/things” ( fare boron se), he explained • blue shin guards with stirrups under his feet “just for style”

After the three o’clock prayer, Ele would set out once more, either on foot or in a shared taxi, to grace the dundunba gathering with his kinesthetic and sartorial flair. Conakry’s audiovisualscape is permeated by the electric force of dance and music, which intensifies in the popular quartiers, especially where Maninka and Susu people live. The city never had an explicit racialized segregation policy during the colonial period, as did many other colonial urban centers such as Lusaka, Nairobi, and Johannesburg (see, e.g., Coquéry-­Vidrovitch 2012). Conakry was, however, divided into zones (by a series of decrees in 1901 and 1905) based on the monetary value and quality of building materials used in concessions (Goerg 1985, 326–­29). “Lifestyle” (“mode de vie”), class, and occupation therefore became key factors defining who lived in which quartiers of the colonial city. As French historian Odile Goerg explains, “no ethnic or national criteria were put forward, but the third zone was called an ‘indigenous zone’: hard construction [brick, stone, roofing tiles, etc.] was not

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mandatory” (1985, 327).27 Built infrastructure had already acquired a semiotic life beyond itself, as it was used to institute de facto segregation. As Cathérine Coquéry-­Vidrovitch recounts, “social zoning” (based on income) largely replaced explicit or de facto racialized segregation in African cities after independence, as African elites moved into the former white colonists’ districts and poorer people occupied peripheral areas (2012, 268). This kind of social zoning continues in contemporary Conakry, with certain areas primarily devoted to commerce or government activity and others to upscale villas and housing complexes inhabited mostly by expatriates. Neighborhoods where common people live, however, are brimming with local multifamily compounds, open-­air markets, and small businesses. As a general rule, the spaces of the city with more formal built infrastructure are less dense with dance activity. While most of the construction in Conakry now is “hard” in the sense used by the French administration (there are not many thatch-­roofed huts left), the popular neighborhoods have very few formal buildings other than mosques, and young artists occupy streets, open dust fields, beaches, and ruins of old buildings with rehearsals and ceremonies. The absence of formal infrastructure becomes an open invitation for youth to make creative use of public space (cf. De Boeck and Plissart 2006, 230). When traversing the city from the perspective of a dancer, class and ethnic cleavages emerge viscerally. Commercial and wealthy neighborhoods host fewer ceremonies and have fewer troupes. Neighborhoods that are predominantly ethnically Fulbe, even if they are not wealthy, also engage with dance less than other popular neighborhoods. Ethnic Fulbe, though numerous in Conakry, have never had a strong presence in Guinean dance for both religious and political reasons.28 Despite this historical paucity of Fulbe in ballets, performing artists are now some of the city’s most fervent critics of ethnic division, and troupes welcome all interested youth into their ranks. At a time when Guinean politics has become increasingly linked to the politics of ethnicity, urban ballet practitioners also forge ceremonies as spaces of interaction that substantially downplay or even erase ethnicity as a marker of belonging, as I explain in the second half of this book. Transformation/Becoming Dance in Guinea is not just a vehicle for embodying meaning. Rather, it is a performative medium that transforms the reality in which it operates. This book develops several overlapping senses of transformation/becoming—­the English words I use to approximate the Susu verb rafindife (to change state) from the root verb findife (to become). First, I write of the change from state

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socialism to capitalism, which across the globe has both enabled new kinds of creative encounters and been met with nostalgia and regret by people navigating uncertain terrain (cf. Boyer 2006; Boym 2008; Cole 2010; Nadkarni and Shevchenko 2004; Todorova and Gille 2010). Because ballet was so closely entwined with the politics of Guinea’s socialist state—­yet independent enough to be revalued after its demise—­dance reveals how attachments and affects linger and are reconstituted in various forms across dramatic political-­ economic change. The second major transformation I explore is from rural to urban. While the top socialist ballets in Guinea drew practices and people from the countryside, now Conakry artists have developed a system of troupes and a repertoire29 of steps that participate actively in constituting the place that is Conakry. These simultaneous movements—­from socialism (or some other form of statism) to neoliberal capitalism and from rural to urban—­reflect broader trends on the continent in the 1990s and early 2000s. The third sense of transformation/becoming has to do with the potency or transformative potential historically associated with performing arts in Guinea. Dance was instrumental to socialist politics because of its ability to motivate new kinds of collective feelings and ultimately to change a colony into a nation. The quasi-­magical powers built into Guinea’s indigenous performing arts were part of what made them so effective as political media, and artists in Conakry continue to tap into this history as they remake their profession in the neoliberal present. Finally, dancers in Guinea transform themselves through their practice. Over years of training in ballets and soloing in ceremonies, dancers develop chiseled bodies and clever minds. They emerge from inexperienced youth into coveted teachers and performers—­a process they describe as “becoming it” (findi a ra), which may be translated as “becoming someone.” During the socialist period, the state promoted dance as an activity capable of cultivating young people into upstanding and creative members of society. Practitioners and teachers maintain that dance continues to play such a socializing role, albeit now without the support of a strong state. Transformation, in these three senses, is central to the way dance acts as a world-­making force and historical record in Guinea. Author, Methods, Chapters While it is not possible to fully convey the physical dynamism of dance in writing, text allows me to unpack aspects of dance as a social and political experience in Guinea that are not visible to the typical dance student or audience member. For those readers already interested in West African dance and

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music—­who know what Guinean dance looks and sounds like but not, perhaps, how it is situated socially and historically—­I hope this book invites new kinds of productive conversations. For the general reader of anthropology or African studies who may have never seen or heard Guinean dance and percussion, I employ vignettes and photographs to call forth the vivid visual and spatial presence of the dance.30 Image and text together can evoke some of the energetic motion of dancing bodies (cf. Meintjes and Lemon 2017; J. Taylor 1998), and the photographs in this book may be approached in different ways: as conventional illustrations or as more open-­ended visual expansions of the prose (cf. De Boeck and Plissart 2006; D. Hoffman 2017). The addendum at the end guides readers to relevant visual and sonic material and to Guinean artists who teach and perform in the diaspora. The accounts and arguments presented throughout the book are the result of my long history of engagement with and deep respect for Guinean dance and dancers. When I was twenty-­two years old, I bought a ticket to Bamako, Mali, where I had lived before as an exchange student. I had been studying West African dance and music in the US for several years. A dear friend from college who was traveling with me was especially interested in Guinean drumming, so after a short time visiting in Bamako,31 we traveled overland to Upper Guinea to a village called Baro, which was known for its dundunba. After several months of learning dance and percussion in Baro and neighboring villages, we went to Conakry to renew our visas, and I ended up staying for three years. The city was bustling with dance and music. Artists trained for hours each day and attended ceremonies in the afternoons and evenings. I was struck by the professionalism of Conakry artists compared with those I had known in Bamako or in Guinean villages. Rehearsals began on time. Artists worked in multiple ballets, developed their skills as soloists in the afternoons, and taught classes to tourists on the side. I was first drawn simply to the excitement and challenge of the movement and wanted to be good at it. I found a job as an art teacher at the American International School of Conakry, which enabled me to rehearse each afternoon with the Ballet Communal de Matam, located just up the hill from the school. Learning dance in Guinea, however, turned out to be about much more than developing proper technique. It is a process of socialization that forced me to consider broader questions about value, politics, and collective memory in Africa; it is what first gave me the curiosity of an anthropologist. I lost myself a bit in Guinea by trying so hard to fit in. I became known for my unusual mastery of the Susu language, I wore African clothing, and I danced with some fluency. But the longer I stayed in Guinea, the more I felt the profound inequity of my position: I could leave whenever I wanted to, and my

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friends could not. All the courses in political science and globalization in college could not have taught me the deeply troubling lessons about power and privilege that living among incredibly talented young Guineans could. Over the years, however, I have watched cohort after cohort of Guinean artists find their way in the world: gaining prestige in Conakry, obtaining touring contracts overseas, or marrying foreigners. Young artists’ determination to sustain creative careers in the face of Conakry’s many financial, social, and political obstacles makes the city an extraordinary place, and dance and percussion have long been distinctive media through which Guineans make their marks on the world. The years I spent learning dance and language in Conakry—­and after that working with migrant artists for four years in New York City—­shaped my understanding of Guinean ballet and positioned me well socially as a researcher years later. I returned to Guinea in 2010 and pursued ethnographic research in Conakry’s dance scene between 2010 and 2013, and I conducted additional interviews and informal conversations with Guinean migrant artists in the US between 2006 and 2019. This book also draws from archival video and print media I obtained from the national library in Conakry and from Guinea’s central television and radio network (Radio Télévision Guinéenne [RTG]). My long history as a dancer and fluency in Susu have allowed me to document the perspectives of artists who do not speak French, especially young women, and to fill in the communicative gaps between formal interviews, informal banter, and embodiment in ballets and ceremonies. The book is organized into two parts. “Part 1: Aesthetic Politics, Magical Resources” traces the socialist political history that undergirds the practice of ballet in Guinea and the rise of private troupes in postsocialist Conakry. These chapters focus on the institution of ballet and its role in arbitrating young artists’ experiences of political-­economic change. Chapter 1 explores ballet’s history of cohabitation with state power and shows how the socialist state not only demanded loyalty but also depended on the sincerity and spontaneity of artists’ performances to win the hearts and minds of spectators. This chapter lays the groundwork for understanding the connection among aesthetics, affect, magic, and politics in Guinea and complicates any simple dichotomy between authoritarianism and creative freedom. It also sets the stage for examining how and why ballet became a resource that continued to command the attention of youth in Guinea decades after the death of Sékou Touré. Chapter 2 details the privatization of ballet in the postsocialist era as an experience of both loss and liberation for practitioners. It highlights the ambivalent position of private ballet directors who at once pine for the authority and structure of socialism and celebrate their troupes as legitimate and creative cultural infrastructure. Chapter 3 investigates everyday political subjectivity in Conakry ballets as a

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cultivated interaction between authority and vitality, discipline and invention. By examining the dynamics between teachers and students, chapter 3 shows how gerontocratic and patriarchal models of authority are widely accepted yet are also transformed and defied as youth harness new opportunities in the neoliberal economy. Together, these chapters illustrate how elements of the ballet genre32 have been mobilized, changed, and diverted across time and space in Guinea, becoming part of the armature of the contemporary city. “Part 2: Delicious Inventions” offers ethnographic case studies of popular ceremonies in Conakry to reveal how young artists perform and comment on a postsocialist urban lifeworld through improvisational dance and metasemiotic framing. By concentrating on a playful emerging urban lexicon of dance moves and practices and the heated intergenerational debates they spark, these chapters show how dancers navigate—­through embodied and verbal discourse—­major social and economic transformations in postrevolutionary Conakry. Chapter 4 examines how young dancers across the gender spectrum mobilize the iconic power of rural “strong men” to redefine urban gendered personhood through the dance and ceremony dundunba. Chapter 5 asks how cultural inheritance operates across dramatic sociopolitical change, suggesting that the focus on objects of tangible or intangible heritage—­common in academic, developmentalist, and popular discourses—­misses identifying potentially vital relational connections between generations. Chapter 6 demonstrates how the cosmopolitan ceremony sabar engages feelingfully with social and economic changes wrought by neoliberal reform in Guinea. By examining three aspects of sabar’s performance in Conakry—­hypersexualized dancing, electric amplification, and money throwing—­this chapter provides critical purchase on the socially emergent nature of Conakry’s ceremonies and on the role of dance in articulating shifting notions of positive value in the city. The epilogue revisits the themes of aesthetic/affecting politics and semiotic resourcefulness to reveal how dance in Guinea has maintained transformative potency across political-­economic eras. By framing key ethnographic moments presented in the chapters through the concept of infrastructure, the epilogue returns to Conakry’s cityness, showing how imperfections and blockages in the flow of ideas, people, and embodied signs generate novel possibilities in the urban present.

pa r t i

Aesthetic Politics, Magical Resources What powers authority? What in us responds to it? How is vital energy turned into social form? w i l l i a m m a z z a r e l l a , The Mana of Mass Society

The initial three chapters of this book establish the logics guiding the nexus of politics, aesthetics, and performance from the socialist period to the pres­ ent in Guinea. These chapters demonstrate how dance became a versatile re­ source for generating, mimicking, and challenging power in its many forms across vastly different political epochs. Guinean artists’ involvement in for­ mal politics was but one iteration of a flexible approach to the relationship between aesthetics and power in Guinea that continues to inform the practice of ballet in Conakry’s privately run troupes. Because Guinean ballet was es­ sentially born from the revolution, dancers also address viscerally the ques­ tion that threads through all anthropologies of postsocialism: How does un­ derstanding the lived experience of a socialist past inform honest and creative interpretations of the present? Throughout the book, I use the term aesthetic to refer to the organiza­ tion and perception of visual, kinetic, and sonic materials. This definition acknowledges the original Greek sense of the word aesthetic (meaning re­ lated  to sensory and corporeal perception1) without losing sight of the ways in which people—­and especially those who self-­identify as “artists”—­ organize and reflect upon what they do and make and how that production is received in the world. This definition of aesthetics highlights the affecting consequences of art, and I treat aesthetics and affect as overlapping concepts that together capture political life beyond the rational-­critical. Aesthetics entails an interaction between art forms and practices, what they signal or “mean,” and how they are sensed (cf. Rancière [2000] 2004, 10). This interac­ tion is a performance with material consequences in the world. The word performance of course has a double entendre in the social sciences: it refers not only to a display of skills before an audience but also to performativity—­to

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the idea that aesthetic or communicative acts play a role in constituting the reality in which they circulate. Dance, music, and song have long been cul­ tivated in Guinea as media with the capacity to powerfully transform the social world. The legacy of aesthetic/affecting politics in Guinea—­whereby kings and rulers bargained with artisans to promote their own legitimacy and potency—­is continuous with a contemporary urban ballet scene in Conakry in which young people mobilize dance as a semiotic resource to construct their lifeworld. My investigation of aesthetic/affecting politics is multilayered: I write of the subtle negotiation between creativity and authority in Guinea from the socialist period to the present, highlighting how even the most didactic of po­ litical media involves compromise and collective feeling. I attend also to the ways in which people who are not active in formal politics use their bodies to make claims on and about public sentiment and public values. Aesthetic/af­ fecting politics is at play at the level of formal state policy, within institutions (in this case, the ballet), and at the level of individual practice. By uniting these different scales of political life through the medium of dance over time in Guinea, I demonstrate how aesthetics and affects are neither mere political epiphenomena nor simply instruments of domination or resistance. Rather they are, as Ann Laura Stoler puts it, “the substance of politics” (2004, 6).

1

Why Authority Needs Magic Statecraft is a thespian art. c l i f f o r d g e e r t z , Negara

Mouminatou Camara, once a star dancer in Guinea’s national company Les Ballets Africains, walked to the front of a packed dance studio in Union Square, Manhattan, to begin her class. Before starting the warm-­up, she turned to the drummers, stood up straight, and exclaimed with a wry smile, “Prêt pour la Révolution!” (Ready for the Revolution!)—­a political slogan and obligatory salutation in socialist Guinea. The remark was lost on American students, but the drummers—­most of whom were also Guinean—­smiled and responded in kind, “Pour la Révolution, prêt!” In that moment, Mouminatou invoked the political history of the dance genre she teaches. While the exchange was infused with humor, she and others of her generation make clear in conversation that their professional identities are intimately tied to the period during which they were expected to be “ready for the revolution.” The category of person now referred to in Conakry as artiste—­including dancers, musicians, and singers—­was forged through socialist cultural policy when the state bucked lineage distinctions around who could perform professionally. This category of artiste, which both disavowed and celebrated “tradition,” emblematized a political era framed by the competing ideologies of Marxism and Pan-­Africanism. Performing artists during the First Republic were lauded as citizens who modeled proper socialist behavior and morality. Their staged performances were used internationally to convey the dignity and uniqueness of African cultural production and within Guinea “to perform a kind of morality play . . . in which [audiences] were didactically instructed in the types of behaviors they should and should not engage in as citizens of a modern nation” (McGovern 2017, 41). Ballet was political theater in socialist Guinea, but its persistence long after the death of Sékou Touré makes clear that the genre was

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not contained by socialist politics. By investigating the close relationship between Guinean ballet and the government that supported its flourishing, this chapter demonstrates how the Guinean state’s authority depended, in part, on creative freedom. While the Touré regime overtly instrumentalized art and artists toward political ends, it also depended on the affecting resonance of their performances to move spectators. This produced a situation in which ballet artists were both explicitly at the service of politics and free to establish new movements and rhythms at will. Ballet’s positioning between vitality and authority in Guinea has shaped the genre in different ways from its political heyday in the postindependence era until the present and accounts for its resilience through political-­economic change. Anthropologists working in postsocialist contexts have long contested Western exaggerations of the level of control that socialist states had over their citizens (e.g., Burawoy and Lukács 1992; Dunn 2004; Verdery 1996, 20). Indeed, the depiction of Soviet Russia as “totalitarian” bolstered Cold War propaganda in the US,1 and similar logics continue to justify American meddling in foreign regimes in the name of freedom (e.g., Abu-­Lughod 2013). By correcting overarching stereotypes about socialisms, this literature highlights the persistence of Cold War binary oppositions that bear little relation to realities on the ground and that further entrench popular notions of Western moral authority. Similarly, analyses of political spectacle that focus on “truth value” or sincerity miss potential avenues for moving beyond conventional understandings of authoritarianism as neatly opposed to democracy and freedom. Guinean ballet demands, rather, that we acknowledge more subtle ways in which politics relies on the pursuit of resonance—­on the “intensification produced by the overlapping, back and forth call of signs from various discourses” (Lepselter 2016, 4). In an interview I conducted in Conakry with a well-­known pop singer, griot, and former dancer named Mama Diabate, she described to me how a truly virtuosic dancer compels audience members to follow the dance mimetically with their own bodies; the performer lunges, leaps, and twirls, and the viewer imitates with micromovements and facial responses. Implicit in Mama’s description was the idea that a great dancer compels mimetic feeling as well—­feeling that ties people to one another across space. This premise was key to President Touré’s interest in performing arts as media of nation-­ building and posits dance not as a passive object to be observed but as an active practice forging human connection. When dancers move, they command space and feeling beyond the dimensions of their individual bodies. By conceptualizing dance as a mode of generating resonance, I demonstrate

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throughout this book how the “thing” that is dance in Guinea has long been constituted less by what it is than by what it does. In the small ethnographic record on Guinea, there is ample evidence that the demystification campaign (explained in the introduction) helped the socialist regime consolidate its power by attempting to appropriate rural dance, music, and song (e.g., Højbjerg 2006; McGovern 2013; Rivière 1969, 1977; Straker 2009b). Yet this literature also demonstrates how ultimately unsuccessful demystification was in transforming its targets into citizens who disavow magical ontologies. These ethnographies illuminate one piece of a larger social puzzle about aesthetics and politics in Guinea that has continued temporally and semiotically well beyond the iconoclastic campaign. When a dance was appropriated through demystification for performance in the national companies, for example, the movements became available to the artists tasked with modernizing them for incorporation into stageworthy repertoires. The process of using rural steps as the basis for elaborate ballet programs was left to the discretion of performers and directors who turned a blind eye to or were unaware of the violence of the campaign. These artists understood themselves to be creators of novel forms that emblematized an emerging, and anti-colonial, modern nation.2 The history of aesthetic and affective politics in Guinea has only partially been written until more is articulated about (1) the artists working in the bal­ lets that appropriated once-­sacred or secret material during demystification and (2) the complex relationship between authoritarianism and creativity that allowed dance to be at once a tool of the state and a tool of average people who kept it thriving after the end of the regime. Art in the service of politics in this context illuminates how the choice, in both theory and practice, is not only between resistance and hegemony, freedom and coercion—­dualisms that continue to be reproduced in both academic and popular accounts of state-­sponsored art.3 In Guinea, ballet constituted successful state propaganda in part because the force and resonant capacity of Guinean artistry—­propelled by popular histories of nyama and magic—­was by definition not transparent to ideology and could not be fostered without granting artists certain creative freedoms. Performing artists in socialist Guinea navigated a contradiction at the heart of all modernizing projects—­ that ideals of creativity and reason are in tension with the political authority of the modern state (Agamben 2005; Yurchak 2006, 10). How they chose to engage that tension exemplifies broader negotiations between creativity and authority that have had ramifying consequences in Guinean society into the present.

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Griots, Artists, and Militant Theater The relationship between the archive and the repertoire . . . too readily falls into a binary, with the written and archival constituting hegemonic power and the repertoire providing the anti-­hegemonic challenge. Performance belongs to the strong as well as the weak . . . and embodied performances have often contributed to the maintenance of a repressive social order. d i a n a t ay l o r , The Archive and the Repertoire

The Touré regime capitalized on the popular appeal and political efficacy of griots and on orality and embodiment more generally as means of disseminating political messages. I employ the French term griot simply because it is familiar to many readers, but locals in Conakry use the Maninka term djeli or the Susu term yeli to refer to Maninka lineage bards. In rural Mande societies, griots were historically employed by kings and other nobles and could exercise considerable influence over their patrons (Conrad and Frank 1995, 4). While sometimes disliked or distrusted, griots have long been important to the people they praise, over whom they wield power through their authority on “kinship and genealogy, social domains central to the sense of honor and reputation of the family and the individual” (B. Hoffman 2000, 12). Griots also accompanied soldiers into war “in order, by reciting the great actions of their ancestors, to awaken in them a spirit of glorious emulation” (Scottish explorer Mungo Park 1799, 278–­79, quoted in Conrad and Frank 1995, 3). Griots played a central role in the formation of modern musical ensembles and ballets during Guinea’s socialist period (see Counsel 2009, 70), but that cultural infrastructure also promoted the formation of an achieved category of artiste not beholden to lineage, class, or ethnic background. The Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG) championed this move away from ascribed statuses as part of its anti-­elitist and egalitarian politics4 and ultimately undermined the monopoly that griots once had on professional singing, dancing, and music-­making. The French title artiste, for which there is no Susu or Maninka equivalent, itself metapragmatically stipulates the kind of modern cosmopolitan communicative interaction that socialist artists were intended to be a part of (as does the term ballet). Unlike griots, “artists”—­including dancers, singers, musicians, and dramaturges—­were trained in formal companies to be stage performers. Performing arts were politically useful in reaching wide audiences, and artists became emblems (indexical icons)5 of the combination of African authenticity and modernity that nationalist movements cultivated aggressively across the continent. The Guinean state framed ballet as the revolutionary expressive form par excellence and artists as laudable advice-­givers and moral

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examples. Indeed, Guinea’s socialist government placed more value on ballet and the broader project of “militant theater” (including ballets, theater troupes, and musical ensembles) than on formal schooling. According to Jay Straker, “Touré cherished theater as a political and pedagogical field with a vibrancy that validated, with special poignancy, his regime’s capacity to reshape and mobilize the cultural and historical sensibilities of the Guinean people” (2009b, 84). One of the most revealing claims President Touré made justifying this emphasis on the performing arts was about transparency. Touré and PDG media outlets posited dance and music as more reliable and “objective” communicative media than literary works or talk radio because the performing arts rely on bodily sensation as well as intellect—­and therefore generate a kind of undeniable material support for party messages. According to a party publication, for example, “Choirs, ballets, folk dances, music, and plays presented by the Federation troupes allow for greater information to be disseminated among the population completely and objectively concerning the important political, economic, and social problems of our people, and contribute to the development of [the population’s] militant vigilance” (PDG-­RDA, n.d., 36; italics mine). It is worth quoting Straker at length here, as he explains the dis­ tinction Touré made between literary expression and embodied arts as revolutionary tools: [For Touré,] the most notable and regrettable quality of literature was its capacity to engender potentially infinite (mis-­)readings, alternative meanings as diverse as the educations and sensibilities of the readers who engaged it. An omnipresent “filter” inhered in literary works precluding the possibility of an uninfected transmission of ideas from writer to reader. . . . The types of meanings forged through a spectator’s experience of a theatrical production were wholly different. Radically unlike the reader, the spectator was fully enveloped, senses as well as mind, in the complex communicative power of the performance. He or she was completely captivated—­one is tempted to say “captured”—­by the messages conveyed through the physical presence and conduct of the performers. . . . The unstable, interpretive filtering intrinsic to literary experience was elided in theatrical experience, and misinterpretations were, necessarily, “infinitely fewer.” (2009b, 86–­87)

When Touré suggested that ballet was a proper revolutionary medium because of its transparency, he was tacitly conveying that performing artists themselves—­who tended to come from the lower classes—­were loyal and could be trusted. Although socialist-­era artists were not all griots, the historical relationship by which kings and rulers were patrons to traditional bards informed the structural position of artists vis-­à-­vis the state. Historically,

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griots in Guinea could not become kings and did not seek political office.6 During socialism, many artists came from poor families and few were formally educated, making them less threatening politically to Touré (who was an autodidact) than educated elites. The characterization of performing arts as objective communication hints at Touré’s deep paranoia about the threat that intellectuals and political opponents posed to his position and served practically to valorize media that was immediately accessible to a largely illiterate population. Political Formulas, Proper Revolutionaries Une troupe guinéenne exaltant la Révolution africaine. A Guinean troupe exalts the African Revolution. s é k o u t o u r é , Horoya-­Hebdo

In 1958, all French territories in Africa voted on whether to join a new “French Community” (Communauté française) proposed by Charles de Gaulle’s government. Leftists in Guinea strongly opposed the new constitution, seeing it as a form of continued colonization, and Guinea was the only French African territory to vote no and to gain independence. Leading up to the referendum vote, Touré, who was then the trade unionist leader of the Guinean branch of the interterritorial Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA),7 gave a speech urging the populace to vote against the constitution. During this speech, he famously declared, “Nous préférons la liberté dans la pauvreté à la richesse dans l’esclavage” (We prefer liberty in poverty to riches in slavery), a statement that set the ideological stage for the postcolonial struggle to come8 and perhaps too aptly foreshadowed the reality of Guinea’s journey as an independent country. Indeed, after the referendum, France retaliated by attempting to isolate the budding nation “diplomatically, economically, and militarily” (Schmidt 2007, 157). They sabotaged the new government on multiple fronts, removing money from the central bank, boycotting Guinean exports to western markets, and withdrawing administrators (M. Camara 2005, 58; McGovern 2017, 39; Mortimer 1969, 329–­35). According to Mohamed Saliou Camara, “Vital government files vanished, along with telecommunications installations and plumbing facilities; excesses solely meant to further complicate Guinea’s frail independence beginnings” (2005, 57). In October 1958, Guinea gained its independence from France, and the Guinean section of the RDA transformed into the PDG, separating from the interterritorial union (Mortimer 1969, 345; Schmidt 2007, 175–­76). Touré’s statement about preferring liberty over riches,

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which captures the kind of moral stance championed rhetorically by the PDG in the years to follow, was and continues to be widely cited and repeated in Guinea, though with increasing sarcasm in the present day. The performing arts were infused with such a postcolonial moral stance through overt messaging in staged performances as well as in media coverage about them, and practitioners in national and federal ballets understood themselves to be providing a vital and ethical service to their nation.9 Socialist artists were called to act in service of politics, as international ambassadors of the new nation and as media of the revolution within Guinea. Artists came to be synonymous, in party rhetoric, with the lofty goals of postcolonial nationalism, and party publications, such as the weekly Horoya-­ Hebdo, regularly exalted artists as revolutionary heroes. A typical article declared, “The Guinean artist, from the first hours of independence, is truly at the forefront of the fight to shape political consciousness of the revolution and to restore the authenticity of African culture” (Kouyate 1982, 62).10 Dancers and musicians who trained during socialism embraced (and continue to reproduce) such rhetoric, yet they interpret it not as an articulation of how art fits into a political ideology but rather as a set of claims about the capacity of art to influence and transform macro social and political phenomena. These claims proved easily transferrable to a changing political economy after 1984. Sékou Touré’s regime became increasingly autocratic and repressive over the course of his tenure, and cultural politics contributed to maintaining a cult of personality around the president. During the 1960s and 1970s, somewhere between ten and thirty thousand political prisoners were killed by the Guinean state (Mouralis 1987), and under Touré’s rule, nearly one-­third of the country’s population—­a figure representing between 1.5 and 2 million people—­fled the country to escape the repressive political system (Bah, Keita, and Lootvoet 1989; Rubiik 1987, 105). During the 1970s, state repression worsened following an attempted coup in 1970 by Portuguese soldiers and Guinean fighters,11 and ethnic Fulbe became targets of the president’s growing paranoia (Arieff and McGovern 2013, 200; A. Bâ 1986; Kaké 1987). Literary creative expression was increasingly stifled during this time in favor of Touré’s own writings (Kaba 1976). Citizens were encouraged to reproduce formulaic slogans and parrot official ideas, and intellectuals writing about this time period often presume that creative endeavors were universally repressed. Guinean historian Lansiné Kaba, for example, writing in 1976, suggested that “a high level of mobilization and autocratic authoritarian rule tends to stifle creativity by subjugating art to the party bureaucracy, and to the opinion of the national leader. Contemporary Guinea exemplifies such a totalitarian world” (202). A. O. Barry

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makes a more subtle yet ultimately similar argument that the creative practice that was truly influential during this era was the “art” of oratory that bolstered Touré and his party-­state. Barry contends that the formulaic repetitions in Touré’s speeches and in party slogans succeeded in affectively enveloping the population in a particular and extremely limiting world view: The repetitions form a frame that concentrates attention on a few essential notions, reducing the field of possibilities for reasoning and compressing the thought of the listeners in a tight ringlike maze with a single exit. Les répétitions forment un cadre qui concentre l’attention sure quelques notions essentielles, ce qui réduit le champ des possibilités de raisonnement et comprime la pensée des auditeurs dans un labyrinthe semblable à un anneau serré dont la boucle n’offre qu’une seule issue. (2002, 75)

Barry demonstrates how Touré’s oratory was itself performative of political might and was filled with slogans and mechanisms for engaging audiences in a kind of collective effervescence that was independent of the content of the rhetoric. Touré’s speeches “were not meant to ‘say something,’ but to produce effects” (n’étaient pas destinés à ‘dire quelque chose,’ mais à produire des effets; A. Barry 2002, 74). While both Barry and Kaba illuminate important and troublesome aspects of the relationship between affect and political influence in socialist Guinea, neither acknowledges potential for openings in the self-­referential loop created by party rhetoric. Mike McGovern similarly mentions that Guinea’s socialist government “came to evaluate all cultural production in instrumental terms. For theater, the only meaningful criterion was a piece’s potential service to the revolution” (2013, 210). However, McGovern also acknowledges that artists had to go beyond prescriptive messaging in order to reach their audiences and notes that “the enjoyment that many Guineans experienced even during times of real political repression . . . drops out of many accounts of this period” (2013, 219). This genuine positive feeling communicated through dance and music during socialism both served as critical substance for affective politics in socialist Guinea and demonstrated how party control was never total (e.g., Dave 2019). During the First Republic, performing artists who became directly involved in politics were sometimes targeted by the Touré regime,12 but ballet practitioners were not typically sanctioned or forced into exile as a result of the art they produced, as were some writers, including Camara Laye and Tierno Monénembo (Thomas 2002, 35). Guinean performing artists therefore tend to remember socialism positively as a time when their competencies were celebrated and rewarded by the state. Touré did not suspect them as subversives,

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and as long as they danced well and produced theatrical scenes with properly “revolutionary” themes—­such as anti-­imperialism, anti-­colonialism, heroic epic histories, national unity, or work and productivity—­their dances were not censored at more subtle levels of significance. The PDG waged war over the control of signs through demystification, but once those signs were in the hands of dancers and musicians in the national ballets, the state did not strictly censor their circulation or manipulation. The press and competition juries at national festivals paid attention to the themes of the shows and the quality of the dance’s execution but did not (at least openly) debate or describe the intricacies of movement’s possible meanings. For example, in an extended article in the state paper Horoya-­Hebdo about the National Cultural Festival in 1970 (Cissé and Touré 1970), the authors elaborate on the merits and faults of different competing ballets. They celebrate troupes for attending to themes such as the ills of drug trafficking, rural authenticity, anti-­imperialism, and the history of the PDG. The authors use vague terms of praise—­like charming, extravagant, highly skilled, majestic, and precise—­to describe the performances that judges deemed worthy of esteem. They deride other ballets for not rehearsing enough or having too few people. At a dance conference in California in 2018, I spoke with two prominent Guinean artists—­Alisco Diabate and M’Bemba Bangoura, who had performed in socialist-­era federation and national ballets—­about these trends in evaluation I had noted in the party literature. They described to me how during the revolution, members of competition juries would visit ballet rehearsals before competitions to do what was referred to in French as “censure,” or critique. These critics typically monitored the historical accuracy of the narratives, made sure that ballets were producing shows with properly revolutionary topics, and judged how “disciplined” the artists were by their ability to execute movements in synchrony. M’Bemba noted that the dance movements themselves were not generally discussed. This surface-­level interest in motifs and coordination contrasts with the Soviet Union’s close scrutiny of the meanings embedded in cultural production (e.g., Oushakine 2012). In Guinea, ballet programs continue to be framed by such vacant themes as “national unity,” “work,” and “peace,” but Conakry dancers have become adept at separating the medium from the message, so to speak. Formulaic messaging in ballets has become so distanced from the movement that the dance often communicates at cross-­purposes with the explicit theme or bears no relation to it at all. For example, in a 2013 festival that I describe in detail in the following chapter, the Ballet Merveilles staged a program called La Paix (Peace) in a show framed by the theme of national unity. The message of peace was conveyed through lyrics and short plays, all stating tritely that “war

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is bad.” The framing narrative, however, acted as a feeble constative hull for a show that consisted mostly of dynamic movement and percussion conveying multiple subtle layers of information that did not match or even support the explicit message. Dancers and drummers showcased their virtuosity, weaving together dance steps in intricate arrangements that communicated meaning metapragmatically through the juxtaposition of foreign and domestic influences, the speed of execution, references to ethnic identities, and citation of rural dances. The reproduction of authoritative forms need not signal a wholesale embrace of their descriptive messages. As Alexei Yurchak (2006) has argued in the context of late Soviet Russia, adherence to political and rhetorical formu­ las can, in fact, enable the production of unanticipated meanings and social formations.13 By advertising party directives alongside dance moves that were increasingly abstracted both from their rural contexts and from the stated messages of the shows, artists in socialist Guinea built a genre of dance with the potential to extend beyond the party-­state. Artists were called upon not only to reproduce rigid formulas but also to do what all good art does—­to transcend the easily describable and get audiences to feel along with the performers, to pursue a relation of mutual becoming. A famous line from a speech Touré made at the second Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Rome in 1959 reveals this pursuit of embodied resonance as foundational to his understanding of the political role of the arts. He said, “To take part in the African revolution it is not enough to write a revolutionary song; you must fashion the revolution with the people. And if you fashion it with the people, the songs will come by themselves, and of themselves” (quoted in Fanon [1959] 1963, 206). If Guinean ballet had produced ideology alone, without embodied resonance, it would have been decidedly less appealing as a political medium and far less enduring as an artistic one. Modern Aesthetics and Ethical Being The PDG valued dance troupes for their ability to communicate to vast audiences without the use of language, but not all troupes were tasked with the same communicative goals. While local ballets were charged with educating the population about party values and African epic histories, the national ballets (and especially the top company Les Ballets Africains) were supposed to acquaint foreign spectators with Guinean art and culture (Charry 2000, 211; Touré 1970). Despite the different aims of these troupes, they all parti­c­ ipated in the broader task of producing a modern Guinean aesthetic by com­ bining, translating, and elaborating on existing rural cannons of dance and

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percussion. This aesthetic was constructed by performing a variety of ethnically marked dances and rhythms in a single program, by increasing their tempo, and by dramatically expanding the repertoire of movements within each rhythm. By staging and modifying African dances in this way, Guinean ballets during the First Republic offered qualitative support for the state’s claims about socialism as a pathway to modernization qua progress—­indexed by speed and accumulation. These qualities that marked early ballet as modern were not ideologically tethered to socialism and have easily been transferred to the exigencies of life in postsocialist Conakry. One might suspect that even if the guiding principles of Guinean ballet transcended the party-­state by indexing modernity or progress beyond any specific political agenda, the ethical principles communicated didactically through socialist dance would have become obsolete with the end of the regime. In fact, moral frameworks from the socialist period have similarly been incorporated into contemporary ballet culture in Conakry, where artists are no longer linked to a state-­sponsored political platform. Young artists, like their socialist predecessors, often claim that artistya—­the profession of the artist—­constitutes a particular form of ethical personhood. Despite their disempowered position vis-­à-­vis formal politics and diplomacy since the end of the First Republic, artists in Conakry have not relinquished the lofty ideals that defined their profession in both socialist and griot idioms. They explain, for example, that artists can prevent war, predict the future, or make politicians see a righteous path. As one Conakry dancer in her early thirties put it, “The artist’s job is to unite Conakry. S/he doesn’t work to divide the city; s/he tries to get rid of the anger and ill will that exists, so that the country can progress and unite.”14 By this logic, it is through influencing people’s emotional states that artists are able to affect social change on a broader scale. In an interview with me, drummer Nabilaye Moussa Camara reiterated these ideas, which are shared by many Conakry artists: In Guinea here, it is thanks to Allah and artists that war does not break out. There are a lot of things in Guinea that normally, if they happened, would lead to war. People get motivated and go out to incite violence, sure, and sometimes there is fighting! But it doesn’t become like Sierra Leone or Liberia, no no no no no. Why? Because as soon as it starts, artists have already begun gathering. They sing to raise public awareness, and if people watch the artists singing in a concert, and listen to their words, bad ideas can’t come into their heads.

Nabilaye taps into an important question that scholars have posed about Guinea: why there has not been a civil war when all the indicators political

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scientists use to determine the likelihood of war are present, especially the fact that neighboring countries have recently experienced violent conflict (e.g., Arieff 2009). Nabilaye’s conclusion may seem farfetched, but it resonates with McGovern’s analysis of the unlikely stability the Guinean state has maintained as resulting in part from the socialist state’s success in fostering a strong sense of national identity and purposeful shared suffering (2017, 5). Performing artists were central to that project of nation-­building. on memory and being go od In interviews I conducted in Conakry, young ballet practitioners also discussed the relationship between artistry and ethics through themes of memory and remembering. They described memory as a means of influencing spectators positively as well as an embodied way for practitioners to attain deeper forms of ethical personhood. Nabinti Cisse, a dancer in Merveilles, articulated the first of these uses of memory, proposing implicitly that people are inherently good and must only be reminded of what they already know in order to set them on a good path. The artist, she noted, “helps you recall what you have forgotten.” Dancer Moussa “Ele” Sylla also invoked memory, suggesting that participating in the arts is transformative for the performers themselves. He commented, “Art is powerful. . . . God created it so that we won’t become forget-­people” (Art sεnbε gbo. . . . Allah bar’a ramini, a ramini alako won naxa findi nεεmumixie ra). Ele used the idea of memory here to evoke a sense that through the more literal training of remembering gestures, steps, and rhythms comes a metaphorical “remembering” of an artist’s own dignity and sense of purpose. Dancers and drummers I interviewed frequently defined “good” artistry in terms of comportment and respectability. There is a profound sense, across generations of performers in Conakry, that artists are first and foremost social and moral beings, and their talent or success as creators is connected to this comportment. Many expressed the conviction that a “good” artist is not defined solely or even primarily by skill. For example, in response to the question, “What makes a good artist?” dancer Fatou Bangoura (then in her early thirties) noted, “When you become art—­when they say ‘art,’ it’s not just dance! It’s respect.” Damaye Soumah, a dancer trained during the Touré era, similarly described what it means to be “good”: ds: A good dancer is polite. She is educated. She knows how to comport herself. ac: But what is her dance like?

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ds: When she goes out to dance, her dance is all serious. Her dance is correct. (Serious and correct are articulated in French within Damaye’s Susu speech: “a xa fare birin sérieux. A xa fare birin na correct.”) Damaye’s vision of a good dancer is so focused on comportment that she actively deflected the question about what the dance itself is like. She thus implied that dance and personhood are not separable in the way that I was trying to parse them in the question. When I ask her to elaborate on the dance part of the good dancer, she called attention to the dance being “serious” and “correct”—­both French words that are usually used to describe comportment and when applied to dance, have more to do with dancers’ adherences to norms than with the particularity of their movement. This way of foregrounding comportment is common among Conakry artists across generations and highlights the continuity of a socialist-­inspired way of conceptualizing virtue and virtuosity as inseparable. These fairly uniform descriptions do not address the fact that tough competition for good positions in ballets and for international contracts exists—­ now as it did in the socialist period—­and comportment is not weighted over talent. So what does acting morally have to do with winning a competition or getting a great gig? The way this question is answered in Conakry is often religiously informed, as was Touré’s version of socialist morality. Touré proposed that acting in accordance with party principles was moral and would result in benediction. He sometimes even exhorted imams and priests to curse enemies of the revolution and bless its supporters (A. Barry 2002, 247). Guinean artists—­and many other average people in Conakry—­conceptualize morality and success as instrumentally related and seek blessings from God by performing good deeds among kin and intimates. Doing good for one’s mother, for example, will result in divine grace, and hence talent and success (see A. Cohen 2018). In the same way that the modernizing aesthetics of socialist ballet were not wedded to the ideologies of the party, the enduring ethics of ballet were not encoded in moralizing plays but rather resided in a broader understanding of virtuosity as profoundly connected to virtue. “apolitical” politics Artists in Conakry of all ages insist that ballet is and always has been “apolitical.” This claim appears willfully naive if taken at face value, but what exactly do they mean by it? As long as artists during Guinea’s First Republic remained outside of political deliberations and contests for power and the surface narratives of their shows toed the party line, they were free to develop movements

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and rhythms that interested them. This sense of freedom of course depended on artists being willing to turn a blind eye to the unsavory elements of the regime’s politics—­to be career diplomats with no political agenda but to serve their country, a role that mimics the mediator role historically occupied by griots. During the Touré regime, artists learned to navigate a close relationship with a powerful and oppressive state. Ballet during socialism was marked by the intersection of didactic political formula and vital transformative force, and a version of that intersection continues to inform how Guinean ballet is practiced. Young artists in Conakry, like their socialist forbears, exercise creative freedom through steps and sequences yet willingly submit to patriarchal and gerontocratic authority in the institution of ballet, a topic I take up in chapter 3. The durability of aesthetic and ethical dispositions across political eras highlighted in this chapter is one example of how Guinea’s political history traces into the present dispensation through dance. The remaining chapters in this section investigate how political formula and authoritarian command continue to be cultivated in Guinean ballet at the same time that artists engi­ neer movements, gestures, and qualities that perform what it means to be young and urban in contemporary Guinea.

2

Privatizing Ballet

In February 2013, a nonprofit organization dedicated to representing private dance and percussion companies in Conakry organized a concert of “peace and national unity.” The concert brought together artists from across the city with the explicit intention of getting the state—­which had not been involved seriously in the arts since the end of socialism in 1984—­to recognize the worth of private dance and music groups and to eventually help these groups flourish through subsidies and infrastructural support. Before the concert, the directors of the nonprofit—­called the Alliance Guinéenne Pour le Développement de la Danse et la Percussion (AGDP)1—­ presented a memorandum to the ministry of culture listing their grievances and outlining recommendations for what they termed “the revival of Guinean culture and music.” In the memorandum, the authors explicitly and implic­ itly expressed a desire to rekindle socialist cultural politics. They requested that the government become more involved in cultural production and ad­­ min­istration. They lamented the absence of a “true cultural politics at the level of the state” and proposed that the competitions that were central to the socialist arts system be reinstated. Due to the lack of festivals and competi­ tions in the current system, they suggested, artistic competences cannot be “put to use”—­articulated by the phrase mettre en valuer—­which the socialist state frequently employed in laws governing land use.2 The language used throughout the memorandum, in fact, bears a striking resemblance to the formulaic authoritative speech of socialist-­era cultural politics. The docu­ ment opens thus: From the dawn of time in our societies, the artist has not ceased to act his roles, which are, among others, to advise, educate, distract, raise awareness, and warn.

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f i g u r e 2.1.

Loyal to their noble missions, the artists of Guinea are anxious to sol­ emnly express, on this day, their total support of the values of peace, national unity, and democracy, the indicators of all sustainable development. Taking advantage of the current [political] demonstrations, the artists of Guinea are issuing an urgent appeal to all influential leaders: without blind passion, ev­ eryone must demonstrate wisdom, keeping only the foremost interests of the Guinean people in sight.3

After Sékou Touré died in 1984, the nationwide system of training ballets and competitions in Guinea disappeared and many elderly national artists founded private troupes in Conakry. These privately run ballets took over the work of training artists for professional careers and for admission to the two re­ maining national companies, which had once recruited from the countryside. Because the private ballet system operates without state sanction, officials in the ministry of culture are often skeptical of its worth. Directors of private troupes, most of whom were trained during socialism, are themselves conflicted about

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operating in the private sector and appeal time and again to the state for finan­ cial support with little response. Why do private companies continue to solicit a state that has been absent from the arts for decades? Part of the answer is that these appeals are less effective as literal pleas than as performative suggestions that simultaneously enact artists’ abandonment by the government and index the vital presence of private troupes across Conakry. Privatization There is no Susu term to describe les ballets privés—­the private ballets—­of Conakry. The word private signals contrast between these troupes and the publicly funded national arts system that came before. It also points to the broader phenomenon of privatization that accompanied neoliberal economic reform in Guinea as in most other postsocialist states worldwide. After the cold war, as Katherine Verdery points out, privatization became a symbol for the end of socialism, as did other concepts such as “ ‘democracy,’ ‘civil society,’ [and] ‘markets’ ” (1996, 210). Scholarship on postsocialism usually focuses on the privatization of land or industry through state-­led reform or through the direct influence of Western economic advisory teams or structural ad­ justment programs. However, some elements of state-­socialist systems be­ came private by default when individuals and groups took charge of activities once governed by the state. Such was the case with the performing arts in Guinea. The designers of formal privatization efforts in postsocialist contexts fre­ quently envisioned that once the collective structures of socialism were abol­ ished, capitalist modes of thinking and acting would inevitably and “natu­ rally” settle in. Needless to say, this logic of transition rarely played out on the ground (cf. Creed 1997; Humphrey 1991; Mandel 2002; Obarrio 2014), and in Guinea’s ballet scene, though privatization emerged spontaneously, capi­ talist modes of thinking and operating proved no more “natural” than they were in organized privatization programs. Postsocialist cultural production in Guinea is a hybrid enterprise informed by a socialist past in complex ways that cannot be reduced to residual “socialist mentalities” (cf. Shevchenko 2002). As Juan Obarrio duly notes, “The post-­Socialist condition is a particu­ lar version of the African postcolony, in which neoliberal deregulation has not produced a blanket, all-­encompassing transformation. Rather, aspects of previous regimes of governance—­colonial, Socialist—­remain entangled within the current dispensation” (2014, 9). Private companies constitute the bulk of Conakry’s contemporary bal­ let scene. There are over forty-­five private groups in the city and only two

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national ones, and artists trained in private troupes animate the city’s social ceremonies and political rallies. Private companies have effectively replaced the scaffolded infrastructure of teaching ballets that existed during the First Republic. However, while the socialist system extended nationwide, funnel­ ing the best artists from rural areas into national companies through tiers of competitive ballets, there is no longer any mechanism for connecting urban troupes to those outside Conakry. The national ballets recruit almost exclu­ sively from private companies within the capital. This means that Guinean ballet is an increasingly urban genre, as dance ideas are generated and cir­ culated in ceremonies and ballets within the capital with little input from other parts of the country. It also means that private companies are crucial to the flourishing of Guinean ballet. Despite these realities, officials in the min­ istry of culture often dismiss les ballets privés as irrelevant, presuming that unofficial institutions are merely incomplete or improper versions of official ones. The artists and directors working in private troupes are themselves am­ bivalent about the status of these companies. They alternatively characterize their own system of ballets as a legitimate cultural infrastructure and as an illegitimate, neglected version of its socialist predecessor. Practitioners, espe­ cially those who experienced socialism, tack between celebrating their own resourcefulness and lamenting their postsocialist status as nonstate actors, and young artists are compelled to embody this ambivalence in a variety of ways that I explore throughout this chapter. Private Troupes and the State The week after the Concert of Peace and National Unity, I conducted an in­ formal interview with the elderly directors of the AGDP, Djibril Morilaye Ca­ mara (Badjibi) and Moussa Celestin Camara (Celestin). They provided me with a copy of the memorandum that they had presented to the ministry of culture before the event, and they emphasized some of the main points of the association’s mission: The AGDP, they said, aims to “regularize and professionalize” the arts in Conakry. In order to do this, power and decision-­ making must be centralized. The government should be in charge of regu­ lating who is qualified to create a troupe or teach foreign students. While young artists now offer dance and percussion classes to foreigners in “illicit” spaces, like beaches or private courtyards, the AGDP advocates that all classes be taught in official classrooms with government-­certified teachers. These teachers should demonstrate technical ability as well as systematic knowledge of the history and origins of each dance and rhythm. The AGDP aims to cre­ ate a more hospitable environment for an artistic tourist market to flourish by

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increasing organization and professionalism and by fixing prices across the city for classes and performances. Celestin suggested that if artists living abroad bring students to Conakry, they should be required to register them with the ministry of culture.4 Speak­ ing in a mix of French and Susu, he argued that the state should fund the AGDP and other associations helping private companies and music groups. Later he proclaimed that the AGDP wants to be “completely autonomous” (Fr. complètement autonome). I asked if that meant not at all connected to the government, and he said yes. The directors of Conakry private ballets often long for state subsidization and for the return of what they perceived to be a stable and predictable social order. Indeed, as Mike McGovern (2015) describes, many Guinean citizens in the forest region experienced socialism as a time when “liberty” was sup­ pressed in favor of “security” and postsocialism conversely as a time when liberty has come at the expense of security. Conakry artists, and especially those who lived through the Touré era, similarly describe postsocialism as a time when they are theoretically free to travel and to accumulate wealth yet vulnerable to the precarity of urban living, capitalist markets, and political unrest. Even the most successful migrant artists—­those who have benefited the most from liberal capitalism—­express nostalgia for the structure of the First Republic. The artists and directors who run Conakry’s private troupes, which emerged in this time of relative political and entrepreneurial freedom,5 understand the ballets both as a vibrant form of infrastructure and as a testa­ ment to the state’s regrettable retreat from the arts. The directors of the AGDP struggle to legitimate their organization and the private companies it represents to state ministries. Like these directors, ministry officials often frame postsocialist cultural production within param­ eters that were forged during the revolution, but the two groups differ in their assessments of the role of private companies. The AGDP claims that all artists are vital to the preservation of Guinea’s historical patrimony, and therefore their endeavors should be subsidized by the state. Government officials agree about the goal to preserve national patrimony but reason that only official artistic groups that have been organized by the government should be recog­ nized as performing that service. Ministry officials with no connections to the private ballets frequently dis­ miss nonnational artists as riffraff and do not recognize the structural role that private companies have come to play in Conakry. They often pejoratively call private troupes “little ballets” (les petits ballets) and during my fieldwork were fond of telling me that I was wasting my time working with and ask­ ing questions about such ballets. In a conversation in February 2013 inside

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the ministry of culture with the chief of staff, Laye Sidibé, and the director of the national company Les Ballets Africains, Hamidou Bangoura, I asked the two men about the relationship between private and national companies. Both Sidibé and Bangoura, speaking in French, said that private companies are inspired by the nationals, which are inspired by rural “authentic” prac­ tices. Private directors and artists, however, tend to emphasize that the pri­ vate companies produce artists for the nationals, which, as the administrator of the private Ballet Merveilles put it, “nourish” (balofe) themselves from the privates. In this view, echoed by many private directors, the national compa­ nies are associated with an exploitative “politics of the belly” that character­ izes vertical power relations across postcolonial Africa (Bayart [1989] 2009). When I asked them if they saw any value at all in the private ballets, Sidibé and Bangoura noted dismissively that they serve “to occupy the youth.” Sidibé also commented that private ballets are “for animating small neighborhood weddings,” as compared with the lofty goals of the national companies to con­ duct international cultural diplomacy and preserve national cultural heritage. Private companies, however, consider themselves as good as or better than the nationals. Sekou Sano, the younger director of the Ballet Merveilles, com­ mented in an interview, “Privates and nationals are all the same now. There is no difference between them! Except to say that some privates have surpassed the nationals.” Some artists and directors work simultaneously with private and national companies, and they often agree that privates are critically im­ portant and suggest that the status of the nationals is waning because they are underfunded and rarely tour. Celestin himself, who cofounded the AGDP, was also the director of the national ballet Djoliba at the time of my research. My own observations of private and national companies in Conakry since my first visit in 2002 support claims that national companies are no longer necessarily more talented or successful than private ones. Les Ballets Afri­ cains, which was the top ballet for many years, is losing its ability to attract young talent due to infrequent contracts and a widespread perception that jealous older members keep youth from rising. The other national company, Ballet Djoliba, tours even more rarely, and both ballets employ artists well past their prime.6 Younger performers in the national companies are often considered apprentices (Fr. stagiaires)—­and therefore remain unsalaried—­ even if they have starring roles or have been in the ballet for many years. Young members of Les Ballets Africains regularly defect from international tours when they happen,7 and during my fieldwork in 2013, they staged a strike demanding regular wages (so-­called apprentices were paid only after tours, while the older members were paid monthly).

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While the nationals are suffering, private companies continue to crop up all over Conakry. They range from extremely small disorganized outfits to eighty-­member-­strong ballets that train artists rigorously. The quality of these private ballets fluctuates over time depending on a number of factors, including the loss of artists to migration, age, and movement into national companies; the death of qualified directors; and the availability of resources from members and donors. Some private company directors hope to gain touring contracts. Others—­noticing that obtaining visas for entire groups has become more difficult—­have reconceptualized the private ballet as a training ground for individual artists who will acquire independent opportunities to travel and then provide support to the ballet from abroad. Still others have responded to the visa challenge by founding smaller percussion companies with only two or three dancers (as opposed to twenty or thirty in a typical bal­ let) and networking with foreign managers and students to secure contracts.8 In many African cities, as AbdouMaliq Simone makes clear, “increasingly, more ephemeral forms of social collaboration are coming to the fore, and more effective formal governance partnerships often succeed to the degree to which they can draw on them” (Simone and Abouhani 2005, 23; also see Bergère 2016; Burdett 2013). If state actors in Conakry insist on interpreting the city and its artistic production primarily through the officialdom of gov­ ernment structures, when in fact these structures are quite weak, they risk missing such potential partnerships and misinterpreting the social landscape of their constituency.9 The interactions between private troupes and officials in the ministry of culture frequently exemplify this kind of misrecognition that is exacerbated by the double desire of the private ballets to be both au­ tonomous and state supported. Next, I describe the AGDP’s Concert of Peace and National Unity and a similar show organized by the private Ballet Mer­ veilles. Both events, according to the organizers, were attempts to secure state patronage and recognition, and both of them failed. The Concert of Peace and National Unity In the Ballet Merveilles, where I rehearsed daily during my fieldwork, the di­ rectors announced on a Friday that instead of the normal scheduled rehearsal at 10 a.m. on Saturday, we were to report to the youth center at 7 a.m. in or­ der to participate in a “carnival” organized by the AGDP. They provided no more details. The next day, I arrived around 8:30 a.m. to find almost no one there. Artists trickled in, and we left at 10 a.m. There was no transportation for the group, so everyone had to pay their own way in either a shared taxi or

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van. When we arrived at the designated meeting place, a large open-­air venue called La Paillotte, for the beginning of the carnival procession, we found artists from different ballets rehearsing a piece together and others milling about. Directors from a number of private groups were there, including Ous­ mane “Zito” Bangoura, the director of the ballet Samato; “Fule” from a group called Wofa, which had toured the world in the 1990s; Momo “Grand Masta” Camara, the elderly director of the small troupe Africa Danse; and many oth­ ers. I asked Zito what they were doing this carnival for, and he explained that they were going to do a show for the mangee—­a word meaning leaders, kings, or presidents. When I asked more specifically which mangee they were expecting, he said he did not really know, maybe the president, maybe some different ministers. I asked what they hoped to accomplish, and he said that they wanted the mangee to recognize how important they are. He explained that the private troupes feed the national troupes: “Six artists from my group Samato are in the National Ballet Djoliba!” He added that they want the gov­ ernment to begin financing private troupes or at least helping them out some­ how. Throughout the day, I asked people why we were there or what they thought the carnival was for. Most of the younger artists responded that they didn’t know what it was about. I asked Aly Mara—­the young artistic direc­ tor of Ballet Matam and a dancer with Les Ballets Africains—­why they were doing this. He was wearing an organisateur badge, as were all the directors of companies belonging to the AGDP. He replied simply and stubbornly, “So that they know that we are alive” (E xa kolon mu na viverfe). Why do these private artists want so badly for the state to “know that they are alive” or to recognize their importance? One might expect that nearly three decades after the death of Sékou Touré, with very little government support that entire time, private artists would cut their losses, stop hoping for a return to a caretaker state, and move on. Instead, directors perpetually pine for gov­ ernment subsidies, utilizing rhetorical and choreographic formulas from the socialist period in their attempts to interpellate the state and to assert private ballets as legitimate protectors of Guinea’s national culture and fragile peace. As artists from private ballets all over the city waited in the Paillotte court­ yard for the concert to begin, small drum circles formed spontaneously and dancers soloed, sporting colorful costumes from their respective groups. When one circle would peter out, another would emerge in a different part of the yard. Often there were three or four competing rhythms playing simul­ taneously, producing a cacophonous tangle of sound. As I moved into one circle, the rhythm from that group would dominate and all other sounds fell away. Once back on the outside, the ambient soundscape would come back into range. As the day wore on, I began to notice dancers asleep on couches,

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f i g u r e 2.2. Merveilles dancers waiting at the Paillotte for the AGDP concert to begin

tables, and the top of a short cement wall. Others sat and chatted or wandered about, buying water, fritters, clumps of large red beans wrapped in cones of white paper, or French bread with different fillings. People started to com­ plain that they had to go work sabar parties at night and would be depleted of energy. Others complained of hunger and the hot sun (soge xɔnɔ!).10 Around 1 p.m., I went over to ask Badjibi, one of the directors of the AGDP, what exactly we were waiting for and when he thought it would start. He looked at me with tired eyes and said that he didn’t know. I asked him who we were waiting for, and he said, “mangee” (kings, leaders). I asked him which mangee or when they should come, and he did not know. He said that when the mangee arrived, they would let us know that it is time to march toward the Palais du Peuple, where the event was scheduled to take place. This sounded vague, so I decided to go downtown and do my weekly shop­ ping and eat ice cream. When I returned about two hours later, the artists had begun marching up the peninsula’s main artery toward the palais. I stood on the side of the road taking photos as group after group danced by, wear­ ing costumes of all shapes and colors decorated with tassels, cowrie shells, and beads. Drummers wore traditional hats adorned with yarn, shells, and

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mohawks of goat hair. Some carried huge dundun drums between them, while others played the smaller, wearable drums of the ballet ensemble—­ djembe, sangban, and kenkeni. Acrobats paraded in towers of three, juggling bowling pins, and male dancers in pink and blue satin dresses walked with delicately painted Yole masks propped atop their heads.11 Hundreds of per­ formers paraded into the palais parking lot, and groups clustered along the periphery of a space the size of a football field. On the towering veranda of the palais overlooking the parking lot, couches were draped in white cloths behind tables decorated with plastic flowers, and white plastic chairs flanked the couches. This seating area was conspicuously empty. One ballet director said that he thought the single dignitary present was the minister of culture. The seating for the dignitaries was capacious enough to seat at least forty people and was set apart high above the performers, overlooking a large stage with piles of amplifiers on either side. Three or four military guards in green berets leaned over the railing. The pillars of the palais were wrapped in green, red, and gold (the colors of the Guinean flag), and more flags were tied to the railing. A large sign hung from the veranda, surrounded by red advertise­ ments for “Top Prix” soda. The sign read, CONCERT DE LA PAIX ET DE L’UNITE NATIONALE LES ARTISTES ADHERENT AUX PROGRAMMES DE CHANGEMENT PRONE PAR LE PROFESSEUR ALPHA CONDE SAMEDI 2 FEVRIER 2013 L’ESPLANADE DU PALAIS DU PEUPLE A 9H This text is reproduced here as it was on the poster, in all capitals, with no diacritics. The English translation is, “Concert of peace and national unity / The artists adhere to the plans for change advocated by the professor Alpha Condé / Saturday February 2, 2013 / The esplanade of the Palace of the People at 9 a.m.” The organizers clearly hoped that the new administration, under President Condé, who had been elected in 2010, would treat artists differ­ ently than did the previous two (under Dadis Camara and Lansana Conté). Their appeal to this administration was through “national unity” (l’Unité Nationale), a theme popular in the independence era but now wielded by artists addressing an absentee state. As this sign hung in front of the empty VIP seat­ ing area six hours after the event was to begin, the response of state officials to the requests and demands of the city’s artists seemed painfully clear. Once in the large circle, I expected something to happen, but instead, the groups of artists just stood around and then began to animate their own little circles, as they had done while waiting at the Paillotte. This lasted over an

f i g u r e 2.3. Yole masked dancers at the AGDP concert

f i g u r e 2.4. Yole masked dancers

f i g u r e 2.5. Drummer Lansana “Sege” Camara, son of the late Sekouba “Wastero” Camara, walking up the Autoroute to the Palais du Peuple

f i g u r e 2.6. Autoroute artist procession

f i g u r e 2.7. The empty veranda of the Palais du Peuple during the AGDP concert

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f i g u r e 2.8–2.10. Stilt dancer at the AGDP concert

hour. Finally, when nothing beyond the circles had happened by four o’clock, the director of the Ballet Merveilles gave each of his artists ten thousand Guinea francs (FG; about $1.50) for their transport home. He said that one minister had donated five million FG (about $700) to the concert, so Mer­ veilles, the largest private company in town, received three hundred thousand francs (not quite $50). As I was leaving around 6 p.m., the space remained full of artists, but no staged performance had begun. I noticed one fancy SUV enter with a woman in the back wearing a large head wrap faintly visible through tinted windows. The vehicle made a loop and came right back out. Merveilles Festival of Peace and Dialogue About two months before the AGDP’s Concert of Peace and National Unity, the Ballet Merveilles had organized its own similar festival, entitled Interna­ tional Festival of Peace and Dialogue in Guinea (Fr. Festival Internationale de la Paix et du Dialogue en Guinée). Indeed, themes of peace and national unity had become especially prevalent in ballet programs and popular songs in Conakry since the tragic massacre perpetrated by the Guinean military in

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2009 (see introduction) and in response to the ongoing ethnic and political struggles around elections and multiparty politics (e.g., Dave 2019, 200). This theme was also a common feature of many postcolonial nationalist move­ ments on the continent (see Bayart [1989] 2009, 165). The Ballet Merveilles’s Festival of Peace and Dialogue, which I will explore here in some detail, calls attention to the troubled relationship between private ballets and the state and to the use of formulaic authoritative messaging by state actors and private ballets alike in their attempts to communicate. p r e p a r i n g t h e f e s t i va l In mid-­October 2012, a man named Mr. Soumare came to watch a Merveilles rehearsal and addressed the group afterward. He spoke so softly that we could barely hear him and in a Parisian French that most of the artists didn’t un­ derstand. He was making a television series about Guinean youth for the na­ tional television station, Radio Télévision Guinéenne (RTG), and wanted to film the upcoming festival. He repeatedly urged the artists to “take respon­ sibility” but didn’t clarify responsibility for what exactly. He seemed to be insinuating that artists are representatives of either the nation or another un­ specified social collectivity. Soumare returned several times to the Merveilles rehearsal over the course of a few months. In late November, before the festival, he came back to an­ nounce that unfortunately, the RTG would not air the festival or any of the bal­ let’s work on television. He encouraged the artists to “take courage” anyway and continued to try to give an uplifting speech, which the performers listened to politely. As he lectured, one of the only female dancers who understood French muttered in Susu that she caught nothing of what he was saying. Another dancer asked me to translate. Then Soumare began to hold his fist up and talk about how this show was going to inspire all Guineans and people the world over to work for peace. “Artists,” he remarked with verve, “have the power to stop wars! Through their performances, they can tell the Tuareg in Mali that what they are doing is bad!” Even if the event were to be aired on Guinean national televi­ sion, these claims would have been enormously inflated, but after breaking the news that the RTG would not televise the festival, Soumare’s words sounded especially hollow (to me). When he finished, everyone clapped. Later when Soumare was gone, a young dancer named Diallo stood up in the middle of the seated group and did an impression of the guest, with his pompous French and predictable slogans. Everyone laughed, including the director Sekou. As Soumare’s oration makes clear, private artists are not alone in their attempt to rekindle socialist-­era themes and rhetorical strategies. In fact,

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both the transitional government in place in 2009–­10 and the Condé regime explicitly and implicitly linked their political platforms to Touré’s socialist state. In the summer of 2010, for example, as presidential hopefuls were cam­ paigning in Guinea for the first democratic election in the country’s history, the ministry of arts and culture, then partnered with the AGDP, launched a festival called Festival National des Arts et de la Culture (FENAC), and again the stated themes were peace and unity. This festival was explicitly billed as a “continuation” of a festival by the same name that had been a structural feature of socialist-­era cultural policy.12 One typical advertisement for the festival introduced it thus: “After 28 years of absence, the 14th National Festi­ val of Arts and Culture (FENAC) will be launched in Guinea” (AGP-­Guinée 2010).13 Such advertisements emphasized continuity with the socialist period, establishing an edited temporality in which the present state picks up where the socialist state left off nearly three decades before. This way of imagining time is not unique to Guinea. Anya Bernstein describes its frequency in post-­ Soviet settings: “Scholars of socialism have observed that many post-­Soviet historical revisions reveal an interesting conception of time in which history may be visualized as a timeline that can be edited, with certain time peri­ ods snipped and discarded, while other, disparate periods, such as the pre-­ communist 1900s and postcommunist 1990s, can be ‘pasted’ together. Such excisions go beyond simply emphasizing one period over another and reveal a new understanding of time as no longer fixed and irreversible” (2013, 93). When Condé became president in 2010 through popular election, one of his central slogans was “Guinea is back!” (in English). The implication of this slogan is that Condé would instigate a revival of the spirit, both cultural and political, of Touré’s presidency—­albeit in a different global age. This vague promise acknowledged the fact that many ordinary Guineans recall the Touré era with nostalgia and seemed to propose rekindling a structure of feeling that Touré engendered but not his policies per se.14 Again in 2015, the Guin­ ean government organized a reinstatement of the famed festival of the social­ ist period called Quinzaine Artistique. (The theme was “the consolidation of peace and the struggle against Ebola.”) While calling the festival by the name Quinzaine (fortnight) conveyed continuity with the socialist era, the title is a misnomer for the 2015 festival, which took place over three days in regional enclaves. During the Touré era, the quinzaines were two weeks long and were the national culmination of regional festivals that had taken place over a pe­ riod of months (Counsel 2015, 553–­54). Participating artists and groups could be promoted to higher ranks if they won, and artists enjoyed the attention of the president and significant media coverage of their works (e.g., Hashachar

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2018, 1008). In the current dispensation, the incentives are less clear, as there is no national arts infrastructure and far less attention to art in the media, but artists enjoy taking part in festivals. The notion of editing history so as to link the current period with the Touré era is an imaginative exercise in which both civil and state actors par­ ticipate and demonstrates how positively many people in Guinea recall so­ cialism. However, the mere fact that both private and state actors have an interest in imagining the present linked to the socialist past does not mean that their interests align. The fraught interaction between private ballets and the state as played out in Merveilles’s Festival of Peace and Dialogue, to which I will now turn, is evidence of this disconnect. In the weeks preceding the festival, Sekou scrambled to find funding and badgered the four foreigners who rehearsed full time in Merveilles for dona­ tions (the foreigners in the ballet at the time included a Japanese woman, an Italian woman, a Chilean man, and myself). I suggested to Sekou that he charge an entrance fee, encourage a small suggested donation, or at least circulate a donation box. He explained to me that on principle, if a show is championing social values and sending a moral message to the population, the government should pay, not the people. Two days before the festival be­ gan, it became clear that the funding the directors had hoped for from state ministries was not forthcoming. In a speech to the performers, the elder di­ rector Yamoussa denounced the government for being unclear and stingy, repeating several times the Susu axiom “Nko anun mmmhmm, keren m’a ra” (“Here you” go and “mmhmm” are not the same). The dancers explained to me that nko is clear; it means “here, take this,” while mmhmm is vague and noncommittal. Sekou also talked to the group about the upcoming show, announcing that the leaders (mangee) who had agreed to contribute had re­ neged. “We’re private,” he said, “so we will act privately. We can’t count on the state for anything.” t h e f e s t i va l The festival stretched over two evenings, each with a lineup of two ballets and two percussion groups. Merveilles performed both nights, and their program entitled “Peace” (La Paix) opened with a mise en scène. In this short theatri­ cal scene, artists acted as politicians from each of Guinea’s “four regions”15 and promised their constituents that once elected, they would provide water and electricity to everyone. The politicians each gave similar spiels, offering people T-­shirts and money in exchange for support. Then constituents from

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opposing groups began to fight and a clash broke out between ethnic groups or political parties—­depicted as one and the same in this time of ethnically inflected politics.16 After the fight, people solemnly carried off their dead and wounded, and when one man exhorted them to put their differences aside and get along, they all agreed and began to shake hands and help each other. Then all those who had been fighting began to dance a hip-­hop-­inspired piece in unison, singing, Let’s get along my friend, (Won xa lan de n’boore,) Let’s get along my friend, (Won xa lan de n’boore,) You are right (Wo nɔndi nan n’a ra) Women, you are right (Ginee, wo nɔndi nan n’a ra) Guinea’s leaders say (La Guinée mangee naxε) Let’s all agree on the same thing (Won xa lan fe keren ma) You are right (Wo nɔndi nan n’a ra) Men, you are right (Xamee, wo nɔndi nan n’a ra) Guinea’s leaders say (La Guinée mangee naxε) Let’s all agree on the same thing (Won xa lan fe keren ma)

During the rest of the show, which consisted of dance, percussion, and song, without any explicit reference to peace or dialogue, the choreographic director Yamoussa, who had emerged on stage after the fighting, walked

f i g u r e 2.11. Merveilles dancer Morelaye Diallo playing dead in a scene at the Festival of Peace and Dialogue

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around the stage while people were dancing, making gestures indicating that “peace is good.” Dressed in a boubou of indigo and white cloth with a light-­ blue sash, he pointed to the ground, smiled, and clasped his hands together with a nod of affirmation. He held his thumbs up while smiling widely at the dancers. He mouthed “war is bad” (gere mu fan), punched his hands in the air to imitate fighting, and then waved his finger “no.” He did this repeatedly throughout the show, somehow managing not to collide with the dancers who were whirling about the stage at full speed. The ballet Souraxata performed after Merveilles, and their program fea­ tured a similar mise en scène involving a fight and reconciliation. They sang a song in Maninka with the refrain “war is bad” (kele manyin). In the middle of their piece, Souraxata’s stage director spoke in Susu and French to the audi­ ence. He exhorted, “Let’s not fight! Look at Liberia and Sierra Leone! . . . Long live peace!” (Won naxa gere so! Liberia anun Sierra Leone mato! . . . Vive la paix!). At one point between acts, the minister of commerce, who had been invited as a distinguished guest, stood up and gave a speech. He had audience members hold hands and repeat after him: “Vive la paix!,” “Vive l’unité na­ tional!,” and “Vive le Professeur Alpha Condé!” People repeated the slogans with fervor and then cheered loudly. On the second night of the festival, I predicted a long wait and arrived over an hour after the show was scheduled to begin. The room was packed, but the couch with a table covered in a white cloth and plastic flowers was conspicuously vacant. The MC announced in French that we were waiting for dignitaries, whom he referred to as “the big personalities of the Guinean government” (les grandes personnalités du gouvernement guinéen), as if they were movie stars. Sekou stalled and seemed nervous. Three ministers had been invited on the first night—­the minister of culture, the minister of youth and sport, and the minister of commerce—­and they all attended. This even­ ing, when the show finally began, the dignitaries still had not arrived. The couches remained empty all night, even though the rest of us were literally sitting on one another’s laps. Infrastructure of Abandon Despite the fact that the government has been virtually absent from the arts for decades in Guinea, why do directors of private troupes spend so much time and effort supposedly attempting to rekindle a relationship of patron­ age with the state? In these contexts, what is accomplished by the formu­ laic rhetoric of national unity? Directors describe their efforts as a plea to the government. However, I submit that these shows do more than plead

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with an unresponsive state. They also convey significant meaning beyond the literal messages. First, by creating shows with the expressed goal of regaining government support as it existed in the past, private directors are teaching their students about their vision of an ideal relationship between citizen and state. These shows invite elders to comment on the state’s neglect of artists, and they remind youth that there was a time when ballet was at the center of the national agenda. Second, by claiming that private ballets promote na­ tional unity, these shows intimate that the privates have the same ethical and infrastructural role as officially sanctioned ballets. The empty veranda and the vacant VIP couch signal artists’ abandonment by the government. But con­ versely, the parking lot teeming with artists at the AGDP concert and packed house at the Merveilles festival evidence presence and resilience. Hundreds of artists gathering in the palais parking lot, dancing and drumming among themselves, and addressing an absent state is an embodied articulation of the current situation in Guinea. It is indeed, as Aly Mara put it, a testament to the life and persistence of ballet in the private sector. Despite the fact that private troupes have ensured the survival of the ballet genre in postsocialist Conakry, they are routinely dismissed by state actors. If infrastructure can only be the result of official planning and ideology, as some ministry of culture officials would have it, ballet in Guinea would have been lost with socialism. However, private troupe directors themselves question the significance of their own ballets, as they waver between celebrating their achievements and lamenting the precarious situation that required such in­ genuity in the first place. Private ballets constitute an ambivalent improvised infrastructure infused with a collective sense of loss of the official form that preceded it. As the Touré generation disappears and the ballet scene begins to be run by people with no direct memory of socialism, perhaps this will change, but as I have demonstrated, elders actively teach their students to feel abandoned by the state—­to feel their postsocialist “liberty” also as loss. The institution of ballet and the bodies that carry out its work become sites for the indirect communication of political subjectivity.

3

The Discipline of Becoming: Ballet’s Pedagogy Authority is both made and unmade through . . . everyday performances. y o l a n d a c o v i n g t o n -­wa r d , Gesture and Power

Tonton (Uncle) Yamoussa barked at a group of young apprentice dancers try­ ing to perform a choreographic sequence: “Fa! Siga! Goro! Gbilen!” (Come! Go! Descend! Go back!). His instructions were always aimed at getting in­ dividuals to move in unison with others, but curiously, he never mentioned the intended shape of the dance. One person was told to move in, another out, another forward, another back in order to make, for example, a line. But they were never told to conceptualize the line. Yamoussa became irritated at the incompetence of these unseasoned artists and began to physically drag them into their places as they danced. The scene was almost comical to me as an observer (if it weren’t also exasperating), a kind of ragdoll chess game in which the player is exerting a huge amount of verbal and physical energy to get the pawns into simple formations. I couldn’t help but wonder why he didn’t just say, “Make a circle!” This kind of interaction between directors and their students in Guinean ballets is one element of an elaborate performance of gerontocratic and pa­ triarchal authority that ballets foster. Directors exert authority by monopo­ lizing organizing concepts, hoarding knowledge, imposing fines, and doling out verbal and physical abuse. Young practitioners, in turn, rely on the struc­ ture and discipline of ballets to gain the discipline and “courage” (waakili) required to become successful artists. While gerontocratic and patriarchal norms are cultivated and widely accepted in ballets, they do not represent a system of reactionary control antithetical to Guinea’s recent engagement with democracy. Much as the socialist state depended on creative freedom in ballet, contemporary troupe directors rely on the movements and sequences that young artists design in order to make ballet programs exciting. Young dancers invent and share moves both in the ceremonies they attend regularly

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after rehearsals and in periods of exploratory movement “research” built into each rehearsal. For artists working in ballets, freedom and individual capac­ ity are ideally entwined with and enabled by the kind of sovereign author­ ity exercised by elders and big persons. The more authoritarian tendencies in ballet, I suggest, are not dying hard—­rather they are fostered in delicate balance with practices generated through spaces of autonomy and creative freedom. Choreographic Poverty, Richness in Movement During the Touré era, ballet became a politicized national genre and artists were encouraged to develop myriad variations on rural dance. But chore­ ography—­the act of conceptualizing and designing dance pieces—­was never cultivated as a creative medium that could be produced by the populist masses. Indeed, choreography, and particularly framing narratives, were far more be­ holden to party directives and to the logics of the state than were dance steps themselves, as I explained in chapters 1 and 2. The party-­state encouraged choreographers to create programs with appropriate socialist themes and pro­ moted a performance of unity achieved through collective movement. In the years since Touré’s death, the lexicon of moves and techniques available to urban dancers has continued to expand as they incorporate personal inno­ vations and foreign influences into the dance. At the same time, the reper­ toire of techniques for choreography has remained minuscule; dancers are arranged in geometric configurations and dance in unison. The lack of cho­­ reographic innovation in Guinean dance has implications for the ways in which it is being taken up across the globe and for the role individual Guin­ ean artists play in the proliferation of their art form. Foreign audiences, jour­­ nalists, and students celebrate Guinean dancers as virtuosic inventors of move­ ment, as beloved dance teachers, and as athletic black bodies but do not laud their choreographic intelligence. In contrast with Guinea, other countries in the region, such as Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, and Senegal, have produced internationally recognized chore­ ographers. The rise of these celebrated choreographers is indirectly tied to different ideological approaches to cultural policy in the independence era.1 In countries with a history of engagement with European modern dance, French and other European cultural institutions have promoted partnerships since the mid-­1990s with African choreographers to develop “African con­ temporary dance,” a genre heavily influenced by European choreographic and aesthetic norms (Neveu Kringelbach 2013, 150–­54; Spinner 2011). The gate­ keepers of African contemporary dance competitions and workshops tend to

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dismiss troupes and styles that emerged with African nationalist movements as uncreative and “traditional” (e.g., Despres 2016). The average dancer in a Conakry ballet has little to no input in choreo­ graphic decisions and is not trained to think broadly about space or mean­ ing. But the process of finding new movements—­referred to by the French term recherche (research)—­has always been the domain of the artists them­ selves. At the beginning of each rehearsal, dancers are arranged in diago­ nal lines that travel across the floor, and the best dancers take turns de­ vising moves for others to follow. These “diagonals,” as they are called (in French), are the most basic and regular form of research. They offer expe­ rienced dancers the opportunity to bring steps into the ballet that they have invented or that they have “stolen” (muɲa) by watching others at dun­dunba ceremonies. In the diagonals, dancers learn moves and sequences from one another. Another form of research in ballets is a more pointed search for move­ ments to incorporate into a choreographed piece. Directors often ask their most proficient dancers to compose a certain number of steps or combina­ tions to fit within the time of a particular rhythm. The director then takes those moves and incorporates them into the choreography. These common models of research exemplify an unspoken principle—­that dancers them­ selves are better situated than directors to invent interesting movements and convey them to one another. However, directors alone manage the structure of rehearsals and staged programs. Through a variety of disciplinary mea­ sures, the director ensures that dancers execute choreography, practice regu­ larly, and develop proper technique. From the moment they begin training in ballets, Conakry dancers learn how to build upon existing steps and combine discrete moves into short se­ quences. In the neoliberal era, the ability to create new movement has become increasingly coveted in Conakry, as young dancers seek careers teaching for­ eign students at home and abroad. Indeed, if dancers teach moves from their ballet’s staged programs to foreigners in a class, they are widely bad-­mouthed as people who are not yet seasoned enough to invent their own repertoire of individualized movement to sell.2 Young dancers have come to consider the ability to create their own dance essential to their careers, as they must be able to generate moves to offer in the context of international teaching and be able to distinguish themselves from others in the solo circle through per­ sonal innovations (see chapters 4 and 5). The term used to describe the act of exploring new movement—­research—­suggests a thoughtful process of in­ vestigation. This same inventive practice is not often extended to choreogra­ phy in Conakry.

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A Choreography Workshop: Notes from the Field During my fieldwork in 2013, I was invited to attend a workshop for Conakry’s choreographers put on by a Franco-­Guinean organization directed by a Guin­ ean dancer based in France, whom I will call Camara. The organization adver­ tised this workshop as a major event for training Guinean choreographers to expand the conceptual tools of their trade. About twenty-­five choreographers from around Conakry (only three of whom were women3) attended the four-­ day workshop with Camara. On the first day, the choreographers introduced themselves. Most of them were elderly, and their long-­winded introductions included stories about their own training and nostalgic memories about the Touré era. After an hour of these robust introductions, Camara explained that his purpose in convening this workshop was to introduce the concep­ tual apparatus of modern dance (Fr. la danse contemporaine) into Guinean choreography in order to promote a blending of dance styles he referred to as “métissage.” As the workshop went on, it became clear that Camara’s notion of cho­ reog­ raphy—­ which he proudly claimed to have learned from living in Europe—­was strikingly similar to the choreographic logics already circulat­ ing in Guinea for the past fifty years. For example, on the second day of the workshop, Camara spelled out three “styles” or “themes” in choreography: “[Fr.] le rond, la ligne, et la combinaison” (round, line, and combination). He explained, for example, that if one were exploring the “theme” of circle, one could make circles, spirals, or figure eights. If one were in the “thématique” of line, one could do a “square, zigzag, or rectangle.” He smiled and raised his eyebrows, as though disclosing a deep intellectual secret of choreography. He then said, “With lines, you can make a house” and held his arms up in the shape of two walls and then a roof and smiled again. The elderly chore­ ographers in the audience nodded approvingly, as Camara was describing exactly what they had been doing for decades. Despite constant invention in the realm of dance movements in Conakry, choreography remains confined to geometric formations and is controlled mostly by elders. Discipline and Courage Physical education . . . may take hold of people’s bodies and transform how they are inhabited. g r e g d o w n e y , Learning Capoeira

Directors in Conakry rarely create new approaches to movement or chore­ o­graphy, yet they are essential to the functioning of the ballet scene. Direc­

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tors  act as parent-­like figures who cultivate artists as disciplined and per­ severing people. The most revered ballet directors were once great dancers or musicians themselves, and they sometimes speak to their students about what they are doing well or where they could improve. However, the more common and public interaction between directors and students is far more focused on authority and discipline than on questions of form and aesthetics. In keeping with the notion that virtue and virtuosity are inextricably en­ twined, ballet practitioners are taught to conceptualize dance as a practice of courage and sacrifice, enacted in part through discipline. Directors en­ courage artists to “take courage” (waakilife) in order to perform physically demanding movements. They must also invest time, energy, and feeling over years, often with little monetary compensation—­a process referred to as “sac­ rifice” (sεrεxε)—­for the sake of personal and professional growth. A discourse of sacrifice has been built into Guinean ballet since the revolution, when the investment was for the good of the nation. Now the focus is on personal and family futures and individual contracts, but the underlying sentiment is the same. It is simply not possible to produce the incredibly powerful and reso­ nant dance that Guinea is famous for without learning how to work through both physical and emotional pain to manifest “courage” in movement. The verb diɲε (pronounced deenyeh), meaning at once to forgive and to have pa­ tience, is another central concept in this narrative of sacrifice and investment. Dancer Nabinti Cisse, for example, explained in an interview, Artistry [artistya] is hard! Your teacher found his/her way by forgiving [diɲε] “transport” [i.e., not having enough money to take a car], by forgiving having to walk, because artistya, you can leave your house without eating breakfast, you go work and return on foot all the way to Anta [an outlying neighbor­ hood]. It’s hard. So if you get involved as a young person, if you don’t take courage you can’t do it. You mustn’t say “I just got into this and I want to get ahead right away!” No. In artistya, you have to see hard times.4

Guinean artists agree that embodied training makes one a better person—­ someone who is attentive, respectful, composed, creative; exemplary. This kind of metonymical life training is of course not unique to dance and is often built into physical training regimes in sports, from cricket to surfing to martial arts (e.g., Besnier, Brownell, and Carter 2018; Downey 2005; Hough-­ Snee and Sotelo Eastman 2017; James [1963] 2013; Kildea and Leach 1974; Wac­ quant 1995). Greg Downey, for example, notes that Brazilian capoeiristas use the knowledge of their art/sport “to sense danger, move more carefully, con­ ceal abilities, and think strategically in everyday life” (2005, 153). About four months into my dissertation fieldwork with the Ballet

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Merveilles, I participated in a rehearsal that illuminated how dancers are ini­ tiated into regimes of bodily discipline and physical endurance. There were three groups of female dancers in Merveilles—­ranked from the top, group A, with the most experienced artists; to group B in the middle; and to group C at the bottom—­composed of apprentices and people who had recently joined the ballet, including myself. While A and B were constantly rehearsing cho­ reography, C dancers would usually either practice the moves on the side of the main stage or sit on the floor observing. One day, Tonton Yamoussa called group C to the main floor, and we ran to our places, eager for the opportunity. The two directors and the stage manager watched from plastic chairs behind a wooden table, and the dancers from groups A and B sat around the periph­ ery. As the drummers pounded out rhythm after rhythm, we soon realized that this was not an ordinary day for the apprentices. For the first time, we were performing the entire first half of the show without a break, a task that is the endurance equivalent of running sprints for about forty minutes. As we ended the fourth dance, sweat dripping from our brows, Tonton immediately called for the next one to begin. Some dancers began to falter. The more sea­ soned performers from groups A and B, who did this much choreography every day, cheered from the sidelines. When we finished the entire sequence of five dances, we exited the floor sucking air. The veteran dancers congratulated those of us who had kept up, making clear that this endurance test was a rite of passage in the group that marked a new phase of becoming physically capable—­of knowing the struggle behind the effortlessness dancers’ project. The most accomplished Guinean dancers, like any great athletes, make feats of endurance and strength disappear into grace. On the surface, they are charged with displaying a single emotion—­ joy (  ɲεlεxinyi)—­while underneath, as directors frequently urge, dancers must mobilize courage (waakili), anger (xɔnε), and heart (bɔɲε). Once artists have stamina and understand how to draw heart into movement, they can begin to invent their own steps and develop unique embodied personalities. One piece of advice that Conakry ballet directors often give their students is that in artistya, “there is no shame or embarrassment” (yaagi mu na). The idea is that great dancers cannot be shy in their movements; they must be bold and not hold back if they want their performance to resonate with audi­ ences. Seasoned dancers embody this kind of confidence both onstage and off. In the years I spent in Conakry ballets, I noticed how the transformation from apprenticeship to mastery manifests in the everyday bodily comport­ ment of performers, as exemplified in the following excerpt from my field notes:

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September 14, 2012 The newer dancers in Merveilles, who are a range of ages and sizes, seem to have a sort of floppy sense of self-­definition in space. They collide with each other, hold themselves carelessly, and often bump into the person ahead of them in the diagonal lines during warm-­up. The thin ones look gangly and the fatter ones slovenly. There is a socioeconomic element to bodily presentation of course, as newer apprentices often come from poor families and can’t afford to dress nicely or have their hair done. That said, the more advanced dancers are not only dressed better, but their bodies and sense of space are completely different. While dancing, they know exactly where they are and sense others’ positions without looking around. This awareness then translates to their gen­ eral comportment. Great dancers hold themselves confidently, have a highly developed musculature, and tend to be extremely well-­kempt. Whenever I watch a new ballet rehearse, it is often clear who the good dancers are even before they start the rehearsal because of the way they present themselves as they strut in to the space, heads held high, joking with one another, sporting clean, stylish clothing and generally exuding confidence. Yaagi mu na.

I was more attentive to this kind of embodied transformation among women than men, partly because I danced in lines with them and I physi­ cally endured the disorientation of the novices as they bumbled through the movements and into me and partly because there are more women dancers than men in ballets.5 But across the gender spectrum, Conakry troupes offer young people a pathway to full personhood that directors often describe as an alternative to the formal school system. They characterize ballet as an in­ stitution that keeps young people “out of trouble”—­somewhat akin to boxing gyms in tough neighborhoods in the US (e.g., Wacquant 1995, 2006). Most ballet practitioners do not attend school past the early primary grades, as ballet is all-­consuming and usually incompatible with the schedule of for­ mal schooling. Directors take their role as educators seriously and consider discipline (xurui) to be of central importance in pedagogy. Troupe directors regularly whip and smack their students, run after them with belts, and throw objects at them when they make mistakes. These measures are typically not meant to injure the student physically, but they can be humiliating. I have rehearsed in four ballets in Conakry and observed many more, and I have yet to see a troupe where whipping is not part of the disciplinary system (though foreigners are usually exempt). In the Ballet Matam, the founder-­ director used to take his belt off and hit the artists with it, and he would throw whatever he could get his hands on—­chairs, shoes—­at the dancers when he got angry. In another ballet where I rehearsed, the directors often walked

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around with belts or switches. They would sometimes make dancers lie down before them to be hit on the back of their legs or behind. Sometimes artists were made to stand with their hand out to receive a lash. One day, when a dancer refused to be hit because she claimed to be sick, she was forbidden to rehearse for weeks (“sanctioned”) as a punishment. Through these disciplinary tactics, ballet directors mimic kin-­like mod­ els of gerontocratic and patriarchal authority common in Mande societies (e.g., McNaughton 1988, 10) and prevalent in West African interpretations of Islam. Indeed, people in Conakry regularly speak disparagingly about hus­ bands who can’t “keep their wives in check” or parents whose children are not disciplined, and they cite both cultural and religious rationales behind such norms. If a ballet director does not play the role of paternalistic enforcer, he risks being considered weak or ineffective. Artists in Conakry often respect and even revere the directors of their ballets, depending on how much influ­ ence that person actually has had on their lives. Like parents, directors can participate in the development of their students’ very personhood. Drummer M’Bemba Bangoura commented, for example, “[My teacher] Badjibi, he made me into a person” (Badjibi, atan ntan findixi mixi ra; see A. Cohen 2018, 282). While all ballet directors use both physical and verbal disciplinary mea­ sures, in Merveilles, the directors reflected explicitly and regularly about such measures. They would explain to the students that in classes abroad, the teacher is paid and therefore does not insult (konbi) or beat (bɔnbɔ) the stu­ dents. But in Guinea, they noted, because directors are not paid, they insult and hit students as they please. I have heard multiple Conakry directors insult dancers liberally, calling the girls tɔtɔ, meaning “cunt,” or calling artists “red assholes” (duli gbeli). The Merveilles directors, however, were unique in the reflexive descriptions they offered about insulting and beating students as an alternative to being paid. These descriptions seemed to suggest that abusing students and making money are somehow comparable or equivalent acts of self-­realization for directors. I did not ask Yamoussa and Sekou directly to elaborate on this comparison, but both directors spoke about it often in the gatherings after rehearsal. The underlying logic seemed to be that insulting students both disciplined them and enabled the directors to feel empowered and that being paid would accomplish some of the same work. Creating dis­ ciplined students also enlarges the director socially, and that expansion may be compared to the social advancement gained through monetary accumula­ tion. Yamoussa often added that he was taught in the socialist ballets through similar, albeit even stricter, means and that during the Touré era, artists and directors were not paid well, but they were well respected—­they had “big names.” Many socialist-­trained artists I spoke with also lamented that the

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current generation lacks discipline and cited the rigorous and physically abu­ sive rehearsal regimens that they were subjected to as a point of pride in their own formation as artists.6 Orating Authority In order to discipline their students, ballet directors establish and maintain their authority through a variety of performances, including through long periods of oration following rehearsals. When I was conducting preliminary dissertation work in Conakry, I toured private ballets across the city and was sometimes placed in a chair next to the directors and asked to address the artists. Through these impromptu speeches, I became more attuned to the norms governing the oratory of directors and dignitaries. The first time I was asked to speak thus was at my initial visit to Merveilles. When the rehearsal ended and the artists sat on the floor surrounding the directors’ chairs, they invited me to address the group. I looked over the sea of faces, straightened my back, and began: “Wo nu wali” (polite collective “hello”), I said. Eighty artists responded in kind: “I nu wali” (singular polite greeting). As I spoke, I relaxed into what I realized was a familiar genre of oratory to me. I had listened to so many speeches from directors and visiting dignitaries in my years apprentic­ ing in Conakry that I knew the genre without ever having produced it myself. I recounted to my captive audience that I had seen a lot of ballets, but I was very impressed by Merveilles. I knew how to reference their achievements and my own, sandwiching praise for them between self-­aggrandizing notes about my own authority to speak. I knew to repeat certain phrases emphasiz­ ing the value of hard work and perseverance and how to pause between sen­ tences to exaggerate the importance of my own words. I was secretly amused at my performance, as I impersonated a Guinean dignitary, but remained in character. When I finished, the artists smiled and cheered. Clearly they were also amused at the spectacle of a foreigner addressing them in Susu from the director’s chair, but they gave me the polite respect they offer to anyone who speaks from a position of structural authority. In Conakry, the oratorical style of people in positions of relative social or political power is typically long-­winded and self-­aggrandizing and empha­ sizes the performative and phatic7 over the constative. In other words, it is less reliant on the referential meaning of the words than on the manner in which they are delivered and on the type of connection forged between speaker and addressee.8 In Conakry ballets, directors perform their authority through oratory and embodiment. Directors always sit in chairs while their students sit at their feet on the floor. After each rehearsal, they speak for extended

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periods, often without conveying much substance (illustrating phatic com­ munication as that which serves a social function and prolongs the commu­ nicative encounter; e.g., Elyachar 2010; Jakobson [1960] 1990, 5; Malinowski [1923] 1953, 315). When I was first learning to dance in Guinea, I was eager to learn Susu in part so that I could understand the director’s long speeches in the ballet where I apprenticed. The tone of the speeches suggested grave importance, and the director had been a revered dancer in the Touré era, so I imagined that his speeches would contain deep insights into the art form. When I did learn the language, however, I found that the actual content of the speeches was far more banal (and also misogynistic) than I had expected. For example, he once asked a girl to stand up and turn around. He discussed how her dance lacked power and grace, commenting finally, “Your ass is just for shitting!” In another ballet where I apprenticed, the director enacted his authority by eating while speaking in a way that recalled for me Achille Mbembe’s vivid descriptions of the vulgarity of state power in the African postcolony (1992, 2001) or Bayart’s invocation of the “politics of the belly” ([1989] 2009). This director would slowly take huge mouthfuls of rice and sauce (bande), fishballs (gbantui), or Ivoirian couscous (acheke) while he spoke to the artists (who were usually quite tired and hungry themselves). He spoke as he ate, some­ times pausing to receive a cold drink of water from one of the food sellers. His bodily enjoyment was put on display for the group, elevating him through the act of consumption. Policing Women’s Bodies All artists in Conakry ballets learn discipline by submitting to the authority of directors and the physical rigor of the ballet, but there is a gendered disparity in how artists are disciplined. Directors are overwhelmingly male and tend to scrutinize and punish female dancers more intensively than male dancers and musicians. Lesley Braun, in her work on women’s work in Kinshasa, re­ fers to this kind of gendered policing of African women as “encadrement”—­a French word meaning “framing” or “containment.” Braun describes encadre­ ment as the idea that women’s bodies, social networks, and public visibility must be monitored and contained by men (2018, 29; also see Hannaford 2015). During my research in Conakry between 2010 and 2013, the women in both Ballet Matam and Ballet Merveilles were encadrées—­framed and policed—­in a number of ways by male directors. Women were required to wear uniforms, but the men were not.9 The women at Merveilles also had a representative leader (referred to by the French word chef ), while the men did not. When

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one male dancer brought this up in a group session, asking why the men didn’t have a leading representative, Sekou responded that it is because there are “no problems with the men.” In Merveilles, women’s bodies were con­ stantly under scrutiny. Like a watchful Guinean father, the younger direc­ tor monitored the attire, bodily adornment, and comportment of the girls in the ballet, making frequent comments such as, “Don’t get pregnant, pregnant women can go open a pregnant women’s ballet; Don’t roll your shorts up to make the shorts hug your behind; Don’t gain weight, fat women can’t dance well; Don’t dye your hair; Don’t wear waist beads or jewelry while rehearsing; Don’t wear extensions or wigs while rehearsing.” In the Ballet Matam back in the early 2000s, the director once went on a long tirade about how women should shave their armpits and made a principal dancer shave her armpits with a razor blade in the rehearsal space.10 This attention to bodily comportment in ballets is again not simply a reflection of the personal whims of directors but echoes a long history in Guinea of state surveillance of bodily practices and of culturally sanctioned gender inequities. During the revolution, the party’s youth wing policed the bodily comportment of both men and women, monitoring women’s skirt lengths and hairstyles, the tightness of men’s trousers, and other external “signs of potential deviance” (McGovern 2017, 2, 122). The particular fixation on women’s bodies exhibited in contemporary ballets, however, fits within a broader political and religious culture of reactionary patriarchy spearheaded by the military regime of Lansana Conté, in power from 1984–­2008. While the Guinean Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA; leading up to independence) and the Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG; after indepen­ dence) both supported women’s rights for political and ideological reasons, as I examine further in chapter 4, the subsequent regime under Conté reversed or failed to enforce many of the laws protecting gender equality in Guinea (McGovern 2017, 179). As Elizabeth Schmidt recounts, the military regime led a “backlash against women in Guinea” in the 1990s based on the idea that the Touré regime had “destroyed the family, broken homes, and violated African culture and Muslim traditions by emancipating women” (2005a, 13). In Merveilles, girls who violated the directors’ rules were sometimes sub­ ject to fines and sanctions. When one girl dyed her hair, for example, she was told to pay thirty thousand francs, and when she refused, she was barred from rehearsal for several days. Other dancers were told to pay fines if they were late, were insubordinate, or did not wear the proper clothing, though none of these rules was consistent. One day when I came to rehearsal, some girls whispered to me that I would have to pay money if I did not have a pair of stretch pants under my uniform of long soccer shorts. I had been away

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for a few days, and a new rule had been implemented in my absence that all women were required to wear two pairs of shorts for modesty, in case they got a rip in one. This struck me as absurd in such a hot place, and indeed, the overbearing rule did not last very long. Despite the gerontocratic and patriarchal hierarchies in ballets, directors’ efforts to keep female practitioners encadrées are always negotiated and par­ tial. In both the Ballet Matam and in Merveilles, when seasoned female danc­ ers were the subject of directors’ arbitrary audits, they sometimes rebelled, refusing to obey or pay fines, or simply walking out. One Merveilles dancer in her thirties named Lala, who often rebuked the directors’ remarks, once staged a dramatic meeting among peers in which she made the directors’ gen­ dered comments the subject of her own scrutiny: Lala was milling about with the others in the back courtyard of the rehearsal space, waiting to enter while the national Ballet Djoliba, that rehearsed before Merveilles, spent hours convened in a meeting about ridding themselves of corrupt leadership. The Merveilles artists stood outside, eating fish balls and joking around. Aboubacar, one of the best male dancers, set chairs in a ring beside me so that we could practice English. Lala promptly sat in one of the chairs and announced that we were convening a meeting to get rid of our top people, just like Djoliba. I played along, and Lala announced all the bad things about Aboubacar that made him unfit to be a leader. She included the fact that sometimes his shorts were too short, revealing too much, and that he hit pregnant women. (A pregnant girl had just been there, and he had jokingly hit her.) Lala got very specific about why men should not wear shorts that show which way they hang because—­she noted with mock seriousness—­“How are we supposed to do the correct moves with that?” She concocted other humorous allegations against another male dancer Abdoulaye sitting in the circle. The men were annoyed because they wanted to get me to say English phrases into their phone recorders for them to practice, and we were busy with this pretend meeting. Lala would tap my arm insistently and bring up an allegation against one man, and I would agree that it was very serious indeed. Two other female dancers Amizo and Mmi were also in the circle joining in. As we laughed and joked, Abdoulaye would tap my arm harder and put his phone up to my mouth asking me to repeat English phrases a dancer might need, “I am tired today. My body hurts today,” and their Susu translations. Continuing the game, Lala put my purple sunglasses on and flashed a wide grin.

Lala and the other dancers participating in this mock meeting made very clear that they understood the assumptions and inequities behind the polic­ ing of female conduct in the ballets. Lala’s comments mimicked those Sekou

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made nearly every day about the female dancers and called attention to the fact that men’s comportment and bodies were rarely discussed. The male dancers did not find this especially funny, and the whole scene made clear that some of the more outspoken women in the ballet were critical of gen­ dered inequities and felt comfortable joking about them and voicing their opinions. Not all women in the many Conakry ballets I have observed were as confi­ dent as Lala. Those less brazen and less experienced were more vulnerable to the insults and sometimes downright predatory behavior of directors. Some young dancers had intimate relationships with elderly directors, and many others simply tolerated uninvited touches or words. Generally, however, the private ballets in Conakry are less notorious for coerced director-­student re­ lationships than are the national companies, which have long had a reputa­ tion for providing a permission structure for directors to prey on young girls. Jay Straker describes, for example, how girls from the forest region were taken by the militants from the JRDA (La Jeunesse du Rassemblement Démocratique Africain; the youth wing of the PDG) during the revolution, sometimes by force, to participate in militant theater. The girls were sometimes maltreated or encouraged to sleep with or marry directors (2009b, 183–­84). Mike Mc­ Govern similarly describes how troupe directors used dancers as concubines (2013, 190; 213), and in Conakry, members of one of the national companies suggested to me that such behavior is not relegated to the past.11 The Uses and Vulnerabilities of Gerontocracy The age of a director influences the degree to which ballet artists submit to his authority. When the director is too young, the power structure breaks down and results in a chaotic environment—­a process I have observed in multiple ballets over the years. A young man does not have the authority to command, hit, or insult his elders, so if the director is younger than some of the artists, the older dancers disrespect him openly and the ballet becomes dysfunctional. In Merveilles, the pairing of young and old directors worked strategically. The older director, Yamoussa, often proclaimed himself to be tired, illiterate, and out of touch with the times, but the dancers were all will­ ing to be commanded by him. The younger director, Sekou (in his midthirties at the time), had energy, a formal education, and a respected name, as his father was famous, but the dancers sometimes rebelled against his authority because of his age. One day, for example, when I asked a girl why she had been absent from rehearsal the day before, she explained that she and her friends didn’t come because Sekou had insulted their mothers and fathers.

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I told her that Yamoussa had made a speech in her absence about how he would insult whomever he wishes and that if he wanted to insult people’s par­ ents, he would. She responded that Yamoussa can insult her parents because he is older than them, but the younger director Sekou should not insult her parents. She commented, “Sekou, who was just born!?” (Sekou, naxan baaxi bari de ya?). Gerontocratic authority in ballets provides a familiar command structure that people respect and helps facilitate the orderly functioning of troupes when tempers run hot. While age-­based hierarchies are useful in this way, they are also vulner­ able. In neoliberal Guinea, changing opportunity structures for talented young artists present challenges to directors’ authority. Guinean artists have increasingly been migrating abroad since the end of socialism, and those who live abroad gain access to new forms of capital that are often unavailable to their elders in Conakry. Individuals who earn money abroad and use it in prosocial ways are able to acquire prestige beyond the norm for their age in Guinea, upsetting long-­standing social hierarchies based on age (cf. Meiu 2014). The success of migrant artists at once bolsters interest in ballet among Conakry youth and disrupts established hierarchies supporting its produc­ tion and transmission. Allasane “D’Artagnan” Camara, a drummer who was living abroad between France and Chile at the time of my fieldwork, began traveling in his teens with a now-­famous group called Circus Baobab. In an interview I conducted with him in Conakry, D’Artagnan discussed this phe­ nomenon of becoming a “grand” beyond his years: Since I have been living abroad, my [social] position has changed a lot. . . . There are people who respect me who are older than me. . . . You see someone older than you who calls you “grand”—­because your position has changed. You see someone who comes to greet you. He lowers himself [physically as a mark of respect] and says, “How are you?” He tells you his worries. He tells you his problems. That means that you have now become a “monsieur.” You are someone who has become important in life. What is it that caused that? You know, right? Our work.

While elderly local ballet directors in Conakry were historically accorded re­ spect within the artist community according to their age and position as lead­ ers, now their elevated status is rivaled by returning migrants of all ages, some of whom have founded their own ballets. As youth increasingly envision their futures abroad, they look to migrants for guidance and connections. Most young people have an active teacher or mentor (karamɔxɔ) who lives in Conakry, but many also claim a mentor or “grand” abroad. Those mentors abroad, however, cannot offer systematic training for artists in Conakry, and

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the dancers who rehearse exclusively in migrant-­run companies tend to be poorly trained. In order to maintain their value in the market, local Conakry directors sometimes hoard knowledge with the express purpose of holding on to pres­ tige in the face of new dynamics brought about by migration. Following a discussion with me about how socialist artists toiled with little remuneration while migrants are thriving, Yamoussa frankly discussed this tactic of hoard­ ing knowledge: “Even if you know a lot, no matter how well you know your métier, you have to leave some out [when teaching youth]. I will teach [a stu­­ dent], but I leave some out because one day when s/he becomes somebody, s/he can turn against [me; literally ‘stand on your chest’]. Right? So you teach some up until a point and then you stop there. The rest, you keep. . . . If you give [the student] everything, when s/he stands on your chest one day, s/he will have you because s/he will have more power than you.” Yamoussa’s inter­ est in withholding knowledge aligns with notions of concealment and secrecy as central to the production of both knowledge and power in the region (e.g., Davidson 2010; Ferme 1999, 2001; Sarró 2002, 2005). But Yamoussa mentioned this hoarding just after having described the bitter irony of socialist-­trained artists sitting in Conakry with very little to show for their service to the state, while their students are traveling abroad, sending their mothers to Mecca, and building villas in Conakry. So while concealment and hoarding knowl­ edge are not uncommon practices in Mande societies (e.g., Maranz 2001, 30), Yamoussa is describing a particular moment in Guinean history when that impulse to jealously guard knowledge is being intensified by the very real possibility that students will abscond with valuable information, making el­ ders obsolete. Indeed, postsocialist artist migration has provoked a shift in how rapidly a student could potentially transform knowledge into social and monetary capital and replace their teachers as the big men and women (Fr. grand[e]s / Su. mixi xungbee) of the ballet community. While he would often orate for long periods after rehearsals, Yamoussa al­ most never volunteered information about the history or meaning of dances—­ information that is widely understood to be valuable in teaching foreigners. When students come from abroad to learn dance in Conakry, ballet directors sometimes hire young artists to demonstrate steps, but the directors remain in positions of authority by offering explanatory context and orchestrating the classes. Ballet directors’ attempts to remain useful dovetail conveniently with the long-­established power dynamics in ballets, whereby artists are not taught to access metalevel discourses—­whether choreographic, political, or historical (though some artists of course do their own research). However, in the cosmopolitan ceremonies they frequent, young dancers engage embodied

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metadiscourses around major issues, such as gender, gerontocracy, and per­ sonhood, making these ceremonies the subject of generational tension, as I explore in the second half of this book. Postsocialist Democracy? Readers might be tempted to conceptualize the ballet and the model of power it espouses as a system that gets in the way of the freedom artists might ex­ ercise if liberated from such strictures. However, practitioners themselves (of all ages) do not see it this way and tend to think of the ballet as a productive structuring force, training young artists to be disciplined and to “take cour­ age” (waakilife) as they make their way toward adulthood. Within the institu­ tion of ballet, artists and directors—­who regularly proclaim themselves to be “apolitical”—­enact their understanding of how authority and autonomy interact. From the perspective of democracy advocates in Guinea, where free and fair elections were first staged in 2010, Conakry’s performing artists might be construed as an example of an undereducated group of people who do not fully embrace the logic of democratic governance and are therefore contrib­ uting to its failure to thrive in Africa. However, the practice of democracy in Guinea, as in many African countries, is nascent and stands to be influenced by local conceptions of ideal power relations, which are often performed in the institutions and activities of everyday life (e.g., Covington-­Ward 2015; Mbembe 1992; Turner 1957; White 2008). A meaningful African democracy could, for example, reject liberal individualism or the wedding of democ­ racy to free market capitalism. As Shireen Hassim notes, “At the cusp of the twenty-­first century the nature and content of democracy remain open-­ended and uncertain” (2006, 931). By attending to the ways in which people navigate relations of power outside the realm of formal political deliberations, we can develop a clearer understanding of locally robust models of political subjec­ tivity in emerging democracies. An ethnographic understanding of democratization in Africa must in­ clude serious inquiries about the afterlives of socialism on the continent (e.g., Askew 2002; Askew and Pitcher 2006; Fouéré 2014; McGovern 2017; Obarrio 2014) and about actually existing emerging democracies that may not conform to a Euro-­American ideal (e.g., Bierschenk 2006; Nyabola 2018; Paley 2002). Indeed, large numbers of African citizens have experienced democracy—­tied to neoliberal capitalism—­as uncertain in comparison with more state-­centric models of political-­economic organization that came before (e.g., Ashforth 2005, 16; Degani 2018). For average citizens in Guinea, the transformation

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from socialism to capitalism introduced profound insecurity, as the expan­ sion of individual freedom in the realms of economy and politics came at the expense of basic government services, such as food rationing and jobs provisioning. It should therefore come as no surprise that local institutions, such as ballets, do not elevate individual autonomy as a primary organizing principle. Rather, artists foster aspects of autocratic governance within ballets in dialectical relation with acts of experimentation and individual creative freedom, which I examine further in chapters 4 through 6. Conakry dancers navigate freedom and security in delicate balance as they cultivate spaces of autonomy in tandem with models of sovereign authority.

pa r t i i

Delicious Inventions Whatever fits in the rhythm, dance that, because there—­in the solo—­you have no master. You are your own master there. Naxan lanma rhythme kui, na boron, parce que mεnni, maître yo mu na i bε mεnni. I tan nan na i tan xa maître ra mεnni. dancer alseny soumah

The cosmopolitan ceremonies dundunba and sabar are the frontier of aesthetic innovation for Conakry ballet practitioners. While ballets train students in technique and discipline, ceremonies are where they build reputations, forge new approaches to dance, and challenge elders’ presentations of social reality. Through virtuosic solo performances at dundunbas and sabars, young artists consciously “search” ( fen) for name or reputation (xili) and for benefactors (saabui). Dancers and drummers draw on their rigorous ballet training to construct creative solos that can convey their personalities and convictions. Ceremonies are attached to important rites of passage—­marriages, coming of age, baby namings, homecomings—­and they play a role in enabling the kinds of social transformations particular to those rites. But ceremonies are also spaces where artists explore unspoken and sometimes not-­yet-­conscious feelings and potentials that shape the social life of the city. At cosmopolitan ceremonies, artists often disrupt social facts visually and sonically in a way that can open into the realm of the everyday (cf. Marcus 1989, 3). Improvisational dance performed at ceremonies is especially interconnected with drumming, and neither the drum nor the dance ever exerts full command over the other. Masterful dancers may push the rhythm to speed, slow, or even transform, and drummers can signal dancers to change movements or suggest that they perform in a certain style. If a dancer wants the tempo to increase, for example, she can dance just ahead of the time, making the drummers chase. If dancers would like the musicians to play a particular interlude or even change rhythms entirely, certain dance sequences can initiate those rhythmic transformations. However, it takes a capable dancer to really take control of the drums in this way. Likewise, good dancers play “catch” with percussionists by improvising quickly, challenging the lead drummer to

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anticipate the movement enough to mark the solo in real time—­referred to as “catching” (suxufe) the dancer’s feet. An accomplished djembe soloist will be able to make it seem like the dancer’s movements are actually producing the sound. For Guinean dancers, then, one meaning of improvisation is the practice of being infiltrated and moved by sound, and for drummers, it is the art of embodiment. Dance and music are evoked in Susu by a single word: fare (pronounced fah-­ray). To dance is to “stomp” (boron) fare, to play drums is to “hit” (bɔnbɔ) fare, and ceremonies are called “fare places” (fare yiree). While there is a separate word for drums (sambaɲi) and one can speak of “hitting drums,” there is no word for “music” or “percussion” that is separate from fare. Translating fare as “dance” sacrifices some of the subtlety of the Susu concept, which evokes a deeply entwined sonic-­kinesthetic interaction. In the coming chapters, I sometimes use the terms fare, dance-­music, or sound shape (to use Roman Jakobson’s term in a very different context [Jakobson and Waugh (1979) 2002]) to remind the reader that the Western concept of dance is not universal. Dance’s presence across discrete sensory categories in Conakry is also hinted at in the language commonly used to describe it. Dance can positively be characterized as “sweet” or “delicious” (  ɲɔxun) or negatively as bεxi, meaning “flavorless” or “bland,” or as xaraxi, meaning “dry.” For example, one dancer in Merveilles gossiped to me that another girl’s dance was dry and then added, “There’s no oil on it” (Ture yo m’a ma; a well-­prepared dish

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of rice and sauce in Conakry must have an ample amount of palm or peanut oil). Guinean dancers cultivate discipline and virtue and effectuate social and political transformations through their art, but undergirding all that activity is the fundamental fact that dance is enjoyable. Great Guinean dance, like a delicious meal, taps into human pleasure, and street ceremonies in Conakry—­also sometimes called “play places” (bere yiree)—­are key sites where artists delight in and experiment with dance. In conversation, Guinean artists insist that their practice evokes a single emotion—­joy ( ɲεlεxinyi). Dancer Fatoumata Kourouma, for example, offered a conventional response when I asked her if dance could show any other emotion:

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“Dance can’t show conflict or anger. It shows joy. It takes away anger. Because you can’t dance if you are angry. . . . [she lists names of dances]: Dundunba, joy; Sɔkɔ, joy; Soli, joy; Mendiani, joy; Maane, joy. All of them! Yogui—­they are all danced for joy. I have never heard, when there’s conflict here, of someone saying ‘hey, let’s dance in this war!’ ” While this is a common way in which Guinean artists describe the relationship between dance and codified emotion, one of the points I make in the following chapters is that improvisational dance in Conakry is appealing to practitioners and audiences in part because it articulates and generates a wide range of collective feelings. As Fatoumata mentioned, Guineans indeed dance to celebrate joyful occasions; they suspend all rehearsal and ceremonial activity when there is death or conflict in the community. But within the context of these exuberant ceremonies, artists communicate affects that are complex and ambivalent—­ranging from pride and powerfulness to uncertainty and loss. At dundunbas and sabars, the aesthetic probes the social as artists generate novel sound shapes and debate their significance. At these events, women can be “strong men” (chapter 4), youth call the shots (chapter 5), and practitioners and audiences alike engage with shared and sometimes unpleasant feelings that they eschew in regular life (chapter 6). Dundunba and sabar ceremonies not only reflect changing contours of social life in Conakry; they enable social reality to be performatively constituted and revised. While dance in dundunba and sabar circles often provokes generational tensions, these ceremonies do not index youthful ideological rebellion. Ballet practitioners create new dance rhythms and refashion older ones to make sense of change, but they also consciously maintain connections to core principles, reflecting a common Mande concern for balance between essence and revision in aesthetics (e.g., Arnoldi 1995, 102; McNaughton 1988, 107–­8). The ballet genre has retained certain key features across space and time, including its link to ethical personhood and its ability to manipulate power in its many guises. Some core dance movements, names, and rhythms are also passed across generations, and young dancers are constantly negotiating which kinds of modification are mandatory. Why and how are elements of dances and rhythms kept or discarded? What can such revision tell us about the process of active social change? What is the relationship between dance and urban placemaking in Conakry? The ensuing chapters explore these questions through an ethnographic investigation of the cosmopolitan ceremonies dundunba and sabar.

4

Female Strong Men and the Future of Resemblance

The motion of the pump is deceptively simple. When I first arrived in Conakry in 2002 as a young dancer, I—­like all other foreign dance students who visit Conakry—­wanted desperately to be able to dance dundunba with fluency, and the key step is the pump (Fr. la pompe). This movement, which is the central move of the central artists’ ceremony in Conakry, was once only done by men, though now young women in the capital perform it eagerly. To produce the pump, dancers stand in wide squats with their arms bent at the elbows and fists clenched in front of their chests. While lunging from side to side, they “pump” their arms while puffing their chests and flexing their biceps. Dancers’ heads sometimes twitch from side to side, their bodies quivering with force. In villages, dundunba performers clench a long rawhide whip or decorated wooden hatchet in each fist, and in Conakry, they may brandish sticks or hold invisible weapons. Unable to watch myself learning the pump, as there are no mirrors in Conakry dance spaces, I scrutinized how the intricacies of the movement were so often lost on other learners. Both foreign students and novice Guineans made some version of the same mistakes: beginning with the arms bent before their chests, they would either thrust in and out as if punching two boxer’s bags or flip their arms like levers in an up-­and-­down motion. Both versions looked painfully awkward and unlike the pump of virtuosic dancers. As I watched nearly every novice fumble with the pump in a similar way, I was sure that I was doing the same and became determined to figure out what the Guinean experts were doing that was so different. There was something about the pumping motion that seasoned dancers performed that consolidated force into the sphere of the dancer and built on it. The novices pushed their arms away from their bodies, and the momentum of their motion would

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be lost in each pump. The experienced dancers would vibrate with the freight of the movement in a way that seemed to create energy and increase its intensity with each step. They would embody the strength/power (sεnbε) that the dance was known to emblematize. After over a year of training, watching, and feeling like the energy of my pump was getting lost in the air, I remember finally asking one of my friends whose pump I admired to do it as slowly as she possibly could. I noticed that her arms were neither going in and out nor moving up and down but doing both! Her fists were creating a motion that moved in and out from her chest along a curved pathway, like scooping out a shallow canoe shape on each outward and inward sweep. It was so subtle and, in the context of the actual dundunba dance, performed so quickly that the untrained eye only perceives part of the motion. There is something about the way this movement works and how it is timed with the lunges that makes it exude power and also makes it exceptionally difficult to learn. The pump generates this potency through a physical mechanism of creating force and scooping it back into the gesture, never fully letting it escape from the figure of the dancer. The complexity of dundunba’s timing presents yet another layer to the dance’s intrigue. Dundunba, like all rhythms played in Guinean ballet, is polyrhythmic—­it is composed of multiple interdependent parts that combine to make a whole.1 To hear dundunba correctly is to understand not only the rhythm’s intricacies but also the dancer’s movements as one element of a dynamic polyrhythm. This is the case with all Guinean dances, but because dundunba is so difficult for new dancers to hear, it accentuates the need for special training and knowledge in order to produce the sound shape. Many apprentices come in on the wrong side of the rhythm and are promptly corrected by trained dancers who yell “contretemps!” (countertime!) or simply run into the circle facing the apprentice and dance on time until the student follows suit. For practitioners, dundunba’s rhythmic complexity indexes distinctly African ways of knowing and contributes to the dance’s ability to evoke cultural puissance. Dundunba is often described to Western students and audiences in French as “the strong man’s dance” (la danse des hommes forts) because of its origin as a male power dance in upper Guinea. In Susu, it is simply referred to as “power dance” (sεnbε fare). Sεnbε—­which can refer to physical strength, sociopolitical authority, or metaphysical capacity—­is embodied in the motion of the pump. In its rural form, dundunba refers to a group of rhythms and dances performed in Maninka villages in the Hamana/Gberedou region of upper Guinea, where men belong to lifelong age sets formed when boys of the same generation undergo circumcision together. Dundunba once in-

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f i g u r e 4.1.  Maninka dancers at a “village-­style” dundunba in Conakry, sporting the typical pants of Maninka dundunba and brandishing rawhide whips

volved confrontation between age sets that would whip each other and themselves while dancing (see Charry 2000, 220). Participants demonstrated imperviousness to bodily pain, and some were understood to have the ability to shapeshift into animal forms. Doubling as a ritual of endurance and recruitment for war, dundunba was a performance of male virility as well as physical and esoteric power. Today in upper Guinea, the whipping is usually theatrical; dancers carry long rawhide whips and pretend to hit themselves and others. However, several people I spoke with in Conakry reported that violent whipping still takes place in some villages at the discretion of the dancers and according to their strength and “manliness” (xameya). Over the past several decades, dundunba has become the single most popular dance and social ceremony among ballet artists in the capital. The ability to dance dundunba well has become a key marker of an artist’s virtuosity, and there are opportunities to perform dundunba in ceremonies multiple times each week. The event called dundunba manifests in Conakry as a gathering with spectators circled around dancers who perform solos accompanied by an orchestra of percussionists playing multiple djembes and the trilogy of bass drums—­dundun, sangban, and kenkeni. The most common dance at these ceremonies is dundunba itself, with the dances sɔkɔ and sɔkɔ chaud also frequently interjected. Several other rhythms are played sporadically, especially konkɔba, mendiani, and kawa. Dundunba gatherings typically take place in the street at large intersections in neighborhoods but can also be organized in other open spaces, such as soccer fields, private courtyards, or during the rainy season in indoor rehearsal venues. Over the past

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several decades, dundunbas have become the central forum for innovation, rivalry, and the display of individual solo technique for dancers and musicians working in Conakry’s ballets. Why has dundunba become so popular? While artists take pleasure in performing the many dances in their stage repertoires—sometimes noting that “all dances are tasty ( ɲɔxun), except the ones you haven’t mastered”—­not all stage dances are featured in the ceremonies that youth curate. Why have young practitioners afforded dundunba such a central position in their social lives? Part of the answer lies in dundunba’s semiotics. It is a dance that has long emblematized qualities of strength and power in rural contexts, and by performing dun­ dunba’s core movements, youth develop those qualities in the urban present. At stake for the young artists who dance dundunba in Conakry is a sense of their own capacity and potential in a context where the mechanisms for achieving social adulthood and becoming modern that were employed in their parents’ generation are no longer viable. Artists and onlookers understand dundunba as a dance capable of both producing and indexing power—­physical, esoteric, and sociopolitical—­and its performance in Conakry is entangled in debates about who wields power and how. As narratives abound in Conakry about human powerlessness in urban spaces in contrast with the potency of the African countryside, as I demonstrate later in this chapter, this dance has acquired a particular urgency for youth in the capital. Urban dundunba ceremonies—­ where a number of other dances besides dundunba are also performed—­have become sites for reimagining which social actors can embody sεnbε and for articulating what it means to be urban and modern in contemporary Guinea. Dundunba’s Appeal in Conakry Artists explicitly frame dundunba’s importance in Conakry in terms of the central quality of sεnbε that it emblematizes. The thirtysomething expert dancer Aly Mara, for example, spoke with me about dundunba’s significance. When I asked him how it feels to perform different dances, he first spoke with passion about dundunba: “If you like something, you will stay in it. . . . I feel good [dancing dundunba]; my head trembles” (trembling is a sign of physical and esoteric capacity; Sese ra fan i ma, i lu ma na nan kui. . . . N bɔɲε rafanmane n’ma; n xunyi sεrεnma). He then described a Maninka harvest dance called konkɔba, which features movements mimicking planting and harvesting, and described a more removed feeling of acting as if he were a farmer: “Like as if you are farming. You have to bend over” (Alo i n’i xε sa ma. F’i x’i fεlεn). For Aly, the core movements of konkɔba evoke farming and lack relevance for an urban existence, especially compared with a dance that

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signals a multivalent quality such as sεnbε that is easily translatable across time and space. Aly noted that when he performs dundunba, he does not think about acting or about simulating other people’s lives as he does while dancing konkɔba. Rather, he channels the potential himself: “I too am strong/ powerful!” (N fan, sεnbε n bε!) he exclaimed. Guinean dance teachers often describe dundunba as a “Maninka strong man’s dance” despite the fact that it has become a distinctly urban dance in Conakry performed by men and women alike. When Conakry dancers pump the dundunba, they are indeed mimicking the gestures of rural Maninka men, but that relationship of similarity between urban and rural is not determined or linear, and it is mediated by the quality of sεnbε. Resemblance (iconicity) is not only about referencing foreclosed meanings from the past, as when the dundunba pump evokes the qualities of historical Maninka strong men. Signs that resemble their objects (iconic signs) can also open possibilities in as-­yet-­unrealized futures (e.g., Keane 2005). They can recruit the force of the objects they resemble. For example, the Guinean government’s use of dundunba and other powerful rural dances on stage after independence was an iconic invitation for the nation to become infused with the legitimacy and power of those practices. The repurposing of dundunba by Conakry youth suggests that both men and women intercept some of that power. Dundunba’s potential as a medium for generating sεnbε has been produced over time as the dance’s name and key movements traveled from rural strong men, to staged dancers invoking the power of the nation and of Sékou Touré himself (the ultimate Maninka strong man), to urban youth fending for themselves in a capitalist economy.2 When a dancer pumps the dundunba in Conakry, this act reaches out in time and space, conjuring the quality of sεnbε—­once attached to a rural male referent—­to construct the present. Though historically linked to masculinity, the dundunba pump has become especially popular among women in the capital. Dundunba Ceremony—­Matam, Conakry Everyone knew Fanta. Her brazen movement and sartorial flair demanded attention and critique. Seated in the holding chair in the center of the dundunba circle, she clutched a pink bandana indicating her turn to dance. Two inches of bleach-­blond hair, cut in a rectangle, added volume to her already-­imposing stature. When she rose to solo, her smile flashed white against tattooed black gums. She was clad from head to toe in deep-­blue fabric tailored in billowing pants and a belly shirt with wing-­like sleeves, the outfit completed with glinting cowry rings on both hands, attached with little chains to silver bracelets. A sea of spectators encircled the ring, some perched on a yellow courtyard

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wall overlooking the dundunba circle. Dancers outnumbered the plastic chairs. Sitting on each other’s laps and squatting on the inner periphery, they watched the soloists intently and badgered the passing referee for a chance to perform. As Fanta leaped from her chair, hundreds of eyes riveted on the flurry of blue. The female dundunba move matongo propelled her toward the drummers—­pakiti-­pakiti-­pakiti—­a placeholder to position her before the lead djembe. She matched his eyes with a hard stare, then pinwheeled her arms, sweeping torso and head into an arc with palm open skyward. Then, turned toward the audience, she squared off against an invisible opponent and began to shadowbox—­one-­two—­bouncing on her toes—­three-­four—­and her grin revealed a sparkling silver canine tooth. Jumping with a half turn to land in a wide squat, hands in fists, she opened the circle to her friends, who rushed in to join her. Fanta pumped the dundunba with force. The dancers surrounding her each offered their own version of the pump—­arms bent, chests puffed—­some with delicate open hands, others with fists, a few down on one knee. Women’s faces contorted into defiant, humorous frowns as they posed next to men, with Fanta in the center, celebrated. When the lead djembe called a break—­bim bim bim bim bim bim—­Fanta caught the last beat: up on one toe, knee cocked down, her hand and head flipped conclusively to end the solo. The entourage scattered back to the margins as the next soloist powered in.

There is a movement that is historically female in dundunba, referred to in Conakry by the Susu word matongo (meaning “take repeatedly”), but the pump and the matongo are not equivalent. In Maninka villages, men have always been the central dancers of dundunba, and women stand on the periphery, cheering the men on—­singing together and dancing the female move in small circles of their own. In Conakry, women figure centrally in dundunba ceremonies and dance the pump as well as the matongo, but there is a pronounced discrepancy between the symbolic capital of the two moves. The female matongo is rarely performed by men, except in jest, and is often transposed into other dances, while the pump is practiced by both sexes and is strictly reserved for the dance dundunba. The pump is fixed as a signature move or “core step” (Fr./Su. pas xɔri) of dundunba and given a French title (la pompe), while the matongo, always marked as female, blends into other dances and is used for mobility across the dance circle. Both male and female dancers in Conakry have adopted and stylized the pump. Women often keep their hands open, while the archetypal male version is done with fists, but both of these styles may be performed by anyone. Women first began to pump the dundunba during the revolution (1958–­84), when women’s rights were at the forefront of the political agenda.

f i g u r e 4.2.  Maimouna “Lala” Camara dancing the matongo at a dundunba with friends

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f i g u r e 4.3.  Moussa “Ele” Sylla pumping the dundunba

During the nationalist movement leading up to independence, the Guinean branch of the interterritorial Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) championed gender equality both as a political strategy and as a moral stance (e.g., Schmidt 2005a, 113–­43). Once in power, the Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG; then severed from the RDA) advanced girls’ schooling, brought women to positions of power throughout the country, and banned polygyny and nonconsensual marriage (McGovern 2013, 185–­89). It was in this con­ text that some women began to perform steps once reserved for men. Many artists in Conakry who were active during that time recall the national military ballet, Ballet de l’Armée, as the first group that had women pumping the dundunba. However, gendered movements remained distinct in many socialist-­era productions, and some form of gender division is still the norm in ballet repertoires across Conakry today. Dancers are physically separated by sex on stage, and sometimes historically male movements are not included in women’s choreography. According to older artists in Conakry, dundunba gatherings did not become an inclusive urban phenomenon outside of the Maninka ethnic community until after the death of Sékou Touré. When Lansana Conté came to power, his regime not only reduced funding for the performing arts; it also ignored or actively overturned laws protecting

f i g u r e 4.4.  Kerfalla Sylla demonstrating the pump with one arm raised as if brandishing a weapon

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f i g u r e 4.5.  Female dancer pumping the dundunba with Lansana Camara on solo djembe

gender equity in Guinea (McGovern 2017, 179). Preferential policies for women in university admissions were discontinued, as were similar policies encouraging women to enter the civil service and security forces (Mike McGovern, pers. comm. Nov. 2018). Dundunba gained popularity as a professional artists’ street gathering during this time, and women’s appropriation of the pump became widespread. Perhaps not surprisingly, when gender equality became less important to the state’s agenda, it manifested aesthetically as part of the informal agenda of Conakry’s young performers. However, while women pumping male dundunba asserts something about gender equality and women’s abilities, artists in Conakry do not interpret it in explicitly feminist terms, and some express ambivalence about its implications (for a related case involving music, see Dave 2020a). Indeed, there is a long history in Guinea of women asserting equivalence with men without adopting Western-­style feminist ideology (see, e.g., Osborn 2011; Schmidt 2005a, 115).3 In Conakry ballet, men generally accept that women perform classic male movements but claim that they can never do it “like men.” While many female dancers assert that women can and should be able to dance like men, others consider it a transgression even though they participate willingly. One well-­ known dancer, Mai Kouyate, who pumped the dundunba publicly like any other good female dancer in Conakry, discussed women’s

f i g u r e 4.6.  N’nato Sylla (left of frame) pumping the dundunba with friends at the end of her solo

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appropriations with me: “Women should not dance men’s moves. Men’s moves are for men to dance. Women’s moves are for women to dance. But now everything’s mixed up.” Mai went on to say that she thinks this gender-­ bending in dance is “not pretty” (a mu tofan, meaning that it doesn’t befit a woman). I then asked her if she herself pumps the dundunba, and she laughed and responded, “Aah! Like I said, things are changing. If not, normally, men’s moves are for men. But now it’s just whatever. Everyone does things however they want.” Mai both suggested that performing men’s steps is compromising female propriety and conceded subtly that she and others who dance male dundunba “want” this change. Her ambivalence was echoed in conversations I had with other female artists who expressed similar views regarding traveling, living abroad, or being primary breadwinners. They said, for example, that these life choices are being forced on them by poor conditions and otherwise claimed to prefer remaining in established gendered roles. Conakry women, in accordance with Mande oral history, often describe a respectable woman as one who is subservient to her husband, who takes good care of her family, and whose most valued capacity is her ability to birth and raise children (e.g., B. Hoffman 2002, 5–­7; Osborn 2011, 31). Masterful dancers in Conakry often navigate a delicate balance between fulfilling such ideals of feminine propriety and accommodating new kinds of demands and opportunities in postsocialist Guinea—­themes I take up again in chapter 6 on sabar. Other women artists in Conakry celebrate their ability to perform male moves. The defiant dancer Maimouna “Lala” Camara commented, “Normally, women can’t find the strength to really do men’s dance. If you see a woman who can execute men’s dance, it means she has worked hard!” Similarly, an older dancer named Salimatou Sylla, who was one of the stars of the national Ballet de l’Armée during the revolution, remarked, “Dundunba, it’s a power dance (sεnbε fare). If you aren’t sure of yourself, you won’t go out [to solo]. You won’t venture in front of people. Because it is a real dance.” Salimatou and Maimouna both described dancing dundunba as a way for women to demonstrate their exceptional strength and self-­confidence. Women in contemporary Conakry dance historically male moves far more frequently and seriously than men dance historically female moves. Young women’s appropriation of the pump is an especially loaded act through which women grapple with—­both lament and celebrate—­changing gender roles. Female artists are now coveted teachers, and many migrate abroad just as men do, taking on the role of provider for extended families in Guinea, where formal job opportunities are rare. By commandeering male movements, young women dancers in Conakry perform gender equality not as

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f i g u r e 4.7.  Women pumping dundunba in the splits

a political ideal but as a promising and unsettling potential of the uncertain social terrain of neoliberal Guinea. Resemblances Dundunba’s performance in Conakry is not simply an act of replicating an authentic rural practice—though tourists and elderly Guinean artists alike often express such a fantasy about urban dance. In fact, dundunba has long participated in constructing the future in Guinea. During the socialist period, national ballets staged dances and masquerades—­including dundunba—­that commanded metaphysical and political power in the countryside, thereby recruiting the potential of iconic suggestion in the construction of the nation-­ state. Socialist-­era cultural production, however, was rhetorically framed by a nostalgic understanding of iconicity, whereby resemblance between staged dance and rural dance was construed as a reminder of the (noble and powerful) African past. Practitioners and playbills described the dances performed in ballets as replicas of their rural counterparts despite the fact that they were much transformed on stage. For example, in a program for a touring show of Les Ballets Africains in 1973, the distinction between rural and staged dance is blurred in

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the following statement: “When these people dance and sing in their native villages, it is not for the benefit of an audience but to express their own emotions. These dances are vital, necessary, imperious and direct. They express what has happened to the individual or the group. The real life stories which the dances evoke are the dances that make up the program of ‘Les Ballets Africains.’ It is as simple and down to earth as picking corn and feeding the goats. It is the reality of Africa, so forceful and beautiful because it flows from the very heart of the dancer” (Kolu Productions 1973). Of course, while the innovations happening in ballets were downplayed in favor of this nostalgic vision of resemblance with bucolic life, ballet and other forms of militant theater were also touted as paradigmatic revolutionary media. This is but one example of how the “competing cosmopolitanisms” of Pan-­Africanism and Marxist modernity were deployed together in the political drama of socialist-­ era ballet.4 The Pan-­Africanist impulse to celebrate tradition existed in tension with socialist-modern injunctions to disavow indigenous backwardness. Artists from Guinea who were trained during the First Republic tend to exaggerate the continuity between staged dance and rural practices. When they teach foreigners, they typically volunteer the name of the dance, its village of origin, and its rural ritual or ceremonial function. One eminent socialist-­era dancer, for example, described ballet to me as the staging of rural dance in which the “circle” is opened so that the audience can peer inside, like opening an egg to view its contents. The movements these teachers offer, however, usually derive from stage dance and from Conakry’s extensive dance lexicon, not primarily from rural repertoires. Some teachers do try to explain to students that “ballet” and “village” dance are different, but they ordinarily still frame each dance with information about rural origins. In the early days of Conakry ballet, it was perhaps more accurate to conceptualize the city as a site where rural people and cultural forms were simply relocated. Under President Touré’s reign, the national ballets recruited artists through a literal siphoning of talented youth from the countryside, a practice that was terminated after socialism. In the 1960s and 1970s, many artists in Conakry could claim a “home” village where they spent their childhood, and those in the national companies could describe dances that they had personally brought from country to stage—­and hence eventually to the city. Once those rural dances were brought to the ballet, however, they were transformed and innovated upon to create programs with thousands of discrete moves,5 and the urban lexicon has since grown steadily further from its rural “origins.” When probed a bit further about the similarities and differences between staged ballet and rural performances, Conakry artists of all ages often

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assert that dances and masquerades that command metaphysical power in the countryside lose that kind of capacity in Conakry. Masks that can kill the ill-­prepared wearer in the village are worn without ritual preparation in the city, and dances done only by ritual specialists or specially “washed” individuals in village contexts are performed with impunity in the city. Such demystified masking resonates with a broader narrative, common in Conakry, about how metaphysical power and powerful beings are diminishing in direct relation to urbanization. People I spoke with in Conakry posited various explanations for this loss of esoteric force, blaming the density of population in cities, the lack of foliage, or the ubiquity of commercial transactions. Demystification was allegedly meant to stamp out superstition in Guinea, paving the way for more modern ways of thinking and acting. Yet as I explained in chapter 1, the socialist state simultaneously disavowed and relied on the transformative powers associated with many rural dance and music practices. It is therefore not surprising that the demystification campaign failed to produce citizens devoid of mystical beliefs. Indeed, contemporary artists have developed an ontology of power in the city that draws on complex narratives about rural magic. In the following section, I provide ethnographic examples of such narratives and propose that young artists’ performances of dundunba and other potent dances mitigate the sense of loss expressed in the stories they tell. Through these examples, I revisit young artists’ preoccupation with the multivalent concept of sεnbε that simultaneously evokes physical, esoteric, and social power. Stories of Metaphysical Loss A group of artists, all in their midtwenties, were sitting around talking before a rehearsal at Merveilles. A girl named Mariama was emphatically describing a movie she had seen from Nigeria where a person turned into a snake with a human head. Its child was throwing up money. Mariama assured her friends that this is what really happens in Nigeria. Sitting on the periphery, I interjected to ask them if people could turn into snakes in Guinea, and they unanimously responded that there are some people who can become any animal. I asked if such feats were performed in Conakry, and a dancer named Alpha responded that shapeshifting is more common in villages. The capital is so populous, he explained, that a more powerful sorcerer might block the magic and then the person trying to transform would be hurt. These kinds of stories about diminishing magical capacity in the city are common in Conakry. An excerpt from an interview I conducted with a

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dancer-­singer in her early thirties named Fatoumata offers another example, this time by comparing magical “work” in country and city: But you know, here [in Conakry], everything is commercial. . . . If anyone in the village says they can do [metaphysical] work for you, when you see the result of the work, you pay the price if the seri [medicine / magical substance] is good. But here in Conakry, when you go see the ritual specialist, he will say “I’ll do the work for five hundred thousand, one million for me to do the work.” But that’s not the price of seri. Any specialist who tells you that, you will give him money, but you won’t see the work. . . . Seri is not strong here. You do the work, you leave, you wash, but it doesn’t bring anything. But there are people out there, they wash your feet and you will dance from morning until night without getting tired!

Stories like Alpha’s and Fatoumata’s keep alive the possibility of certain magical forms of human capacity while accounting for their apparent lack in the city. Alpha notices the discrepancy between the mythologized capacities Af­ ricans wield in epic tales (which are often featured in ballet productions) and the kinds of weak agency exerted by average citizens in Conakry today. Instead of concluding that shapeshifting doesn’t exist because he can’t see it before his eyes and that real power lies in the state (like a good demystified national citizen might), Alpha simply reasons why such feats are not evident in Conakry. His narrative, like Fatoumata’s, also suggests that people in the city have the potential to wield mystical forces, but the fact of not knowing one another personally creates the possibility of dangerous and unpredictable power plays. Anxieties emerge when the face-­to-­face sociality of rural living is replaced with the sprawl of city life, and it becomes less simple to decipher where power is concentrated or how it is acquired (cf. Ferguson 1999, 117; Simmel [1903] 1969). In Conakry, commonplace narratives like these about superior metaphysical capacity in rural areas reveal a widespread perception that certain distinctly African ways of knowing and acting on the world are diminishing through the process of urbanization. This is not to say that magic is absent in Conakry. In fact, because many people are concerned about occult threats, there is a thriving economy around metaphysical protection. However, city dwellers describe rural areas as more esoterically potent and tend to locate the most awe-­inspiring and positive forms of magic in the countryside. Shapeshifting, in particular, is typically identified as rural, as are metaphysical powers associated with particular dances and masks themselves. While there is a long history in Mande societies of conceptualizing the bush as a “hot” seat of dangerous power vis-­à-­vis the “cooler” space of

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civilization (McNaughton 1988, 71), the contemporary Conakry version of this dichotomy—­told by both elders and youth—­is not a triumphant narrative about taming the rural but rather an ambivalent one tinged with a sense of loss. These narratives seem to posit that distinctly African ways of engaging powerfully and positively with the world are disappearing. Dundunba is one of the dances that is known to bring certain rural practitioners into heightened states of being, allowing them to generate metaphysical power through physical gestures. Scholars often describe the convergence of physical and metaphysical capabilities in African systems of thought and action with the English word capacity. Mike McGovern writes of “power/capacity” among the Loma in Guinea to emphasize a connection between able-­ bodiedness and magical ability in Loma conceptions of ideal adult personhood (2004, 85; 2015). African notions of political power often have less to do with control or domination and more to do with the ability to manipulate energy (e.g., Arens and Karp 1989, xxi; Argenti 2007, 183). Indeed, locals in Conakry frequently describe political leaders as “not mere people” (mixie gbansan), invoking a history in which kings and leaders derive their efficacy from occult practices and figures—­such as artisans—­capable of wielding dangerous and vital energy, or nyama (see McNaughton 1988, 130; for an explanation of nyama, see the introduction to this book). The Susu notion of sεnbε captures power’s multivalence and can describe the esoteric capability of a sorcerer, the physical strength of a young warrior, or the social or political influence of a big person. In urban dundunba ceremonies, artists use their bodies to engender new kinds of social opportunity. Young dancers who perform dundunba indeed do not conceptualize themselves as powerless actors. Instead, while describing the loss of magic in cities, they also create fresh openings by harnessing sεnbε from imagined rural elsewheres for use in the cosmopolitan present. The experience of an urban power void becomes an invitation to invent new ways of performatively constituting sεnbε.6 Urban Alchemy The dance dundunba offers an example of how ideal rural power is channeled into the urban present through acts of resemblance. Iconicity is, however, but one of many elements in dundunba ceremonies that contributes to theorizing and producing city life, and it is to some of these other aspects of urban dun­ dunba that I now turn. One practice that is particularly significant is the act of speeding or “heating” (Su. rafurafe / Fr. chauffer) a dance rhythm. Urban dances are consistently performed much faster than their rural counterparts, and speed is one way of signaling what artists call the “modernization” (Fr. la

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modernisation) of rural forms. Some dances are “heated” to the point of complete transformation, indexed either by a new name or by content that leaves no core (xɔri) gestural element intact. In Mande societies historically, the concept of heat is associated with “staggering accumulations of power and the imbalance of aggressive action” (McNaughton 1988, 71) and is conceptually linked to the potency of nyama, wielded by blacksmiths and griots (e.g., Conrad and Frank 1995; Jansen 2000, 8). In Conakry’s dundunba circles, one of the most popular dances aside from dundunba itself is called sɔkɔ. When heated, sɔkɔ morphs into a rapid version of itself called sɔkɔ chaud, or “hot sɔkɔ.” Sɔkɔ’s central movement is a sequence: a sideways chassé forward, a low kick, 180-­degree spin, and chassé backward into a lunge. This basic sequence, which is sometimes performed with added leaps or twirls inside the chassé, is not gendered, is not danced in any other rhythm, and directly mirrors the conversation of the bass drums: gidin gon, gidin gidin gon . . . ; gidin gon, gidin gidin gon:7

When the rhythm heats into sɔkɔ chaud, the bass drum pattern transforms to accommodate the increased tempo, and the core dance sequence becomes impossible to perform. The drums rev wildly, inviting dancers to the solo—­gagin, gagin, gagin, gagin:

Braids flying, only the most seasoned now dare compete, mostly women. Arms race in forward gyrations, palms flip, head tossed back, matched by alternating stomping feet and undulating torso —one round per second. Watching, I am reminded of Disney’s Road Runner, his legs awhirl. The drums grow feverish, a young djembe accompanist falters, his face beaded with sweat, looking worried. Another woman springs to action, pouncing backward onto her left foot, weight leaning right, leg scooping forward as her arms sweep overhead then reversing to the left—back, forth, and again.

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She launches into the air with both knees tucked to chest, arms straight, hands stretched, she spins upon landing and begins to pound the ground with one foot and then the other, hands clasped behind her neck, throwing her head back on each upbeat. The poor young accompanist can’t hold on any longer. The rhythm wavers . . . Then like a train wreck, some pieces lose traction and begin to fly off a sonic accident. The dancer works against it but finally succumbs, sucking her teeth, she tosses one backhand sideways at the drummers and casts them a dismissive look as she exits.

While most rhythms have a distinct and purposeful beginning and end, sɔkɔ chaud grows out of regular sɔkɔ and often ends in a train wreck rather than a break called by the drummers. It is a rhythm that tests human endurance, is mostly danced by women, and does not purport to have a rural equivalent. Sɔkɔ chaud is an urban invention. It is sɔkɔ—­a dance with a rural origin story8—­heated and compressed into something new enough to receive a name and different gendered boundaries. Speed and volume mark all Conakry dances as both urban and modern, but most dances retain the name, basic rhythm, and some core movements from the rural “original,” making iconicity part of the process of urban culture-­making. Sɔkɔ chaud departs from this model by heating sɔkɔ beyond the threshold where people can perform core moves and by marking that threshold as the beginning of something different, distinct to the city, and on the verge of being out of control. Sɔkɔ chaud calls attention to the process of heating when there is no upper limit, posing embodied questions that illuminate key tensions of urbanization and political-­economic change in Guinea: What happens when “heat” is applied too quickly? What if some people can’t keep up? One other example of “heat” changing a well-­known dance into something new is in the planting and harvesting dance Aly referenced earlier called konkɔba. Nearly every ballet in Conakry does a version of konkɔba, and they are typically quite similar, involving steps that mimic planting and harvesting. As an agricultural rhythm that accompanies actual planting in Maninka villages, konkɔba includes songs that expound on the virtues of hard work. One song exclaims, “Konkɔba! Aah, hunger doesn’t trouble people unless they don’t work.” Another song declares, “There’s nothing like work; work makes people who they are.” Konkɔba is one of the most literal dances in Conakry’s ballet repertoire in the sense that many of the movements recognizably

f i g u r e 4.8. Acrobats form a human tower during the konkɔba rhythm at a dundunba

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denote particular rural activities: men bend over and use a hoe to till the field, women scatter seed from a basket carried in one hand, women gather crops, and so on. Yet as Aly made clear, not all icons are equally appealing to young practitioners mining the past with an eye toward the future. The part of rural experience depicted through konkɔba steps is not relevant to urban youth, and they never dance those moves in the ceremonies they curate. In Conakry dundunba circles, instead of mimicking agricultural work, konkɔba has taken on a new identity as the rhythm of acrobats. When acrobats show up at a dundunba, often from one of the city’s several circuses, the drummers play an extremely fast version of konkɔba (on Guinean circus, see Straker 2009a). Like sɔkɔ chaud, the acrobats’ konkɔba rhythm is so fast that the conventional dance steps are not possible. Dancers stop soloing to make room for roundoff back handsprings, backflips, and human towers. The acrobats are showered with tips. While the work of farmers, acknowledged in konkɔba songs and dance movements, offers a clear path from perseverance to satiation, city life offers no such direct link. Artists work hard but are aware that

f i g u r e 4.9. Acrobats at a dundunba

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their ability to provide depends on luck and grace as much as perseverance (e.g., A. Cohen 2018). When acrobats “heat” konkɔba, they detach work from the earth, replacing the motions of planting and harvesting with bodies flying through the air. In the city, liftoff signals valuable potential. Why Dance “Cannot Be Known” Through many years immersed in Conakry’s dance scene, I observed how virtuosic dancers could translate signs across time and space to make sense of their lives and to entail new futures. Though I became fairly adept at executing complex movements myself, I never approached being able to conjure resonance and collective feeling like the best Guinean dancers could. They could leap to the solo without premeditation, sweep history and personality into form, and revise the social with glints of audacity. Conakry artists and directors often describe a relationship of supplication and surrender with dance by urging apprentices “to give or leave yourself to the dance” (i yεtε so / lu fare yira) or “to let yourself go/unfurl” (i yεtεkan nafulun). Still others submit that in order to be good, you must get frustrated or angry (mɔnεfe) with the dance and/or with yourself. All these ways of relating to dance, the body, and the self suggest that dance is a force to be reckoned with or a presence to appease, one that elicits affective and emotional engagement from practitioners. Masterful dancers, then, are not only technicians. They are social beings who attain mastery through negotiation with a presence more powerful and extensive than any single human—­an unending repertoire of signs and meanings iterated across time and space through bodies. Artists in Conakry frequently reminded me that “dance cannot be known” (fare mu kolon ma). As performance scholars have often argued, dance exists in transformation, en route, in its own disappearance (e.g., Phelan 1993). This wise Susu adage “fare mu kolon ma” posits the human body as a source of infinite invention and transformation. Two arms and two legs, a torso and a head, somehow together can generate an unending lexicon of movement and semiotic potential—an infinite repertoire. When applied more broadly, this adage asks us to approach cultural life as a process of dynamic emergence. Through dance, ballet practitioners in Conakry tap into a long history whereby artisans in Mande societies have been influential social actors able to handle and manipulate the animating energy of the world. Africanist anthropologists have described the desperate measures that youth often take to overcome what Henrik Vigh calls “nullification, an experience of being reduced to a body without worth . . . socially unsubstantiated”

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(2016, 230; also see Cole 2004, 2010; Melly 2011; Newell 2012). Guinean artists faced with economic and political precarity like many other underclass youth on the continent counter this sense of powerlessness by employing embodied signs as a resource. Performers in Conakry dundunba ceremonies use their bodies to shift gendered expectations, to articulate shared anxieties, and to cultivate new kinds of urban possibility. A virtuosic soloist offers a glimpse of the brilliant potential contained within a single person, whose lone body commands affect and meaning far beyond the spatial or temporal limits of its own physicality.

5

Core Steps and Passport Moves: How to Inherit a Repertoire Inheritance is plastic; each generation can change its form. But to play the game, to convey an entrustment from forebears to heirs, is to bind past to future, securing one’s own place in a sequence and a process. p a r k e r m . s h i p t o n , The Nature of Entrustment

On a hot afternoon in Conakry, professional dancers and musicians from over six ballets gathered at a crossroads to hold a dundunba celebrating the marriage of a well-­known dancer. As the rhythm sɔkɔ sped up, a young firebrand named Bountourabi leaped from her chair, kicking her left leg and whirling around with her arms extended. She reeled backward, elbows bent in to her sides, hands fiercely clawlike, casting her upper torso in figure eights from left to right, her head following like a graceful rag doll. Her friends cheered, and some jumped from their seats in approval at this clever improvisation. The few elders in the crowd, however, looked on dispassionately. They grumbled that the current generation no longer performs the real core moves (pas xɔri) anymore, only gigoteau. Bountourabi was one of many young dancers at the ceremony to perform a type of improvisational dancing called gigoteau, whose name derives from the French verb gigoter, meaning to wriggle about. Featuring improvisational, inventive movement, intricate footwork, and sometimes lewd or comedic gestures, gigoteau has become a marker of value and distinction for young dancers as well as a key point of contention between generations. Older artists trained during the socialist period interpret gigoteau—­ with its focus on individuality, humor, and promiscuous cultural citation—­as a threat to the integrity of Guinean performing arts. Postsocialist youth see it as a vital form of self-­expression. Bountourabi positioned herself in front of the lead drummer, who was translating her movement into sound. She performed a classic sɔkɔ move: propelled by a left leg kick, she lifted off the ground, swung her arms into the air, and landed with a backward chassé into a low stance, turning the left knee toward the ground as she thrust her head back and arms outward with abandon. She repeated this well-­known sequence several times, signaling her mastery

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of technique and acknowledging a shared inherited repertoire but returned quickly to personal improvisation. She executed unorthodox combinations, interspersing her own steps with other movements not designated for sɔkɔ. Then looking up suddenly with an undulation of the upper back, she made an insubordinate gesture with her hand as if throwing something at the audience, announcing the end of her solo. Her friends and admirers flooded the ring, dancing sɔkɔ moves in unison. Within the dundunba circle, gigoteau provokes heated intergenerational debate. It is one of several dance practices—­including sɔkɔ chaud (described in chapter 4) and sabar (described in chapter 6)—­that have become central to young practitioners’ understanding of urban virtuosity yet are consistently dismissed by elders as unserious, impure, and even offensive. As such, they are rarely included in ballet programs and dance classes. These are dances that flaunt their divergence from, rather than similarity to, rural prototypes and that emblematize major social and economic transformations in postrevolutionary Conakry. To Guinean practitioners trained during socialism, these distinctly urban forms signal a loss of nationalist focus and of social and affective coherence, both in Conakry’s performing arts scene and in Guinea more broadly.1 Artists trained during socialism fear that today’s dancers are abandoning the social and ethical foundations of the ballet profession. For younger performers trained in the 1990s and 2000s, however, gigoteau highlights individual creativity and global connection, thereby indexing the potential of Guinean ballet to thrive beyond its socialist origins. In this chapter, I investigate these intergenerational debates surrounding Guinean dance, ultimately returning to the question of how cultural inheritance operates across dramatic political-­economic change. How is Guinean ballet dance an “object” of cultural transmission if many of the actual steps and popular practices are not stable across generations? What, in fact, is being transmitted across time? Guinean artists trained during the revolution often reproduce hoary notions of African culture as static or slow to change. According to these elders, the most desirable forms of dance are either “original” dances performed in rural communities or staged “traditional” folklore exemplified in the ballets of the Touré era. (The French loan word traditionnelle is often used to describe not rural dances but the ballet-­style elaborations that emerged during socialism, while the rural dances are described with the French word originale.) For socialist-­trained elders, each dance originates from a particular ethnic group, and the movements from one dance should ideally not be transposed into another. Younger dancers mix steps more freely between rhythms, establishing a distinctly urban approach to producing and categorizing dance in their solos that denies the primacy of ethnicity or regional origin.

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f i g u r e 5.1 a n d 5.2.  Bountourabi Kouyate performs a dundunba solo

In contrast with their teachers who think of ethnic origins as the primary means of classifying and valuing dances, many younger-­generation artists prioritize “feel” or “time” over history when deciding which movements to perform together in a single rhythm. Elders condemn the younger generation’s mixing of different dances, claiming that such pastiche threatens the integrity of the national imaginary (for a related account in Ghanaian music, see Shipley 2013, 75–­78). The Touré-­era artists who now police the boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable types of performance were of course themselves major innovators, but this does not figure into the ideal-­typical image they project of socialist-­era dance as a transposition of village practice onto the national stage. It is also notable that some of the fixed points that anchor the older generation’s notion of Guinean culture (naamunyi) are precisely the dances and rhythms that had, from the perspective of ethnic groups in the forest region targeted by demystification, been profaned by being manipulated and staged during the Touré era (e.g., Straker 2007, 2009b). When government patronage of the arts abruptly declined following the death of Sékou Touré in 1984, artists found themselves unmoored from the collective force of the socialist state as well as from the sense of meaning that participating in the revolution had given their lives. Ballet practitioners in Conakry inherited a dance genre, yet they were obliged to reinvent its contours and the contexts of its performance to fit into a new era of economic liberalization and urban isolation, as artists were no longer recruited from the countryside. As young dancers gradually edge away from “traditional”

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socialist or “original” village repertoires and toward a distinctly urban dance lexicon, debates abound in Conakry between generations of practitioners about admixture and purity in dance and percussion. Young artists, especially in the context of dundunba gatherings, are constantly creating steps and combining them across discrete dance rhythms in their solos. While this blending is far more open ended than the older generation is comfortable with, there is a general consensus among postsocialist-­era dancers that certain canonical movements or “core steps” (pas xɔri) cannot be taken from their rhythm and put into another. So while the older generation has entire canonical repertoires that they consider ideally separate, the younger generation has distilled canons down to bare “bones,” invoking the concept of essential structure through the Susu word xɔri, meaning “core,” “bone,” “seed,” or “kernel.”2 Across both generations, there are movements that dancer Moustapha Bangoura, who performed in the national company Les Ballets Africains for twenty-­two years, calls “passport moves,” which can be danced in many different rhythms (crossing proverbial borders between discrete dances) in both solo improvisational and formal stage performance. But the young are far more liberal in deciding which moves get a passport. By mixing steps so freely, younger artists are establishing a new approach to categorizing dance that denies nationalism or ethnicity as primary categories organizing the social order. While elders espouse notions of cultural identity and boundedness through idioms of purity (keeping influences out) and protection (keeping “culture” in; Harrison 1999; see also Mbembe 2002), which were key to socialist-­era cultural policy, youth are developing alternative modes of articulating identity and signaling continuity. In order to conceptualize intangible culture as an integral part of living social worlds, we must be willing to consider endurance not merely of recognizable forms or the means to produce them but of relations, affects, and organizing principles (cf. Samuels 2004, 11). What remains constant across time may not be tangible or intangible “objects,” such as family heirlooms, a series of dance steps, or the ingredients in a recipe.3 Indeed, such objects become meaningful primarily because of the social relationships they facilitate. Mauss ([1925] 2016) famously proposed that we conceptualize gifts in terms of the social ties they engender, and I suggest in similar fashion that we approach inheritance as a practice of passing on not only artifacts but relations.4 Indeed, as I have been arguing throughout this book, it is the transformative capacity of Guinean dance—­a relationship between movement, meaning, and social reality—­that has enabled its endurance across periods of extreme political-­economic and social change.

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Gigoteau Many dancers express the worry that gigoteau, because it is so individualized and disconnected from inherited forms, is leading away from familiar systems of social cohesion into a realm of individual abstraction that is socially isolated. Under the revolutionary state, dance was constructed as an expression of the national collective, and artists worked for the good of the nation. Gigoteau’s detractors describe it as the antithesis of that model of morally and collectively oriented practice, while proponents conceptualize gigoteau as a paradigmatic sign of youthful postsocialist resourcefulness. Elders understand gigoteau to represent a fundamental break from, or dilution of, inherited repertoires. Private ballet director Ousmane “Zito” Bangoura, for example, explained this common perspective to me in the following manner: “Gigoteau, it’s not dance. . . . It’s a joke because it is one person’s conception, a single person’s thought. It is not the thought of the collective.” He went on to describe gigoteau as a regrettable act of refusal: “Your stage director tells you to bring your arm like this. You don’t do it like that, though. You do something else. It ends up something that they didn’t tell you to do. That’s what they call gigoteau.” For younger performers trained in the 1990s and 2000s, gigoteau signals individuality and resourcefulness—­qualities that are especially useful at a time when dancers need to distinguish themselves in a market economy. The dancer Aly Mara, introduced earlier in the book, also discussed gigoteau with me at length: “Gigoteau, ha haaaa! It’s not a bad thing. It is dance creatively put together. What you as a dancer do personally, that’s what they call gigoteau. It’s mixed dance [ fare malanxi]. That is, you leave point B, you come to point A, you come from A, you go to C, you come to H, you come to X! On Z, now you are jumping. Yeah, that’s what they call gigoteau.” Aly emphasized the unpredictable and deeply personal quality of gigoteau. It is dance put together in innovative ways, an alphabet in disarray. There was excitement in Aly’s voice when he described the purposeful reordering of the alphabet punctuated by a final jump. Gigoteau, in this view, is an attitude toward dance, a fundamental refusal to follow a prescribed path and a creative use of the body that pushes aside convention in favor of individuality. Whether this refusal is valuable is hotly debated. While Zito presents gigoteau as an unfortunate phenomenon in which artists refuse to participate in a group effort, Aly paints the same refusal in a different light: “Yeah, when you hear ‘gigoteau,’ you do something, like, that’s not recommended for that situation. Like, you do something that doesn’t fit, that’s not in the framework, but you take it and bring it into that frame. Then you maintain it, and it begins to make sense, and people end up liking it. That’s gigoteau.” Aly’s and Zito’s

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f i g u r e 5.3.  Female dancer performs gigoteau at a dundunba

differing understandings of gigoteau are representative of the broader field of intergenerational tension that exists among ballet practitioners around which kinds of dance are socially valuable. Gigoteau is performed almost exclusively at dundunba ceremonies and can be woven into a solo in any rhythm. It can be humorous or even insulting: a dancer may, for example, scratch his behind and pretend to throw it at the drummers or imitate moves from a kung fu movie. Gigoteau can also involve quick improvised footwork or any manner of unusual gesture that a dancer brings to her solo to make it more distinctive. Even dramatic eye movements can be a kind of gigoteau. While it marks the individual soloist

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as distinct, creative, and hence marketable, as dance, gigoteau is understood to be unmarketable and unteachable. Artists in Conakry tend to think that it cannot be taught because either (1) it is disconnected from rural precedents and therefore has no value as a cultural commodity or (2) it is a highly personal way of dancing that by definition cannot be transferred. Artists have explained to me that teaching gigoteau would be like trying to teach another how to be oneself. While solo improvisation has been part of Guinean dance across eras and regions, gigoteau marks a new approach to improvisation. Instead of celebrating the style and amplitude with which performers execute ethnically codified movements, this approach elevates inventive citation, humor, pastiche, and individuality. Artists of both generations are clear about the differences be­­ tween gigoteau and “style” (articulated with the French loanword style). While style refers to one’s ability to embellish or make moves appealing, gigoteau refers rather to one’s personal gestures, comedies, or innovative creations that are separate from dance moves themselves. A soloist who uses gigoteau well must have style, but someone with style is not necessarily capable of executing gigoteau. Many of the best socialist-­era dancers, for example, have incredible technique and unrivaled style but are not fluent performers of gigoteau. Arguably, all the best young dancers working in contemporary Conakry ballets are masters of gigoteau, though some who perform it also decry it. This ambivalence

f i g u r e 5.4.  Morelaye Diallo performs gigoteau at a dundunba

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figure 5.5. Male dancer performing gigoteau

is partially due to an ambiguity by which gigoteau overused or performed without “intelligence” (xaxili) and is simply read as “ruinous” to one’s dance (a fare kanama). While dancers at dundunbas make names for themselves by performing distinctive solos that include gigoteau, those who attempt gigoteau without knowing how to balance it with more codified moves or without developing technique and style first are widely derided as not knowing how to dance. Conakry Dundunba Ceremony 2013 At a small dundunba ceremony in the neighborhood of Gbessia, a short dark dancer wearing billowy green pants and slick black dress shoes caught everyone’s attention, though his dance was not what most would consider “good.” Snatching the flag from the referee, he advanced quickly toward the drummers, stopped abruptly before them, and sprung into a deep lunge with the front knee bent and the back leg straight. Grasping the air awkwardly with his

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left hand, he grimaced and then undulated his body suddenly as if jolted by an electric current. He struck an uncomfortable-­looking pose: head cocked, behind protruding, and left arm frozen in the grasping position, and he held that stance while slowly pivoting like a strange doll in a music box. He then walked quickly with stiff legs toward some people in the audience, hopped his legs into a cross, and surged toward them, both arms outstretched as if carrying a huge boulder with his head tilted back. The tendons in his neck popped out, and his sinewy arms strained as he struggled with the boulder. The audience laughed at this spectacle of a solo, and several people tossed him small bills. Contented, he contorted his face quizzically, mouth agape and eyes looking up, jumped his feet together, and punctuated the solo with a dramatic pop of the hip.

This dancer, whose true name I never learned, though he told me to call him “Lion,” composed comedic and original solos regularly. He rarely used codified moves, and though he was a trained dancer who rehearsed in a local ballet, his gigoteau bordered on farce. His spastic movements were reminiscent of the dance brought off by clownish comedy figures popular among Conakry youth. Lion is an example of someone whose gigoteau was dismissed (even by young practitioners who typically appreciate gigoteau) as potentially ruinous. Dancers who are considered virtuosic in Conakry, such as Bountourabi, must be able to “play” (bere) with their bodies, with the rhythm, and with the subtle nuance of expectation and surprise between performer and audience. They must also demonstrate knowledge of canonical dance, either by performing it in bursts between gigoteau, as Bountourabi did, or by alluding to it through rhythmic patterning of improvised movement that reflects a profound understanding of how core steps fit into the rhythm. For those dancers, gigoteau builds name (xili), adding value to the performer as well as to the other invented steps the dancer executes. Core moves, however, also validate the dancer as respectable and well versed in shared repertoires. A performer like Lion takes liberties within this scheme to make sure he is noticed, and in so doing, he may over time change the rules of the game. As I show in chapter 6, some dancers push the boundaries of what is considered acceptable or desirable behavior as they navigate an economy in which distinguishing oneself is supremely important. Like sɔkɔ chaud, gigoteau is a distinctly urban practice that does not depend on resemblance with rural dance for its potential. It is dismissed by many elders simply as noise—­as an impediment to the clear reproduction of cultural form across time. However, if what is being passed across generations in the first place is not simply form with meaning attached but rather a capacity for dance to influence and comment on the social world, gigoteau

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offers another example of how youth are mobilizing this inherited capacity. As artists increasingly identify as urban and navigate an emerging global tourist market for their dance, gigoteau is a practice that establishes the individual person—­and not the socialist collective subject—­as a key locus of artistic production. As I have argued elsewhere, young Guineans are far from embracing liberal individualism wholesale (A. Cohen 2018), and indeed, gigoteau—­which elevates the individual—­is balanced with core moves and embedded within communally oriented dundunba ceremonies. Elder artists in Conakry’s ballet scene tend to portray gigoteau and, by extension, the current generation more broadly as rude and defiant. But attention to the dundunba social ceremonies that youth organize and to their performances at these ceremonies reveals a more nuanced negotiation of cultural continuity and intergenerational deference. Gigoteau’s individual orientation exists within the social field (Bourdieu 1996) of the potlatch-­like dundunba ceremony, which brings ballet practitioners together through acts of gifting and respect. As dancers in Conakry cultivate individual distinction and market themselves through gigoteau, they are also carving out a realm of expression that indexes their values and responsibilities, much as the generation before them did by dancing revolutionary ideals.

The Gift of Respect Binyε mu sigma makiti. Mixie na fima mixie ma. Respect doesn’t go to market. People give it to one another. susu proverb

Elders frequently describe the dance that youth produce as disrespectful and even unethical and dismiss young artists’ interest in money as potentially corrupting to the profession. However, these characterizations overlook the ways in which young practitioners actively preserve key values held dear by the socialist generation. The dundunba ceremonies that youth curate, for example, are structured around the trope of respect (binyε), which has long been central to articulating interpersonal and intergenerational deference in Mande societies. These ceremonies also exemplify how capitalist orientations need not undermine the communal logic of the gift. By refusing clean distinctions between tradition and modernity or gift and commodity, Conakry dundunbas challenge the stereotype of gifting as the antithesis of economic modernity, instead evidencing the entwinement of gift and commodity exchange.5 By extension, gigoteau performances, enfolded in dundunba ceremonies, complicate the ideal socialist dichotomization of individual and communal,

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instead performing new ways of embedding individual persons in webs of relations. If artists want to arrange a dundunba, they must rent chairs, cook food, pay the musicians’ transport, and invite drummers and dancers by distributing candies at ballet rehearsals. These candies, which have replaced the more traditional kola nuts gifted for ceremonial purposes, are often dubbed “your respect” (wo xa binyε) for the people receiving them. Eating these sweets clinches the obligation to come to the dundunba, and the more candies that are distributed around town to invite different ballets, the more people will attend. This is, of course, expensive, and more expensive sweets such as lollipops or fruit-­flavored hard candies are coveted, but cheap Chinese mint cough drops have long been the minimum requirement. The name of the person or people organizing the dundunba also plays a role in attendance, and no matter how many candies are distributed, if the person hosting the dundunba has not yet become recognized among practitioners as a talented artist, not as many people will attend. If the event is well attended, the person who organized it feels proud and respected and may announce afterward to those who came, “You have lifted my head up” (Wo bara n xun ‘nakeli).6 Naming female and male “godparents” or honored guests of the party, referred to by the French terms marraine and parrain, is one way of expanding the social circle of people likely to feel obliged or interested in attending. If a well-­known artist hosts a dundunba, they will likely invite another well-­ known artist as the godparent to honor that person and to bring in more quality guests. Marraines and parrains also initiate a group dance that solicits tips for the drummers. Musicians and dancers do not expect to make money at dundunbas, as they do at other social ceremonies across the city that they are hired to animate. Drummer Nabilaye Camara offered a typical explanation of why artists attend dundunba ceremonies: nabilaye camara: Dundunba is done for pleasure. Dundunba is not about money. adrienne cohen: So for example, if there’s a sabar, you won’t go unless you know that you will make money. But dundunba, even if you don’t make money—­ nc: Yeah, you go. ac: You get yourself there. nc: You go. ac: For the sake of being an artist (artistya)? nc: That’s it.

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Artists attend dundunbas “for the sake of artistya” (artistya xa fe ra)—­that is, for the sake of Guinean ballet as both profession and community—­in several different ways: they are organized for major events or rites of passage in the lives of artists and their families, they are the central forum for innovation and rivalry in Conakry dance and percussion, and they provide a site for artists to distinguish and promote themselves as creative individuals. Exceptional gigoteau sets dancers apart and makes them visible and marketable. Dundunbas are forums for individual distinction in a market economy as well as sites for social cohesiveness to be performed through gifts traded on the trope of respect. As such, they articulate postsocialist cultural production as a hybrid enterprise that integrates older modes of articulating value and sociality into the present (cf. Obarrio 2014; Shevchenko 2002). Artists trained in the Touré era tend to dismiss contemporary hybrid practices such as gigoteau as socially disruptive because they do not reproduce the aesthetic and political logics of the past. But in this dismissal, they ignore continuities that are being forged across generations. In the context of dun­ dunba ceremonies, the trope of respect is one of the key mechanisms through which young people demonstrate deference to their elders and continuity with older values. In these ceremonies, respect is a recurrent theme, and in their solos, dancers can perform respect through supplication or tribute. At the same dundunba in December 2012 in which Bountourabi demonstrated her virtuosic gigoteau, for example, a dancer named Abacar performed a solo involving both invented and core steps and then made a beeline for his elderly teacher, Yamoussa, seated in the audience. As Abacar approached his teacher, the old man gazed into the distance, pretending not to notice as his student squatted before him, pumping his arms—­bent at the elbows, biceps flexed—­in the classic dundunba movement. Abacar then kneeled down, touching the ground before Yamoussa, and bent his head forward in deference. Yamoussa finally allowed a smile to creep over his face, stretching his hand out above Abacar with an open palm facing down and laying it on his student’s back in an expression of benediction. The gesture Abacar performed is an unmistakable and old form of respect. He bent low before his teacher, subjugating himself and offering his dance as a testament to their relationship. This gesture enacts a loyal bond between student and teacher and is not used casually. Through this kind of deferential performance, youth ask elders to publicly acknowledge continuity between generations and to give their blessings, despite misgivings they may harbor. Dancers can also perform respect and continuity through tribute in their solos. At a dundunba hosted in 2011 by the wife of well-­known director Se­ kouba “Wastero” Camara, who had passed away just a few years before, a

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figure 5.6.  Aboubacar “Abacar” Camara kneeling before his teacher, Yamoussa Soumah

dancer called Axurdi (small one), who was trained by Wastero from a young age, took the solo. Smiling and jovial, Axurdi approached the drummers with some typical moves, wrapping their attention around her small frame. Then she leaped abruptly onto her left foot, leaning forward with a bent knee and making a scooping movement with her left arm toward the ground, then rebounding back onto the right foot, chest upright, chin up, with the left hand bent into her chest and elbow pointing toward the drummers. The perceptive musicians took the cue and immediately shifted the rhythm to catch up with the next beat of her sequence—­a series of movements that mirror the bass drum conversation of a rhythm called n fa kaba. Once the rhythm transformed and Axurdi had finished the first sequence, she turned to face the back of the ring behind which Wastero’s house stood. She cut the next sequence short, bending over to hide her face. When she stood up it became clear she was crying. She completed another round of n fa kaba with tears running down her face. A dancer sitting next to me whispered, “It’s Wastero’s dance.” I recalled Wastero’s solos. When he came to a dundunba, often with his wife, Bountou, the drummers would play n fa kaba for them, and the dignified elderly man would spring forward into the dance, adding flourishes to the core sequence each time, eyes sparkling. He and Bountou would dance it together, circling each other and teasing out new ways of flirting around and against the rhythm, ending brilliantly on the final note of each round.

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Following Axurdi, more dancers continued soloing to n fa kaba, bringing their own styles to the sequence and paying tribute to the great Wastero. Axurdi’s solo exemplifies how dancers can “touch time through the residue of the gesture or the cross-­temporality of the pose” (Schneider 2011, 2). Her solo may be understood at once as memory, evidence, and homage. Through her body, Axurdi brought the past into the present, turning a party into a memorial and breathing life into the gesture of the deceased. She asked those in attendance to feel in their bodies the movements and personalities that came before and to understand dance as chronotope, capable of condensing time and space into a sensory moment.7 As these examples make clear, young dancers in Conakry actively pursue the blessings, values, and affects of their elders and ancestors. Inheriting Repertoires Improvisational solos at dundunbas are embedded in a broader economy of performances in which successive generations inherit the ability, through dance, to shape and comment on the social world. They may, however, disagree on which elements of that social world to safeguard and which to change. While socialist-­trained elders in Conakry’s ballet scene seem to be claiming that postsocialist youth—­by concentrating on gigoteau and other distinctly urban varieties—­are not faithfully carrying the profession forward, the attention elders pay to dance form overlooks the broader economy of performances. By embracing the trope of respect and developing dance that is able to adapt to political-­economic change, youth participate in cultural transmission by replicating the performative capacity of the genre while often revising its forms. Interpreting cultural transmission in this shifting social context involves understanding heritage not as the passing on of cultural artifacts but as “a multilayered performance . . . that embodies acts of remembrance and commemoration while negotiating and constructing a sense of place, belonging and understanding in the present” (L. Smith 2006, 3). Across the African continent in the neoliberal era, new approaches to cultural production grapple with political-­economic transformation and financial precarity. Amid so much uncertainty, how do social groups reproduce themselves? How do they incorporate loss and provisionality into the everyday fabric of cultural life? Annette Weiner claims that “the vexing question of how to reproduce the past in and through loss is answered politically by an individual’s or a group’s efforts to keep inalienable possessions while being challenged to surrender them” (1992, 152; italics mine). People meet

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this challenge creatively in contexts of rapid change, calling on heirlooms, in all their plasticity, to perform and authenticate changing ways of belonging to a social collectivity. The mutability of heirlooms is an open secret that when emphasized or even celebrated (as in the case of gigoteau) can pose a challenge to established modes of understanding trust and cultural coherence across generations. Inherited objects and practices that stand in for social relations and enduring identities are what anthropologists call inalienable possessions (e.g., Godelier 1999; Mauss [1925] 2016; Weiner 1992). But that inalienability—­that quality of social life that is intimately bound up with collective identity and therefore cannot be given away or sold—­need not be object-­like. By paying attention to inherited ways of conceptualizing and using embodied signs—­to inherited semiotic repertoires8—­we discover more nuanced ways in which social groups keep inalienable possessions while being challenged to surrender them.

6

When Big Is Not Big Enough: On Excess in Guinean Sabar Everyone shouted past melody, then rhyme, then harmony, then rhythm, then beat, until the shout became the first principle of speech—­sometimes the last. Old oaths, carrying forgotten curses, which themselves contained buried wishes, were pressed into seven-­inch pieces of plastic as a bet that someone would listen, that someone would decipher codes the speakers themselves didn’t know they were transmitting. g r e i l m a r c u s , Lipstick Traces The sacred charter of the discipline is to explain the existence of . . . partly obscured, barely audible, often nascent phenomena in the world. jean and john comaroff, “Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction”

While dundunba is the central ceremony of artists in contemporary Conakry, sabar ceremonies have gained unprecedented popularity for wedding parties among both artists and laypersons of all ethnic and class backgrounds in the city.1 Ballet practitioners throw sabars for their own weddings and other celebratory occasions, and they animate the sabars of nonartists. Sabar is a celebration in Conakry characterized by the quality of excess, manifested in hypersexualized dancing, electric amplification, and elaborate displays of wealth. Guinean sabar is derived from Senegalese sabar, which is a far more complex practice including multiple rhythms and performance events (for detailed accounts of Senegalese sabar, see, Bizas 2014; Castaldi 2006; Dessertine 2010; Neveu Kringelbach 2013; Tang 2007). In Guinea, sabar denotes a single event, and there are just two possible versions of the Guinean sabar rhythm, one slow and the other fast. As a dance genre, Guinean sabar could be characterized as an impoverished variation of its Senegalese counterpart. However, I argue in this chapter that as a social phenomenon, Guinean sabar is semiotically rich and locally evocative. Sabar’s rise to popularity in Guinea coincided with economic liberalization and the opening of national borders after 1984—­events that have ongoing repercussions for Guinean citizens. I propose that Conakry sabar grapples affectively with such exposure to global capitalism and to the sociocultural and economic changes it has engendered within Guinea. While average urban citizens tend to describe their experience of neoliberal reform in stark terms

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of abandonment and liberation, they rarely talk in more depth about feelings associated with the lived realities of political-­economic transformation. In a society where emotional restraint is a virtue, sabar’s position as a foreign cultural import affords participants particular leeway to dramatize collective affect and to publicly question shared conceptions of value in this changing society.2 Going Big lamine’s sabar 1: striptease The wedding of Lamine Lamah was a big deal among performing artists in Conakry. Lamine is the son of the late Kerfalla Lamah,3 a renowned director and choreographer in one of Guinea’s national troupes and the founder of a private ballet in the capital. Lamine inherited the directorship of the company when his father passed away, and he is well respected among the city’s artists. His marriage in 2013 to an American woman was punctuated by a sabar party. Artists from troupes all over the city flocked to the event, at once to support Lamine and his new wife and to experience what they expected to be a well-­ funded celebration. The party was a typical high-­end Conakry sabar, meaning there was plenty of food prepared, a backup generator, and many artists invited.4 I sat close to the drummers, snapping photos. Dancers captured the space one by one, seducing the audience with fiery jumps and sexy gestures, swinging arms and legs to imitate the Senegalese style. As the drums heated up, a tall, sturdy dancer named Bebe ran into the circle. She was wearing orange earrings dangling to her shoulders, a tight T-­shirt with a red-­lipsticked mouth emblazoned on the front, and a wrap tied loosely around her waist. She had been wearing jeans, but as the night progressed, many of the top dancers changed into looser clothing, which allowed them to move freely and to expose themselves when performing suggestive movements. Bebe began with some familiar moves and then squatted, thrusting her knees in and out while accepting tips from admirers and peers. The ring teemed with women and effeminate (“womanlike”; gine daxi) men;5 save the drummers, few cisgender Guinean men dared enter the circle to perform.6 Bebe stood up and pulled her shirt off, revealing a black push-­up bra. She tapped her feet in an open stance and then with one motion threw off her wrap to expose her thighs—­a part of the female body that is usually covered in Guinea—­and clad only in blue underwear and a bra, she ran toward the percussionists. Before they could escape, she jumped on one of them with her legs open. She fell backward as the drummer tried to free himself and, with legs flailing in the air,

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they disappeared from view into the tangle of drums. While some observers, especially young female dancers, were amused by the spectacle, others looked uneasy or openly expressed disgust at such transgressive female conduct that has become increasingly prevalent in Conakry sabar in recent years. Bebe’s striptease represents an extreme version of the hypersexualized theatrics characteristic of sabar in Guinea, and even more ribald displays are standard in Senegalese sabar (see, e.g., Neveu Kringelbach 2013, 86–­90). No other dancer stripped down to her underwear that night (though it is a common practice in Conakry sabars), but many mimicked sexual acts in their dance moves or showed thighs through open skirts as they danced. While the sexualized nature of sabar makes it the subject of moral scrutiny wherever it is performed (even in Senegal7), in Guinea, the dance is controversial both because of its bawdy nature and because it is foreign and has become an emblem of contrast with locally derived cultural forms. Sabar and other women’s dance parties in Senegal are typically analyzed by anthropologists as liminal spaces where women are empowered to dramatize their sexuality. Suggestive dances are, in these analyses, an expression of resistance to patriarchal authority (Heath 1994) or a kind of inversion of normal social roles that helps women “build up confidence in female power linked to sexuality” (Neveu Kringelbach 2013, 87; for related examples, see Castaldi 2006, 82; and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Braun 2014). This angle is not entirely irrelevant to Guinean sabar, but female empowerment, as I will demonstrate, is but one element of the complex semiotic encounter that sabar constitutes in Conakry. In Guinean sabar ceremonies, stripping generates both discomfort and excitement in the crowd. “Women didn’t used to act like this!” some people complain. Others just shrug and note dismissively that dancers can make big tips when they take their clothes off. Young women are often energized by the act and either give money to the performer or begin to dance provocatively themselves. Stripping in this context makes the dancer appear at once desperate and powerful—­grasping for attention and money while also demonstrating her ability to transgress religious and cultural norms at will. At sabar parties, hypersexualized dancing, money throwing, and electrification are all instantiations of a quality that I refer to as “excess”—­a quality with no lexical term in Susu, which extends and decenters the culturally salient quality of bigness (xungboe), which I discuss next. By actively probing the threshold of a positive quality (i.e., when does bigness become too much?), these manifestations of excess perform ambivalent public feelings at the heart of the lived experience of political-­economic transformation and demonstrate how embodiment can be central to an anthropology of precarity.

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Anthropologists often invoke the concept of precarity to describe the sense of exclusion and uncertainty felt by laborers in post-­Fordist economies (e.g., Allison 2012, 2013; Millar 2014), but precarity also captures the experience of postsocialist citizens whose ability to create stable lives was dramatically and suddenly upended by political-­economic change (e.g., Ghodsee 2017; Humphrey 2002; O’Neill 2014; Shevchenko 2002; Verdery 1996; Volkov 2002). While the anthropologies of neoliberalism and of postsocialism are distinct (and postsocialist theorists make clear that not all roads inevitably lead to capitalism), these fields of inquiry are unified by the experience of precarity—­of “life without the promise of stability” (Tsing 2015, 2). Across the African continent and all over the globe, neoliberal economic policies have produced increasing inequality and uncertainty through the shrinking of social welfare programs and the privatization of public resources (e.g., Ferguson 1999, 2006; Ganti 2014, 94). This chapter demonstrates how affective, energetic encounters—­as opposed to stable objects of material or linguistic coherence—­are key sites for investigating the lived experience of uncertainty ethnographically. Excess: The Sensuous Quality of Uncertainty The quality of excess is a central feature of multiple Conakry dances that foreground their discontinuity from the rural—­including sɔkɔ chaud and acrobats’ konkɔba (described in chapters 4 and 5). Sabar is another example of a dance that has no rural referent in Guinea and has been developed specifically around the exigencies of city life. Sabar ceremonies are saturated with performances of excess embodied in showers of money, expensive clothing and layers of fabric, sound amplified until speakers are cracking, and frenetic, lascivious dancing. Excess tests the boundaries of bigness (xungboe)—­a lexically salient quality that is coveted in Conakry and in Mande societies more broadly (e.g., Ferme 2001, 159–­86; on being “little” in Mande, see McNaughton 1988, 153). Bigness can materialize as corpulence, which indexes financial means and social influence, and powerful accomplished people are referred to as “big people” (Su. mixi xungbee / Fr. grand[e]s). Bigness is a quality built into numerous aesthetic practices in Guinea: sartorial splendor is achieved through layers of boldly colored starched fabric that enlarge the figure both physically and figuratively, djembe percussion involves a similar aesthetic of bigness through its sonic volume and polyrhythmic layering, and directors encourage their dancers to increase the size of their movements, to “make their moves big” (pas ra xungbofe).8

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Anthropologists often pay attention to qualities when they are labeled and collectively deemed to signal positive value (e.g., Chumley and Harkness 2013; Harkness 2015; Keane 2003; Lemon 2013; Munn 1986). But what happens when people feel that their shared understanding of how to obtain desirable lives is under siege? Attention to qualities that materialize in action without being named can reveal emergent dimensions of social life and can offer empirical traction on the active production and reformulation of shared value. My use of the term value is most closely aligned with Nancy Munn’s (1986) notion of value as the transformative potency of actions. For Munn, value is not just another word for shared importance, nor does it denote congealed labor, as in Marx’s famous articulation. Rather, Munn characterizes value as the potential of actions to produce (positive or negative) transformations in the world (also see Graeber 2001, 43–­47). Embodied qualities then evidence those socially recognized possibilities (an example in her ethnographic context of Gawa is lightness indexing positive potential and heaviness negative potential). While I espouse Munn’s basic definition of value as generated through action, I push the idea further by investigating an embodied quality that is unsettled and not firmly positive or negative. Such “emergent” qualities are part of precarious socialscapes and illuminate the ambivalent process of reformulating which kinds of actions bring about desirable transformations in the world. Dance in Guinea has long been a medium capable of producing what Munn calls “value transformations”—­changes in the social or political potency of a person, place, or corporate entity. I have thus far concentrated largely on the positive aspect of these value transformations, as when dance empowered nation-­building, when dundunba engenders youthful capacity, or when gigoteau enables personal distinction in a changing economy. But transformation is not always unequivocally positive, a point that Munn’s notion of value-­as-­potential allows and sabar exemplifies. Excess in Conakry is an emergent quality—­one that is affectively salient but not lexically salient, that is not named or consciously categorized but experienced. Unlike in cases where qualities are bundled together and valued either positively or negatively (for instance, in Munn’s account, buoyancy, lightness, and swiftness are set against heaviness and slowness), excess is fundamentally ambivalent. It is not the antonym of a valued quality but rather a degree of a desirable dimension—­a degree that has exceeded a definitively positive value threshold and has come to signal the uncertain potentiality of relatively new social actions and configurations. Excess is too much of a desired quality, not the quality’s opposite, and the sentiments it arouses are not as clear as those surrounding oppositional categories. In the sabar circle,

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excess manifests via multiple sensory experiences—­ including stripping, money throwing, and electrification—­which are not found together in other Conakry ceremonies. Their combination, I suggest, embodies both the thrill and the extreme uncertainty of Guineans’ engagement with liberal capitalism and brings into ethnographic focus the idea that “emergent” phenomena are those that “exert palpable pressures and set effective limits on experience and on action” even if they are not (or not yet) consciously defined, classified, or rationalized (Williams 1977, 132). Attention to manifestations of emergent qualities illuminates embodiment as central not only to alternative modes of “knowing” or remembering (e.g., Connerton 1989; Foster 1996; Lock 1993; Mauss [1935] 1973; D. Taylor 2003) or to understanding sociocultural reproduction or maintenance (Bourdieu 1977) but also to theorizing the lived experience of rapid social transformation. Sabar and Ballet, Producing a “Stable Alterity” They put us in jail for playing sabar and announced on the radio that we had sabotaged Guinean culture! drummer m'bemba bangoura

M’Bemba Bangoura is one of the Guinean drummers who first introduced sabar in Conakry. He has since become one of the most well-­known Guinean drummers in the world and has lived in the US for over two decades. One afternoon in 2012, I sat with M’Bemba on his tile porch in Conakry as he recounted the early days of Guinean sabar: In 1981, a group of Senegalese women in Conakry asked him and some of his friends to play for the arrival of Senegalese president Abdou Diouf in Guinea. The women sang Senegalese sabar rhythms, and the Guinean musicians imitated on djembe drums so the women could dance. After the president’s visit, sabar began to catch on among Guineans in Conakry, and soon M’Bemba and his colleagues were being called to animate sabar parties all over the city. Not only was this a challenge to the traditional Maninka griots who had hitherto performed at many of the city’s wedding celebrations; it also confronted a national culture industry that had been carefully engineered to match the political vision of the socialist state.9 The state-­run ballet M’Bemba and his group worked for was not supportive of this new cultural and entrepreneurial venture and had the drummers thrown in jail for animating sabar parties. M’Bemba recalled that it was announced on the radio that they had “sabotaged” Guinean culture. They were released after only a few days, making clear that the gesture was intended merely to send a message. However, the striking state response to the adoption

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of a “foreign” practice offers a glimpse of how sabar has long been construed as a sign of the danger of foreign cultural intrusions in Guinea. These events did not dissuade M’Bemba’s group from playing sabar, which gained traction in Conakry especially after the death of Sékou Touré in 1984. At first, M’Bemba and his friends had borrowed instruments from their ballet for use in sabars, but after having the instruments confiscated repeatedly, they began to use the money that they made at sabars to purchase drums. Equipped with their own materials, M’Bemba explained, they became “independent,” and the directors no longer tried to stop them from pursuing this new direction, although it put them at odds with ballet officials and in competition with griots.10 Three decades later, sabar has become one of the most popular dances in the capital and is no longer connected to resident Senegalese. Sabar remains a stigmatized nonlocal cultural form, but I suggest that sabar’s position as a cultural import is part of what fuels its local appeal. During the socialist period, dances and rhythms from various ethnic groups were staged in a display of national unity. While some of the dances that were included in Guinean ballet repertoires were not native to Guinea, the overarching logic governing what should belong in ballet choreography was (and continues to be) based on narratives of auto­chthony and/or cultural heritage. For example, sometimes Mande aesthetic forms that originated within the boundaries of neighboring nation-­states are accorded belonging in Conakry’s ballet lexicon, as are dances from some of the non-native peoples who settled early in Conakry, such as the Temne from Sierra Leone. As in most discourses of autochthony (e.g., Harrison 1999; Geschiere 2009), the division between “inside” and “outside” in Guinean ballet has as much to do with signification and power as it does with literal historical connections to place or ethnic ownership.11 Sabar’s alien stature in this rubric intrigues urban youth for a number of reasons. When I spoke with ballet practitioners in Conakry about sabar either in interviews or informally, they almost always highlighted its foreignness. In an interview I conducted with an elderly ballet directress named Jeanne Macauley, who was a celebrated dancer during the socialist period, I brought up the topic of sabar, and she immediately cut me off: “No! Sabar, I have nothing to say about that. It’s not my culture. Sabar is from Senegal. . . . I can’t explain sabar to you! So if you ask me about sabar, you will make me worry. I will worry!” Even young artists who claimed to appreciate sabar and who attended sabar parties regularly concentrated on its foreignness in interviews. One such dancer named Fatou Bangoura described how she knows how to dance sabar but refuses to teach it in classes because she is not Senegalese. One prominent male dancer mentioned that he likes sabar because it reminds him that each culture is rich and distinct, noting that Guineans could never

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dance sabar like Senegalese. Others treated sabar as an emblem of youthful disrespect. A young transmigrant drummer named Laoulaou Bangoura, who was visiting Guinea from his home in Japan during my fieldwork, used sabar as a metonym for lack of respect and discipline among Guinean youth: “The current generation, they aren’t disciplined; there is no respect,” Laoulaou complained, “They don’t see what has come before. If I just started [drumming], I will respect [those who know more] so that I too can learn. But that is not in the current generation. They just start to hit the drum. It’s like, only sabar, just sabar! There’s no respect.” Implicit in this critique is the idea that youth are forsaking their socialist-­trained elders and the values of discipline and collective sacrifice they upheld. While Laoulaou himself was trained in the postsocialist era, he attributes his own success as a drummer to his ability to respect and learn from the older generation. In contemporary Conakry, sabar maintains physical, cultural, and semiotic distance from Guinean ballet dance, which was developed to signal national pride and Guinean revolutionary ideals. This condition of what Brian Larkin calls “a stable alterity” (2002, 752)—­by which sabar’s outsider status keeps it safely distant from local cultural forms—­makes sabar a prime site for engaging unpleasant feelings associated with loss, vulnerability, and precarity that the postsocialist era has invited. As ideal types in a local collective imagination, dundunba and sabar occupy oppositional categories. While both sabar and dundunba are extremely popular ceremonies in Conakry, dun­ dunbas are more closely connected to organized ballet and include a number of features that frame the dance event as more dignified and respectable than sabar. Dundunbas take place in the afternoon and are carefully timed to end at the evening call to prayer, and professional artists are the main participants. In contrast, sabars take place only at night and are organized and attended by many people who are not artists. Dundunbas require few monetary transactions and no technological fixtures in order to be successful. Professional dancers and drummers are motivated to attend sabars, on the other hand, by the potential for income generation as much as interest in the genre. For artists, the dance dundunba connotes upstanding social values including respect and unity. The means for signaling these values are contested between gener­ ations, as we saw in chapter 5, but the ideal-­typical virtues identified with the dance remain central to both cohorts. Dundunba also emblematizes masculinity, and though women have now appropriated its once exclusively male movements, dundunba is not associated with female sociality, as is sabar. As ideal types, dundunba and sabar oppose each other at every turn: dundunba

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is done during the day, sabar at night; dundunba is based on gifting, sabar on monetary exchange; dundunba is male, sabar female; dundunba is national, sabar foreign; dundunba is respectable, sabar lewd. While dundunba is not immune from internal upheavals and antiaesthetics, sabar as a category has allowed dundunba to maintain a more distanced relationship with the ugly feelings that sabar invites. During more than four years of participation in Conakry’s ballet scene, I attended scores of sabars with ballet dancers. I sometimes danced myself, as I had learned basic sabar from Senegalese teachers in the US. However, in Conakry, I became far more proficient in dundunba than sabar because I rehearsed regularly in ballets where the dances performed at dundunba ceremonies are taught. My own training therefore reflected the bracketing of sabar as foreign in Conakry. Semiotic containment efforts are always complicated; they create, as Judith Irvine observes, “a kind of present absence” (2011, 17) by directing attention to the object of containment. While sabar maintains emblematic distance from the upstanding sociality ballet is intended to signal, it has become thoroughly enmeshed in the cultural fabric of the city and in the social and financial lives of ballet practitioners, and its popularity stems in part from its transgressions.

figure 6.1 and 6.2.  Sabar dancers in Conakry

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Manifesting Excess Sabar parties in Conakry overwhelm the senses. Participants engage in acts of amplification and accumulation (both instantiations of bigness) that reach tipping points at which they signal impossibility and/or produce uncomfortable affects. Amplified sound, for example, is distorted through old equipment and often cuts abruptly with electrical failure. Acts of throwing money with abandon—­performing a fantasy of capitalist accumulation—­contrast sharply with daily experiences of material shortage. Dance solos accelerate into frenetic encounters that sometimes end in striptease. Occasionally, music and dance disintegrate into an odd combination of discomfort (indexed by pained facial expressions and shouting) and laughter, after a dancer literally tackles drummers, sometimes in her underwear. In these moments, the threshold of desirable bigness is transgressed in different ways, drawing attention to uncomfortable collective feelings. In the following pages, I describe ethnographically how these scenes unfold in Conakry sabars. lamine’s sabar 2: throwing money At the sabar party celebrating Lamine Lamah’s wedding, guests arrived, as they do for all sabars, wearing immaculate gowns and men’s complets made from the most coveted shiny fabrics overloaded with expensive embroidery. Women guided pointy high heels over pebbled ground, their large headwraps competing for attention in the crowd. Dancers and spectators occupied yellow plastic chairs encircling a dance space the size of an Olympic swimming pool, with drummers, a guitarist, and several singers at one end. Dancers entered the ring one by one to solo, swinging their legs and arms in broad, quick strokes and jockeying for attention as the music grew faster. When the dancers had been soloing for a while, a griotte would interject a song, inviting guests out to dance slowly and offer money as she sang praises and popular songs. When it was time to honor the “godfather” (Fr. parrain) of the sabar, his friends gathered at one end of the ring, encircling him. He was a tall dark man who appeared to be a popular member of a group of virtuosic effeminate sabar dancers. As they began to move slowly across the circle, he was in the center of the pack, wearing a light-­blue outfit made of the highest quality cloth called bazin riche embroidered around the neck with shiny white and red thread and decorated with fuchsia, lime-­green, yellow, and blue squares.12 Matching lime-­green leather slippers completed the ensemble. Flanked by his friends and supporters, the distinguished-­looking parrain walked slowly to

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figure 6.3.  Money platter for collecting tips

the music, showing off his expensive outfit, interjecting a subtle flourish here and a toss of the head there. He lowered his eyelids, raised an eyebrow, and pulled out a thick stack of new cash from his pocket. As the griotte sang his praises, a large metal platter was presented before him, and he began to dish out crisp five hundred and one thousand franc notes.13 He did this slowly and deliberately, interjecting saucy graceful moves. His friends cheered as the griotte elaborated on the good deeds of his ancestors in between verses of a popular song. By the end of the song, the platter was full. Money “spraying” is common across Western and Central Africa and is productively analyzed by anthropologists as a means of self-­fashioning and reputation-­building (e.g., Barber 1995; Dave 2019; Newell 2005, 2012; White 2008). Sasha Newell describes it as an act that projects “the fantastic onto the realm of the social” (2005, 139), allowing the performer to enlarge himself socially by enacting a fantasy image. Nomi Dave (2019, 92) suggests that when someone performs wealth and receives praise, they are recognized in a way that transcends the individual—­that reproduces and recognizes the collectivity. Throwing money, as these authors have shown, is a hopeful and productive performance of social grandeur. While throwing money is a practice capable of generating social bigness qua reputation, however, actually achieving the status of big man or woman

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in Conakry typically involves becoming financially stable and being able to support others. At a time in Guinea when it has become painfully clear that the vision of rapid development and economic growth offered by both the socialist state and neoliberal adjustment regimes has not come to fru­ition, the drama of opulence embodied in money throwing also points to the extreme uncertainty of gaining financial stability in contemporary Conakry. The cash sprayed at sabar parties all goes into a pot of money that drummers and singers split at the end of the night (dancer income is separate and comes from personal tips). So the act of spraying is also a drama of precarity for the artists receiving the money, as their incomes are not fixed and fluctuate significantly depending on how many artists are there, who organizes the party, and which guests are present. While some people in Guinea have experienced economic liberalization and globalization as the ability to accumulate resources without constraint, most have gained an acute awareness of disparities (1) between local conditions and standards of living in the global North and (2) between those who have gained access to power and resources and those who have not (cf. J. and J. Comaroff 1999; Mains 2007). While being asked to be a distinguished guest is considered an honor in Conakry sabars, average people grumble privately if they are chosen for the role because they know that it will deplete their already meager cash reserves, and local spectators are all aware of this fact. There is insecurity in the spray for all but the wealthy, as people distribute what they don’t have, and as artists on the receiving end scrape together a living in a hustler’s economy.14 At sabars, all distinguished guests—­artists or not—­“spray” money, but a trained dancer has the wherewithal to create exaggerated gestures that call explicit attention to the separateness of this performance from regular life. A dancer, for example, may raise her eyebrows masterfully while lowering one eyelid in a facial gesture of haughty success or stop and move her shoulders in a slow figure eight and flip her head as she tosses a bill, using these embellishments to demarcate the act of throwing money from simply handing it over in a market. It is precisely this separation—­between the fantasy of largesse and the reality of its fraught attainment—­that makes money spraying into a public spectacle of insecurity, hitching a ride with aspiration. electricity and powerlessness The quality of excess is again materialized in sabar parties through electrification. While dundunbas and all other dance ceremonies involving percussion in Conakry are performed acoustically, sabars utilize an amplified electric

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guitar, a PA system for the singers, and electric lighting to make the dancers visible in the dark. The drums are also sometimes amplified by a singer’s microphone held inside or next to a djembe drum during a solo. While acoustic djembe drumming is already extremely loud (a xui gbo; “it’s voice is big”), its amplified sound literally exceeds the threshold of the PA system’s capacity, resulting in sonic excess—­frequent screeches, buzzing, and distortion of the sonic material. This is not a cultivated sound, as in heavy metal music, where distortion is a valued feature of the genre (Wallach, Berger, and Greene 2014, 11). Rather, the sensorial experience created at sabars is akin to that of pirated video and audio recordings, which are marked by poor transmission and ambient noise (Larkin 2004), creating a sound that indexes inadequacies both technical and social. Electrified sound is not simply bigger than acoustic sound and therefore better on a smooth valuative gradient (the bigger the better). Rather, failures of channel and provisioning get in the way of such linear intensifications of positive value. During the socialist period, everyone in Conakry had electricity, but it was quite modest, a single twenty-­five-­watt bulb in each household (McGovern 2013, 220). Since the end of socialism, electricity provisioning has been unpredictable and socioeconomically uneven in the city—­it is available more frequently in wealthy and commercial neighborhoods. At the same time, Guineans have become increasingly aware of cultural and political realities outside national borders, and their desire for and sense of entitlement to regular and abundant electricity has grown. While in the socialist period Guineans were taught that shortage had a social and ideological purpose,15 now it is simply interpreted as state negligence. In the sabar circle, lack and uncertainty are emblematized at once through the sonic excesses of technical breakdown as well as through sudden outages that point to broader infrastructural deficiencies. During my fieldwork from 2010 to 2013, electricity was highly irregular in Conakry, and it was almost impossible to predict when the electricity would be on and for how long, especially in poor neighborhoods. Due to this irregularity, the host of a sabar party usually also prepared a backup generator to keep the party going even if the electricity went out. Only relatively wealthy patrons could afford to sidestep the grid entirely by planning a party with exclusively generated power. The source, quality, and evenness of electricity at sabars therefore betrayed socioeconomic inequality in the cityscape.16 The topic of the state’s failure to provide regular electricity is central to everyday politics in Conakry (e.g., M. Barry 2017; F. Diallo 2017; Economist 2013), as in many other African contexts (cf. Degani 2017; Mains 2012), and there were regular protests around these issues during my research in Conakry.

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Even when a generator is waiting in the wings, the period between grid failure and generated power is pregnant. A flicker and “ziiooop” sound signal the imminent transformation of the audio and visual experience. When the microphone is suddenly severed, sighs of disappointment fill the ring: “Ade ahhhh!” (Not this again!). Disappointment turns to anger as people suck their teeth loudly and curse the government. Cracks of the djembe drums—­which would exemplify sonic “bigness” in a nonelectrified landscape—­sound weak and strained. The dancer soloing continues in the dark to swing and spin in a stubborn effort to keep the party alive. When the electricity cuts, the ring is flooded with literal and metaphorical darkness, silence, and powerlessness. In the loaded pause between grid and generator (or grid and grid, or grid and the end of the party, as the case may be) regular people are reminded of Guinea’s dismal “place-­in-­the-­world” (Ferguson 2006) and the limits of modernity’s relativism. Precarious Emergence To live with precarity requires more than railing at those who put us here. . . . We might look around to notice this strange new world, and we might stretch our imaginations to grasp its contours. a n n a t s i n g , The Mushroom at the End of the World

In Conakry, bigness has not ceased to be a central quality signaling personal success. To be a big person is to be respected and financially stable, iconically indexed by big bodies, big clothing, big names, and generous acts (described as big-­heartedness in Susu). But social bigness is elusive in Guinea’s neoliberal economy in which the mechanisms for becoming a grand(e) that were available to the socialist generation are no longer viable for Conakry youth. In the three previous examples—­stripping, money spraying, and electrical amplification/outage—­ performances of desirable bigness in sabar circles reach thresholds at which they generate ambivalent affects and call attention to impossibilities. If value arises in actions that transform and qualities signal the potency (positive or negative) of those actions, as Munn proposed, what does it mean in Conakry sabar that bigness as a quality is repeatedly pushed beyond its ability to connote positive value? Guinean dance is always supposed to be big. Performers are coached to “make their moves big” (pas raxungbofe); to claim space through jumping, expanding the stance, opening the fingers outward, and smiling broadly. But what counts as too big—excessive even? In a common Guinean sabar solo, a good dancer will call attention to herself through energetic steps punctuated by sexy flourishes. In a solo that devolves into a striptease, however, the

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performer transitions quickly from dynamic moves to sexy asides to another act entirely—­one that many observers think exaggerates the ribaldry of the dance to the point of “ruin.” Guinean artists frequently describe such spectacles as “dirty” (nɔxi) or simply note, “She exaggerates!” (Su./Fr. A exagérerma!) with a negative inflection. Such solos transgress the accepted threshold of desirable bigness. What does it take for ballet practitioners to make a living—­to be noticed and stand out from the crowd—­in Conakry’s neoliberal economy? When dancing well is often not enough, what kinds of actions will propel artists into the lives they desire? This is an open question in Conakry, and artists are inventing dance practices that defy or test the boundaries of qualities that the generation before them considered definitively positive, such as collectivity, bigness, and control (e.g., A. Cohen 2016). During socialism, pathways to success for artists and many other youth were fairly direct. Going through school was likely to produce a government job at the other end; developing one’s skills as an artist through hard work led to upward mobility in a state-­run system of troupes, at the apex of which were the prestigious national ballets that traveled the world regularly. In postsocialist Guinea, as in many other African countries, those pathways have become increasingly uncertain (e.g., Abbink 2005). If the good life is ideally stable but getting there is profoundly insecure, sabars in Conakry dramatize that uncertainty through actions that induce shared feeling. This is a productive drama that shapes social reality by probing the qualitative contours of positive value in precarious times. Contemporary secular urban ceremonies and artistic genres in Africa are emergent in Raymond Williams’s (1977) sense; they exert force on conceptions of the desirable and make possible collective feeling but are not rationally or consciously calculated to do so. As I have argued in this chapter, one of the mechanisms for exerting such force is the embodiment of emergent qualities. In situations of rapid transformation, people embody emergent qualities before or instead of settling on lexically salient ones. When the basic condition of being is precarious, emergent qualities and the ambivalent feelings that accompany them may replace more stable models of indexing shared value (through, for example, words, objects, or other codified representations). To paraphrase Sianne Ngai (2009), nagging “ugly feelings,” while often not the subject of philosophical inquiry or aesthetic theory, can offer rich material for understanding social and political predicaments of restricted agency. In Conakry, sabar is a site of foreign vulgarity at the heart of local senses of what matters. It is at once elevated as being worthy of wedding celebrations and denigrated as culturally other, feminine, and unserious—­and therefore bracketed as a space of untrammeled affect. While anthropological accounts

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of both money throwing and hypersexual dancing on the continent tend to focus on social uplift and empowering inversions, I explore the fundamental uncertainties and unpleasant feelings that are captured in these performances. For Guinean artists, like many other Africans, the neoliberal era has meant radical exposure to the vicissitudes of global markets and to the insecurity of private provisioning. In Conakry, economic liberalization and state retreat have been experiences of worlding—­of becoming global in a way that is both vulnerable and hopeful (Ong and Roy 2011; Simone 2001), the possible outcomes of which are as yet unsettled. The fundamentally ambivalent quality of excess in sabar parties reflects this precarity that surrounds the Guinean present and illuminates the unconscious and embodied ways in which feelings transcend the individual (on public feelings, see Berlant 2011; Cvetkovich 2007, 2012; Durkheim [1912] 2001; Gordon 1997; Mazzarella 2017b). By examining how the trusted quality of bigness is extended repeatedly beyond capacity in sabar parties, creating an emergent quality of excess, I show how qualities that manifest not in lexical terms but in embodied, affecting encounters, can evidence collective value in the making.

Epilogue: Embodied Infrastructure and Generative Imperfection

The history of Guinean ballet may seem impossibly contradictory. How could the same dance genre be proudly instrumentalized by a violent autocratic regime and mobilized as a vibrant source of potential by postsocialist urban youth? Moreover, how could creativity have flourished while that political instrumentalization was taking place? And how do contemporary artists endorse models of dogmatic authority in the institution of ballet while simultaneously embracing defiant logics of invention in the solo circle? In this book, my answers to these questions about the nexus of aesthetics, affect, and politics have been twofold: First, the idea that societies must be either liberated or oppressed is a Manichean fantasy that is strikingly persistent in Euro-­ American liberal culture yet repeatedly contradicted in the ethnographic re­ cord (e.g., Askew 2002; Bayart [1989] 2009, 165; Mahmood 2005; Steingo 2016; Wedeen 2008; Yurchak 2006). The story of dance in Guinea offers a salient example of how lived political realities do not fit neatly into an antonymous paradigm by which societies are either “open or closed, liberal or repressive, governed by the checks and balances of democracy and strong institutions or despotic” (McGovern 2017, 215). Second, during Guinea’s socialist period, the connection between art and vital force—­historically articulated by multiple ethnic groups—­was not evacuated from dance as a political medium but rather modified and invested through a state-­run arts infrastructure. After Sékou Touré died, the potency of embodied arts was channeled again into a postsocialist urban lifeworld. In each manifestation, dance has retained not form or ideology but performative capacity: the ability to constitute the social reality in which it circulates. Underlying my account of these transformations is the concept of semiotic resourcefulness in Guinea. As dancers draw on signs from the past, they

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enable performances and interpretations that support novel forms of association in the capital. If Guinean dance were the perfectly transparent communicative medium Sékou Touré envisioned it to be, this book would not exist. Semiotic action can have world-­making consequences precisely because there is never an inevitable or unmediated path between the signs we use and the ways in which they are taken up and reinvested. Semiotic resourcefulness, then, is an activity that feeds on the work of circulation and interpretation, both within the city and across time. It is a practice of mediation, diversion, linkage, and obstruction. This book has examined the many ways in which dance has been intercepted, combined, and rerouted across time and space in Guinea to produce unforeseen connections and possibilities. The dance infrastructure in Conakry (composed of troupes and ceremonies) exemplifies how such mediated and obstructed pathways forge the contemporary city. While troupes and ceremonies facilitate the movement of people, ideas, affects, and money around Conakry and beyond national borders into Guinea’s artistic diaspora, that movement is not always smooth or direct: affects accumulate into nostalgic longings that inform and structure the present, as when private ballet directors pine for the stability of a centralized and paternalistic state. Certain dances are blocked from developing as urban media when young artists deem them unimportant and choose not to feature them in popular ceremonies, while other dances are elevated and widely circulated. An idea that emerges in the diagonal “research” of a ballet may be performed at a ceremony and then appropriated and translated by an observer for use in another ballet’s program. Knowledge may be hoarded by elders in ballets as youth cultivate new avenues toward social enlargement, often distinguishing themselves in the open forum of ceremonies. Exchanges take place—­steps, ideas, knowledge, money, respect, and candy are traded. Nonhuman forces are deployed and reimagined. Passages are blocked and new routes established. The dancers whose solos and styles graced the pages of this book are exemplary of a whole generation of young people taking the future into their own hands through the expansive resources of body and “heart” (bɔɲε). Nima is now making her way as a dancer and mother in New York City. Fanta lives in Sweden, teaching dance and singing professionally. Ele moved to Gambia in search of economic opportunity. Abacar, Axurdi, Bountourabi, and Bebe continue their work in Conakry—­rehearsing in ballets, teaching classes to foreigners, and gigging in ceremonies across the city. Legacies of the Guinean dancers and musicians who have moved abroad since the end of socialism—­fleeing the strangle of Guinea’s impoverishment—­are ever-­ present in Conakry’s ballet scene. Migrants’ elevated names1 float through

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figure e.1.  Dancer Fode Soumah performing at a dundunba ceremony

artists’ conversations, encouraging youth to make lives for themselves in dance. But the aspirational pathway from young apprentice to successful migrant is itself full of affecting and energetic diversions that ignite the dancer’s city. Those who flourish are not merely following a prescribed path; they are finding creative ways to become larger than life, to explode the contours of the expected—­and in so doing, to find their own big names. The fact that dance can facilitate and feed on circulation in Guinea depends on its local historical trajectory. In other places, history has brought different media to the center of urban social life (Gray 2013 is a wonderful example). Dance’s infrastructural position in Conakry calls attention to the ways in which material and meaningful translations are bound up with one another—­a point made eloquently in the literature on the semiotic potency of material infrastructure (e.g., Boyer 2015; Larkin 2013; Sneath 2009; Von Schnitzler 2016). But the materiality of meaningful infrastructure receives less attention (e.g., Elyachar 2010; Kockelman 2010). This ethnography has demonstrated how embodied, affecting, and physical signs play a crucial role in forging lived realities. For example, as the Maninka strong man’s dance step “the pump” moved from village to city, elder to younger, man to woman, it enabled new potentials in Conakry’s lifeworld. Sometimes, as in the case of the pump, meanings attach to particular dance moves that are translated

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figure e.2.  Stilt dancer at a dundunba ceremony

across time and space, dragging fragments of their journeys with them into the present (they become chronotopes). Also translated, however, are repertoires of attitudes and expectations that people share about the possibilities that inhere in signs. By inheriting and interpreting such semiotic repertoires, young Guinean artists build continuity into change and have afforded dance a central position in the contemporary city. They reveal how imperfections in the flow of people, ideas, and signs generate the urban present by actively negotiating between what is known and experienced and what is yet to be.

Acknowledgments

The great dancer Alseny Soumah said to me in an interview, “Even now I haven’t finished knowing dance. Every day I am adding to my knowledge; every day I am getting to know it” (Han ya n mu nu ge fare kolon de. Loxoe yo loxo n na a kolon fe ne quoi, loxoe yo loxo n na a kolon). It is with similar humility that I acknowledge the many people whose collective knowledge helped me understand Guinean dance and anthropology enough to put them in conversation on the page. I am lucky to spend my life getting to know these disciplines. This book is the product of a long journey, and it is my pleasure to thank the many artists, scholars, friends, and family members who made it possible. I begin, sadly, with two mentors of mine who are gone. My father, Jonathan Cohen, was a powerful force behind my intellectual curiosity. He was also a figure against whom I was unwittingly rebelling when I first lived in Guinea for a period of three years, among artists who had little interest in what he reverently called the “life of the mind.” The life of the body, however, was also crucial to growing up with my dad, and it is because of him that I have always been both athlete and intellectual. This book reminds us that the two are connected. I wish he were here to read it. Another great mentor, Bernard “Barney” Bate, passed away just before I finished the first iteration of this project. Barney generously read multiple drafts of chapters and managed to pair brutal honesty with praise in a way that always left me determined. His untimely death was a huge loss to this world. Many other people in the Anthropology Department at Yale University during my graduate formation contributed to this project. Mike McGovern, who was my primary doctoral advisor, has been a model scholar and teacher over the years. His adventurous intellect and profound knowledge of

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Guinea influenced me greatly. Doug Rogers cultivated my interest in global postsocialisms and always made time to guide me, in life as in scholarship. I am indebted to Bill Kelly, Paul Kockelman, Chris Miller, and Louisa Lombard for their support. At Colorado State University, which is now my professional home, I extend my gratitude to the Department of Anthropology and Geography and especially to Kate Browne, Lynn Kwiatowski, John Pippin, Jay Schutte, and Jeff Snodgrass for their feedback on chapter drafts, to Steve Leisz for his help making maps, and to Mica Glantz for her encouragement. I also thank the following scholars who read drafts along the way: Josh Cohen, Nomi Dave, Rikki Ducornet, Susannah Fioratta, Cory Kratz, William Mazzarella, Hosna Sheikholeslami, Jay Straker, Emily Wilcox, and Amy Zhang; and thanks to photographer Jimena Peck for capturing a hand-­drawn map. I save a special acknowledgment for Perry Sherouse, who read so many drafts I felt compelled to send him chocolate. Two of the chapters in this book are based on published articles. Parts of chapter 5 appeared in American Ethnologist as “Inalienable Performances, Mutable Heirlooms: Dance, Cultural Inheritance, and Political Transformation in the Republic of Guinea” (A. Cohen 2016). Chapter 6 is based on a 2019 article in the journal Africa entitled “Performing Excess: Urban Ceremony and the Semiotics of Precarity in Guinea-­Conakry.” The research for this book was generously funded by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-­Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the Yale MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. There are many people and institutions without whom I could not have completed fieldwork in Guinea. I thank the Ballet Communal de Matam, where I was accepted as an apprentice from 2002 to 2005 and again in the summer of 2010. The late Sekouba Camara, who founded the Ballet Communal de Matam, welcomed me into the ranks of the company without contingency. I am grateful to him and the many artists from Matam who taught me dance and language in those early days, especially Fanta Yayo, Ismael Kou­ yate, and Fatoumata Kourouma, and to Shelly Stein, a fellow American who first showed me the ropes. I thank Mama Diabate and her family for hosting me during fieldwork in 2010 and Aboubacar “Toti” Sylla for helping me find housing during a research trip in 2011. The music scholar Graeme Counsel was also a generous ally during my longer stint of fieldwork from 2012 to 2013, as was Kristine Schantz, who welcomed me into her home, without having ever met me, and ended up hosting me for nearly a year. I am indebted to the Ballet Merveilles de Guinee, where I apprenticed from 2012 to 2013, and to its directors Sekou Sano and Yamoussa Soumah, who I’m sure tired of answering my questions but answered them nonetheless. I thank the many dancers and musicians from Merveilles and other

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ballets around Conakry who taught me, took me to ceremonies, and sat for interviews with me. I hope this book does justice to their struggles and triumphs. Several dancers became especially close allies during the formal fieldwork, serving as interlocutors, teachers, and guides: Aly Mara and Alseny Bangoura not only were thoughtful interviewees but also acted intermittently as research assistants. Moussa “Ele” Sylla called me daily to inform me where social ceremonies were occurring and accompanied me to track down multiple contacts. Aminata “Konkaser” Conte was always ready to help with connections, information, or simple companionship, and Fatoumata Kourouma has long been a true friend and tireless conversationalist. Many other artists were important to the realization of this project, including Lansana Camara, Maimouna “Lala” Camara, Morelaye Diallo, Bountou Soumah, and Kerfalla Sylla. Djibril “Badjibi” Camara and Moussa Celestin Camara were also always extremely gracious and spoke formally and informally with me on multiple occasions about the project and the situation of ballet in Conakry. On the US side of the Guinean dance scene, I recognize the many Guinean artists who are inscribing Guinean ballet into the cultural landscape of the United States. There is no way for me to name them all. I am especially grateful to M’Bemba Bangoura, Moustapha Bangoura, Mouminatou Camara, Alisco Diabate, Karamba Dioubate, Youssouf Koumbassa, Alseny Soumah, and Fadima Traore for explaining their practice to me. Some of their voices are quoted directly in this book, and all their influences are palpable. Linguist and Bible translator Brad Willits has been an invaluable source of information on Susu language and orthography, and without his help, my Susu transcriptions would be far less consistent. Brad not only provided me documents he had compiled on many aspects of the Susu language, including a dictionary; he also answered questions via email over the course of the writing. Dr. Mamadi Diane, director of Conakry’s Institute for Research on Applied Linguistics (IRLA), met with me on multiple occasions and facilitated my understanding of Susu orthography. I also thank the director of Guinea’s national library, Dr. Baba Cheick Sylla, for his assistance with archival materials in Conakry and with making important contacts in government ministries. A special thanks goes to the University of Chicago Press, especially to Priya Nelson, Elizabeth Branch Dyson, and Mollie McFee for their support and guidance. The feedback I received from two anonymous reviewers, one of whom later revealed herself as Corinne Kratz, helped shape the manuscript in countless ways, and I am grateful to them both. The book is a product of many people’s insights. The errors are my own. Finally, and most importantly, I celebrate my wonderful family. My brother Josh has coached me through many aspects of academia and is a

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model scholar and true friend. My mother, Leslie Jordan, “made me into a person” (a ntan findixi mixi ra), the significance of which readers should understand by the end of the book. I thank my husband, Jesse Burkhardt, who always keeps me laughing and adventuring, and the sprites who are my daughters: Amielle and Jordan, who have shown me quite literally the meaning of life.

Addendum: Artists in the Diaspora

There are many accomplished Guinean artists who live and teach outside of Guinea, some of whom have websites or Facebook pages with their teaching materials and touring schedules posted. Here I list the names of some of the most prominent teachers in the US and in several other countries. This list is inevitably partial, as artists move frequently and I am more familiar with the Guinean arts scene in the US than elsewhere. However, it should offer readers enough information to access audiovisual content and/or to locate classes, workshops, and performances in their area. I include links only to the most established websites, but most artists can be found on Facebook or through Google searches including their names and the words Guinea, dance, or drum. USA Dance Moustapha Bangoura, dancer (lebagatae.com) Naby Bangoura, dancer Alhassane Camara, dancer (duniyadance.com) Marietou Camara, dancer (marietoucamara.weebly.com) Mouminatou Camara, dancer Nimatoulaye Camara, dancer Youssouf Koumbassa, dancer (youssoufkoumbassag.wixsite.com/site/about-youssouf ) Ismael Kouyate, dancer Alseny Soumah, dancer Fara Tolno, drummer and dancer (kissidugu.org) M’mah Toure, dancer USA Percussion Fode Bangoura, drummer Ismael Bangoura, drummer

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M’Bemba Bangoura, drummer (albums and instructional videos are available at wula­drum.com) Fode Moussa “Lavia” Camara, drummer Ibrahima Kolipe Camara, drummer Laurent Camara, drummer Mamadouba Mohamed Camara, drummer Bolokada Conde, drummer Alisco Diabate, drummer Famoro Dioubate, balafonist (album available at wuladrum.com) Karamba Dioubate, drummer Alpha Oumar “Bongo” Sidibe, drummer (duniyadance.com) Abou Sylla, balafonist Mangue Sylla, drummer Europe Percussion and Dance Alseny Bangoura, dancer (Italy) Babara Bangoura, drummer (Belgium) Mamady Keïta, drummer (Belgium; founder of TamTam Mandingue Djembe Academy; ttmda.com) Aly Mara, dancer (France) Fatoumata “Fanta” Yayo, dancer and singer (Sweden) Global Percussion and Dance Laoulaou Bangoura, drummer (Japan) Mohamed Bangoura “Bangourake,” drummer and dancer (Australia; bangourake .com) Allasane “D’Artagnan” Camara, drummer (Canada) Karim Keita, dancer (Mexico) Sekou Oulare, drummer (Argentina) Mamady Sano, dancer (Iceland)

Notes

Preface 1. Much of the literature on youth in neoliberal Africa focuses on the indefinite prolongation of the category of “youth” and the desperate, yet creative, solutions young people engage in to attain full personhood (e.g., Abbink 2005; Cole 2010; Hansen 2005; Mains 2007; Masquelier 2013; Melly 2011; Somners 2012; Vigh 2016). 2. Contemporary linguistic anthropology is deeply engaged with questions about how signs mediate and construct the real (e.g., through analyses of indexicality, performativity, and pragmatics/metapragmatics). However, the four fields of anthropology have grown so specialized that cultural anthropologists often ignore this literature, which is indeed notoriously jargon-­ laden. Throughout this book, I reference concepts developed in linguistic anthropology in an accessible manner that I hope invites productive conversations within anthropology and across related fields. Invitation 1. This figure of seventy-­eight thousand comes from Rivière (1977, 29). However, population statistics are notoriously imprecise for Guinea at the time, and historian Patrick Manning (1988, 119) suggests that the population of Conakry was less than fifty thousand in 1958. 2. Ethnic ceremonies are modeled on rural prototypes, are often performed for prescribed occasions, and include a relatively limited set of movements that performers dance with their own dynamic styles. Cosmopolitan ceremonies can be organized to celebrate many different occasions (including marriages, circumcisions, births or baby namings, major achievements, homecomings, and even sometimes birthdays, which are not usually feted in Guinea). At cosmopolitan ceremonies, ballet artists invent new kinds of distinctly urban dance that draw on rural practices, as well as diverse sources of inspiration, including global media. Some of the most common ethnic ceremonies in Conakry include the following: soli for Susu and Maninka circumcisions, balanfare and dinge fare for Susu traditional weddings, ginefare for Susu excision, and safinamalɔ and denbadon for Maninka traditional weddings. There are also numerous celebrations in Conakry of Fulbe and various “Forestier” ethnic groups that ballet artists

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tend not to be hired for because they do not play the instruments particular to those ceremonies. Most Maninka and Susu ceremonies are performed in Conakry using the same combination of Maninka djembe and dundun drums that are used in the ballets, though ginefare is sometimes performed with several balafons and no drums. A full exploration of these ethnic ceremonies is beyond the scope of this study. 3. I use the term ceremony to describe these events for two reasons. First, African urban arts were long relegated to the realm of the inauthentic in Western scholarship, and although this is changing, the language we use plays a role. By calling rural social dance events “ceremonies” and urban ones “parties” or “celebrations,” we risk perpetuating the notion that rural performance practices are socially constitutive, while urban arts are derivative or inauthentic. Second, in Conakry, the term neotraditional, which scholars sometimes use to describe urban dance and percussion (e.g., Neveu Kringelbach 2013; Waterman 1990, 145), does not capture the relationship between rural and urban dance in Guinea, a topic I investigate in chapter 4. 4. Unlike dundunbas, sabars are not exclusive to professional artists. Young women of all professions and ethnic backgrounds request sabar for their wedding celebrations, and drummers are hired to animate the party. Trained dancers often come with the drummers and earn tips, so for dancers, sabars are most lucrative if the patrons are wealthy and there are few other trained dancers in attendance. According to some of the talented sabar dancers in Merveilles in 2013, a single dancer at a sabar could make anywhere between twenty and four hundred thousand FG (One US dollar was equivalent to about seven thousand FG at the time). 5. Linguistic, semiotic, and cultural anthropologists use a number of terms—­including metapragmatic, metasemiotic, metacommunicative, metalinguistic, or metaindexical—­to describe particular ways in which language and other kinds of semiotic activity can reflect back on or frame sign-­object relations (e.g., Bateson 1972; Goffman 1974; Kratz 1994; Nakassis 2016; Silverstein 1993; Urban 2006). I use the terms metalevel framing or metasemiotic framing to describe the activities in dance ceremonies that reflexively calibrate the action as being of a particular kind or that stipulate how participants and spectators should interpret explicit or tacit meanings conveyed in dance. For example, dundunba is always described as the “strong man’s dance,” a title that frames the dance as a historically gendered event, within which urban women’s appropriations constitute a transgression of gendered norms. Another example is electronic amplification, which frames a ceremony as modern and urban yet can also call attention to average people’s reliance on systems controlled by a neglectful state. Sudden interruptions in electricity offer particularly salient moments of heightened reflexive awareness of that relationship of reliance, a topic I take up in chapter 6. 6. For related discussions of how dance, music, and poetry enable social engagement that might be foreclosed through the directness of everyday language, see, e.g., Abu-­Lughod (1986); Askew (2002, 126, 155), and Meintjes and Lemon (2017, 16, 119). These three ethnographers differently engage how the multivalence and indirectness of performance practices enable people to communicate in ways and about topics that would be prohibited in normal conversation. 7. While social mobility, or the lack thereof, can affect who classifies as youth or elder in contemporary Africa (e.g., Cole 2005; Mains 2007; Vigh [2003] 2006), the socialist/postsocialist identifications I describe here do not tend to fluctuate similarly. In other words, dancers who have attained status beyond their years do not then begin to reflect the ethical or aesthetic orientations of socialist-­trained elders. 8. As Yair Hashachar (2018) argues, the performing arts exemplified the interweaving of Guinean nationalist and Pan-­Africanist agendas during the First Republic. There were national

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interests at play in the Pan-­African festivals that Guinean artists attended, such as the first Pan-­ African Cultural Festival of Algiers in 1969 or the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in 1977 (FESTAC) in Lagos, and non-­Guinean artists and groups performed at the national festivals in Guinea. Paul Schauert describes a similar dual focus on the national and the Pan-­African in Ghana’s national dance ensemble (GDE) under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah (Schauert 2015, 70–­7 1). While Ghana’s ensemble performed Pan-­Africanist ideals by including some dances from outside Ghana, Guinea’s national companies focused primarily on dances from within Guinea but exemplified a Pan-­Africanist orientation through party rhetoric valorizing African cultural heritage more broadly and through participation in Pan-­African festivals. 9. The literary culture that did come out of Sékou Touré’s Guinea was constrained by prescriptive state formulas. For examples of socialist-­era literature, see Sikhé Camara (1967, 1982) and Djigui Camara (1982). 10. According to Joshua Cohen, this national system was inspired by Eastern Bloc socialist cultural policies. Its hierarchical structure “was modeled in the image of the PDG’s youth organization, La Jeunesse de la Révolution Démocratique Africaine (JRDA), which itself mirrored the PDG’s pyramidal political structure, which in turn had been modeled after the structure of the Parti Communiste Française (PCF)” (2012, 26–­27). 11. According to Claude Rivière, as of 1974, there were twenty-­nine administrative regions, corresponding to the party’s federations; 220 sections controlled by the federations; and four thousand district committees, which corresponded to individual villages (Rivière 1977, 97). According to an undated Parti Démocratique de Guinée-­Rassemblement Démocratique Afri­cain (PDG-­RDA) pamphlet, there were eight thousand comités, 208 sections, and thirty federations of the party (PDG-­RDA, n.d., 88). Graeme Counsel cites Dukuré (1983), who suggests there were 320 sections (Counsel 2009, 79). 12. According to McGovern, the quinzaines were held every other year in June beginning in 1961 (2013, 212). According to Graeme Counsel, the first of these competitions was held in 1960 and titled “Les Competitions Artistique Nationales,” and after 1963, they were expanded into a two-­week event referred to as La Quinzaine Artistique (Counsel 2009, 78; 2015, 553–­54). Nomi Dave notes that the Quinzaine festival was reconfigured in 1970 into an event called the National Cultural Festival (2019, 30–­31). 13. For example, while one of Guinea’s three major Bauxite mines was jointly operated with the Soviet Union (the Débélé mine in the Kindia region; Campbell and Clapp 1995, 429), another mine, in Boké, was owned jointly by the Guinean government (49 percent) and an international consortium called Halco Mining (51 percent) made up of multinational American and Canadian companies (Campbell and Clapp 1995, 432). Guinea ended up collaborating with many socialist countries partially because France, snubbed after Guinea’s vote for independence, encouraged its allies to boycott the emerging nation. As Elizabeth Schmidt notes, “By refusing to deal with Guinea after independence and by isolating it internationally, France pushed the new nation toward the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. Guinea eventually concluded loan, line of credit, and trade agreements with the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland, and China” (2007, 174). 14. Captain Moussa Dadis Camara headed a military junta that seized power in a coup d’état on December 23, 2008, following the death of President Lansana Conté. The junta, which called itself the National Council for Democracy and Development (CNDD), was responsible for a massacre of opposition protestors in a stadium in Conakry on September 28, 2009. Over 150 people were killed, and many more wounded and sexually assaulted. The junta was under close

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scrutiny from the international community following the incident, and Camara was blaming the atrocities on his military. Camara was soon after shot by one of his own men and evacuated to Morocco to seek medical treatment and then to Burkina Faso, where he has remained. An interim government led by junta member Sekouba Konaté was then set up and enabled the country’s first “free and fair” multiparty democratic elections in 2010. 15. These groups are sometimes referred to as “secret societies.” I follow Mike McGovern, who, writing about the forest regions of Guinea and culturally similar areas of Sierra Leone and Liberia, uses the term power associations. According to McGovern, each association controls different powers, “such as the ability to treat snake bites, to help infertile women conceive a child, or to control lightening” (2013, 14). 16. McGovern describes, for example, how Loma farmers recall the socialist period as the only time when they experienced famine because they were required to pay one-­third to one-­ half of their crops to the state as tax in kind (2013, 221). 17. I use the term revolution, as Guineans often do, to refer broadly to the reign of Sékou Touré (1958–­84). In 1968, the Touré government launched a “Socialist Cultural Revolution” that increased the centralization of cultural production in Guinea and set goals for making artists adhere to the party’s ideological agenda (e.g., Counsel 2015, 554; Dave 2019, 52–­53). Ballet artists in Conakry today, however, tend not to speak about the “cultural revolution” as separate from the “revolution” writ large. 18. This connection between performing arts and power was differently constructed in the various ethnic enclaves within Guinea’s borders. The coastal Baga, for example, had a rich tradition of masquerade and dance connected to indigenous spirituality and ritual initiation (e.g., Lamp 1996). These practices were the targets of both religious and political iconoclastic movements from the mid-­1950s through the reign of Sékou Touré (Sarró 2009). Various groups including the Loma in Guinea’s forest region also had dance and music that were used in ritual initiations into the men’s Poro and women’s Sande societies, which were also targeted by the demystification campaign. These societies exist in much of Guinea’s forest region as well as in parts of Liberia and Sierra Leone and are part of a broader series of “power associations,” and each controls different metaphysical capacities (McGovern 2013, 14). Mande bards, as I describe toward the end of this chapter, were also directly involved in politics as the mouthpieces of kings and nobles and were understood to command the powerful force called nyama. Other Maninka musicians would sing and play for hunters, inspiring in them bravery and endowing them with powerful protection (Charry 2000, 64). Many Maninka dances were or still are directly connected to esoteric power or power associations (e.g., Gagliardi 2010). For example, Mandiani (also spelled Mendiani) is a dance typically performed in upper Guinea by a single young girl. This masked dancer historically was thought to possess extraordinary powers (Charry 2000, 220) and continues to be a chosen representative of a local women’s association (Billmeier 1999). Dundunba, as I explain in chapter 4, is a dance that displays both physical and esoteric capacity. Kawa is a masked dance from the Faranah region that is performed only by certain trained individuals who wear a costume covered in talismans signaling magical potency. Komodenw is a dance that has become popular in Conakry ballets but originated as a powerful mask dance from the Northern Mande power association called Komo (e.g., McNaughton 1988, 129–­44). 19. “In its strictest sense, ‘Mande’ is a linguistic term that includes the interrelated Bamana, Malinke, Dyula, and Soninke language groups. . . . More southerly Mande groups include the Konyaka, Loma, Kpelle, and Koranko” (Conrad and Frank 1995, 17). Guinea is a heartland for

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Mande culture. For more on the classification of these groups, see Greenberg (1955, 1966) and McGovern (2013, 31–­32). 20. The Susu word sεnbε has equivalents in other Mande languages. Barbara Hoffman notes, for example, that the word sebaya in Bamana refers to “great power”—­not only political or economic but also occult power that comes from “the mastery over the energies of ɲama” (2000, 65). Bamana is mutually intelligible with Guinean Maninka. 21. Capacity, in this book, refers to the world-­making potential of persons and signs. While capacity is related to the notion of agency, the two concepts are not synonymous. Agency typically signals the ability to act independently and exercise free will, presuming a bounded, conscious, subject-­actor (Asad 2003, 79). The linkage between individual autonomy and moral good is often tacitly wound into the concept of agency (e.g., Keane 2007) in ways that can serve to reinforce Western moral authority and romanticize or exaggerate the significance of resistance. Capacity, as I employ the term, is both more embodied and pragmatic than agency. One can have the capacity—meaning potential or ability—to run a marathon, to cast a spell, or to earn money. The “agency” to do such things has more to do with autonomy and free will. By indexing a combination of physical and metaphysical potentials, the term capacity reflects African systems of thought and practice more accurately than the idea of agency, as I describe further in chapter 4. 22. I use the term political subjectivity to describe how average people understand and enact relationships between those in subordinate positions and those in positions of authority and power—­relationships between ruled and rulers. Embedded in any investigation of how people develop and perform political subjectivities is the question of how they imagine their own (individual or corporate) sense of power/capacity to transform the social. 23. Guineans experienced rapid inflation between 2004 and 2007, during which time average people experienced extreme economic hardship (see McGovern 2017, 167–­68). A series of general strikes and low-­level violence and street protests ensued in 2006 and 2007 (Engeler 2008; Philipps 2013, 41–­44). Following the assassination attempt in 2009 against Camara, political protests and continual low-­level violence surrounded the elections in 2010 and continued to be a routine feature of Conakry’s political landscape during my fieldwork in 2012–­13. Violent clashes between protestors and security forces continue to plague Guinean politics (see, e.g., Samb 2017; J. Barry 2018; Human Rights Watch 2018; Aljazeera 2020; BBC World Service 2020). 24. These exit strategies became common among dancers and musicians from many African countries beginning in the ’80s and early ’90s, as neoliberal reforms cut state funding for the arts (e.g., Neveu Kringelbach 2013, 53, 54, 58; Schauert 2015 4–­5, 147; Skinner 2015, 49). 25. Ryan Skinner’s 2015 book Bamako Sounds is an exception to this. 26. I approach affect as a fundamentally semiotic process. In affect theory, semiotics is often equated with language, coding, or “representation” and therefore dismissed as not relevant to the study of immediacy and “intensity” (e.g., Clough 2008; Gregg and Seigworth 2010; Guattari 1996; Massumi 2002). Such characterizations not only inadvertently reinscribe a Cartesian mind-­body duality (Lutz 2017, 187–­88); they also misconstrue semiotics as being fundamentally about language or texts and they reduce linguistic and other semiotic phenomena to referentiality, which is of course only one of many functions of signs (e.g., Jakobson [1934] 1987, 63). A host of creative theorists have recently critiqued divisions built into much affect theory—­between affect and language (Gray 2013, 245; Wetherell 2013, 2015) and between affect and emotion or selfhood (Ahmed 2004; Kockelman 2011; Lutz 2017; Martin 2013; Navaro-­Yashin 2009; Ngai

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2009)—­thereby opening the field of affect studies beyond a narrow theoretical genealogy (also see Keane 2003; Mazzarella 2017b; Navaro 2017; Newell 2018). 27. Original French: “Aucun critère ethnique ou national n’était mis en avant, mais la troisième zone était qualifiée de ‘zone indigene’: la construction en dur n’y était pas obligatoire” (Goerg 1985, 327). 28. While most Guineans are Muslim, Fulbe claim an early history of conversion and often espouse expressions of piety that other Guinean Muslims do not (Fioratta 2020). Another reason for their underrepresentation in ballet is that many Fulbe opposed Sékou Touré’s politics and felt themselves to be political targets of the socialist regime, especially in the 1970s (A. Bâ 1986; Kaké 1987). Although ballet was supposed to be an expression of cultural and ethnic unity, it was heavily influenced by Maninka cultural practices and idioms. Out of dozens of possible configurations of instruments for use in the national companies, the central drums chosen were those used in Maninka areas, including in Touré’s own hometown of Faranah. The typical ensemble consists of a large bass drum (dundun), a midsized base drum (sangban), a small bass drum (kenkeni), and between one and three djembes. At the national level, all ethnically specific rhythms were transposed on these Maninka drums, which have become the key instruments used in Conakry ballet. Counsel also confirms that the state-­sponsored music scene was dominated by Maninka (Fr. Malinke) artists. He notes that the state-­funded recording label Syliphone “heavily favored” Malinke bands: “The gawlo, who were the griots of the Fula, were rarely given the opportunity to record or broadcast their music, as were the modern orchestras of these regions” (Counsel 2009, 102). 29. The sonic-­kinesthetic encounter that is dance in Conakry may be understood as a repertoire in the sense often conjured in performance studies: as embodied practice that plays a role in generating and activating history and memory (e.g., Conquergood 2002; D. Taylor 2003). The practice of ballet in Conakry reveals attachments to the past and possibilities for the future and enacts social continuity across radically different political-­economic eras. Cati Coe’s adaptation of the term repertoire is also germane. Coe describes repertoire as a multilayered habitus influenced by diverse cultural inputs, as “a body or collection of practices, knowledge, and beliefs that allows people to imagine what is possible, expect certain things, and value certain goals” (2013, 14–­15). Finally, I use the term repertoire in the more colloquial sense—­to mean collections of dance movements recognized as constituting a meaningful whole. These repertoires in Guinea are dynamic, and dance is always being changed and combined to index different kinds of conceptual “wholes” (e.g., the nation, the urban, the feminine, the ethical, the powerful, etc.). For example, what constitutes “women’s dance” changes dramatically across time as women are exposed to different kinds of economic and political realities that shape their definitions of the feminine and the desirable. 30. With the exception of map 2, the photographs in this book were all taken by the author. The vignettes are based on real events and characters, but the descriptions of dance solos are based on recollections (aided by video footage taken in the field) of particular dancers’ styles and approaches and are not exact replicas of solos. Pseudonyms are used occasionally in this book either when interlocutors requested anonymity or when their stories involve sensitive information, but most artists requested that their names be used. 31. We were hosted graciously in Bamako by the family of US-­based Malian dancer Djeneba Sako. 32. The ballet genre in urban Guinea is the umbrella term I use to describe the practice and community of professional dance-­music in Conakry that emerged from the state-­sponsored

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dance of the independence era. Both troupes and cosmopolitan ceremonies play a role in con­ stituting ballet in contemporary Conakry, but of course there are also multiple types of ceremony within that rubric. I approach genres not as fixed categories but rather as mobile “orienting frameworks” that shape the contours of the possible in dance performance (Bauman 1999, 85; Hanks 1987). I take ballet (and not Guinean dance or urban dance) as the cover term for a few reasons. First, while indigenous dances were originally compiled to create ballet programs, the ballet genre has become its own urban practice, and it does not react in any systematic way to contemporary changes in rural dance. Second, there are other kinds of dance in Conakry—­ including pop dance (performed in music videos and at concerts) and ethnic ceremony—­that are part of the urban experience but are only tangentially related to ballet. Throughout the text, I attend not only to local distinctions between different dance types and performance contexts but also to the ways in which urban dance practices inform one another to create the ballet genre not as a fixed collection of dance movements but as a malleable framework orienting the relationship between the aesthetic and the social. I do use the term Guinean dance when referring to the broader spectrum of rural and urban dance forms that were combined during socialism to generate ballet. Part One 1. This comes from the Greek words aisthēta meaning “perceptible things” and aisthesthai meaning “to perceive.” Chapter One 1. Kristen Ghodsee explains, for example, how the CIA actively cultivated American aesthetic taste in high art—­elevating abstract expressionist work and nonrepresentational art more broadly as a sign of expressive and intellectual freedom in contrast to socialist realism that indexed authoritarian control (2017, 115–­17). William Mazzarella similarly discusses how the Cold War exacerbated certain anxieties that continue to haunt American politics: “The Cold War allowed the liberal-­democratic world to project all the anxieties that inhered in modern publics—­ anxieties about autology, genealogy, sincerity, spontaneity, and anonymity—­onto paranoid figures of mass manipulation (brainwashing, subliminal advertising, etc.) that could then be quarantined as totalitarian tendencies against which a healthy liberal public sphere could and should inoculate itself ” (Mazzarella 2015, 94). 2. Indeed, demystification was not widely discussed in Guinea at the time it was taking place and was rarely mentioned in the party newspaper (McGovern 2013, 172). In touring shows presented to international audiences by Les Ballets Africains in the 1970s, initiation dances and scenes were staged, and the program describing the show vilified the colonizer, and not the socialist state, for violently suppressing initiations. Part two of the 1973 touring show was titled “Initiation,” and the program states, Of all the rites and rituals of any society, that of initiation is by far the most significant. It was perhaps because the initiation rite was the keystone of the social structure that the colonizers held these ceremonies in derision and christened it [sic] “an asylum for barbarism” or a “sanctuary for the collective manifestation of idolatry.” One of the aims of the initiation ceremony is to teach the young to practice life while living in direct contact with nature. The wise men of the tribe—­the scholars and scientists—­spared no

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effort to give the young people the most solid insights into life—­to make an apprenticeship to life that merged with life itself. (Kolu Productions 1973) This excerpt hints at how ballet was framed (at least for international audiences) to disavow or mask the contradictions of demystification. 3. Academics sometimes depict national dance troupes in Africa as hegemonic tools of the state, emphasizing the idea that artists were forced to participate (e.g., Gilman 2009, 5; Philipps 2013, 40). Authors writing about African “contemporary dance” (meaning African dance fused with Euro-­American modern dance) often describe ballet troupes as uncreative and “traditional”—­again reinforcing the idea that free will is not exercised in state-­sponsored art (see Despres 2016, 4; Spinner 2011, 107; Tiérou 2001). Even academic literature that aims to dispel these dualisms (freedom/coercion, creativity/authority) often reproduces them. For example, in his book Nation-­Building, Propaganda, and Literature in Francophone Africa, Dominic Thomas condemns the fact that literary scholars dismissed official/state-­sanctioned writers in the Congo after independence, yet in making the argument, he reiterates the familiar presumption that state sponsorship forces conformity and “inevitably kill[s] creativity” (2002, 12). 4. By making everyone, regardless of status or ethnicity, participate at some level in song and dance (some people found this humiliating), the Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG) cultivated an iconic display of ideal national unity in the performing arts. Downplaying traditional hierarchies was also one facet of the party’s tactic of appealing to youth and women who had the least to gain from traditional social structures of gerontocracy and social stratification (see McGovern 2013). 5. An emblem, in semiotic theory, is an indexical icon. As Asif Agha puts it, “it is a performance of a sign that reveals properties or qualities (the iconic part) of the one contextually linked to it (the indexical part)” (2007, 257). 6. Lineage no longer dictates profession in Guinea, but stigma is still attached to the politician with an artisan name. In the first internationally recognized democratic elections in 2010, for example, Lansana Kouyaté ran for president, and though he had occupied high posts in both the government and ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States), his distinctly artisan family name was frequently cited in conversations I had with average people as a reason he should not be president. 7. The Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) was an alliance of French West African colonies formed in October 1946 out of a congress of political parties held in Bamako. The RDA was extremely influential in French West African politics for over a decade (Manning 1988, 142–­43). 8. Mike McGovern eloquently captures this when he notes that Sékou Touré and the PDG “raised the ‘No’ vote to the status of a shibboleth, a profession of faith” (2017, 212). 9. Out of over thirty-­five formal interviews with dancers and musicians trained during the socialist period in Conakry’s ballet scene and myriad informal conversations over ten years of participant observation in Conakry, I have never encountered a socialist-­trained artist who deviated from this stance. Literature on artistic participation in the forest region reveals that artists in areas targeted by demystification did not all share this revolutionary fervor (see, e.g., McGovern 2013; Højbjerg 2006; Straker 2009b). 10. Original French: “L’artiste guinéen, depuis les premiers heurs de l’indépendance, est effectivement a la pointe du combat formateur de la conscience politique de la Révolution et de la restauration de l’authenticité culturelle africaine” (Kouyate 1982, 62).

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11. See Arieff (2009, 334–­35) for a concise history of what motivated this invasion. 12. One of the most famous and disturbing examples of this is Fodéba Keita, the original founder of the company that became Guinea’s first national ballet. Keita served as minister of the interior under Touré. He was later imprisoned in the infamous prison Camp Boiro and killed by the regime in 1969. 13. Gavin Steingo, in his work on South African Kwaito music, makes a similar argument in reverse—­that music’s political potential need not be lodged in referential messaging or in aesthetics of resistance. Music that ignores social and political realities, he contends, can be political in its very disconnection from that reality by enabling listeners to imagine and even experience “a world that does not yet exist” (2016, 7–­9). 14. The third person singular pronoun in Susu (a) is not gendered, so I translate it as “s/he.” Chapter Two 1. English translation: Guinean Alliance for the Development of Dance and Percussion. The AGDP was founded in 2004. The Concert of Peace and National Unity described in this chap­ ter  was co-­organized with another nonprofit association representing band musicians called UNAMGUI, which stands for Union Nationale des Artistes Musicians de Guinée (National Union of Musician-­Artists of Guinea). 2. All land under the First Republic was considered the property of the state, but in practice, it belonged to whomever could “make it productive” (mise en valeur; McGovern 2013, 100–­101). 3. The text refers to political “demonstrations” because during this time, there were regular, sometimes violent, popular demonstrations in the streets in response to various failings of the regime—­especially the failure to provide regular electricity and to conduct timely legislative elections. The original French text reads as follows: Depuis l’aube des temps dans nos sociétés, l’artiste n’a cessé de jouer pleinement ses rôles qui sont entre autres, conseiller, éduquer, distraire, sensibiliser et mettre en garde. Fidèles à ses nobles missions, les artistes de Guinée tiennent à exprimer solennellement ce jour leur adhésion totale aux valeurs de paix, d’unité nationale et de démocratie gage de tout développement durable. Profitant des présentes manifestations, les artistes de Guinée lancent un appel pressant à tous les leaders d’opinion pour que sans passion, chacun fasse d’avantage [sic] preuve de sagesse pour ne voir que les intérêts supérieurs de la nation guinéenne (AGDP/UNAMGUI 2013, 1). 4. Among the demands that the AGDP and UNAMGUI make of the government in the Memorandum is the “regulation by the state of Guinean dance and percussion (choice of teachers, fees, and authorization of permits)” (Règlementation par l’Etat des cours de danses guinéennes et de la percussion [choix des maitres, fixation du tarif, octroi du permis]; AGDP/ UNAMGUI 2013, 3). Another suggestion made in this document is that foreign students of music should pay taxes to the state (AGDP/UNAMGUI 2013, 4). 5. In Guinea under socialism, private property and income were tightly regulated, partly in an effort to contain the political strength of the bourgeoisie (O’Toole and Baker 2005, xli). Private accumulation of wealth was stigmatized as antithetical to national unity, and between 1975 and 1978, all private trade was abolished (Azarya and Chazan 1987, 112). While the severity of such policies fluctuated, they made an impact on the general population, and many of my interlocutors in Guinea characterized socialism as a time when private accumulation was not allowed. 6. Artists in Conakry often critique the national companies for the fact that they do not make dancers retire when they are too old to perform well. This retention of artists results from

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a system with no safety net for ageing artists in which elderly directors protect their vulnerable peers by keeping them on salary. 7. During the 2006 US tour alone, the ballet lost over ten members, some of whom had arranged with the directors to stay abroad, but at least six of whom defected outright. At the time of my fieldwork in 2013, the last US tour of Les Ballets Africains had been in 2007, and the ballet was severely compromised because it had lost so many members and the leadership was having trouble obtaining visas for replacements. The ballet resorted to hiring expatriate Guineans living in the States and one African American to learn roles in a matter of days for the tour. 8. One such group that was rising during my fieldwork was Awa Guinean Drums, directed by Dani Fatou Abou Camara in consultation with the French manager François Kokelaere, who had conceptualized the successful Guinean group Wofa in the 1990s. 9. Kelly Askew makes a similar point in her work on Tanzanian musical performance. She suggests that any government plan of action that fails to recognize the importance of average people in charting the development of national culture will be inherently defective. Askew writes, “A new mode of cultural production is thus required: .  .  .  one that does not locate productive power always and only on one side of a two-­sided ‘state/society’ equation” (2002, 288). 10. The Susu phrase soge xɔnɔ literally means “sun hurts,” and can express a feeling of being tired or annoyed while waiting for something outdoors. Instead of framing this annoyance with talk about time, as Americans sometimes do (“I don't have time for this!”), Susu speakers note the physical discomfort of waiting under a menacing sun. They often mention that standing in the hot sun “makes people sick.” An accurate translation of soge xɔnɔ into English may combine “it’s really hot” with “I’m sick and tired of this.” 11. Yole (sometimes also called djolé) is a masked dance originally from Sierra Leone. Yole groups were once quite prevalent in Conakry, but now there are just a few groups that specialize in Yole masquerade. The rhythm and movements of Yole have been adapted to the stage in Guinean ballets, typically without the masks. The dance was likely brought to Guinea by Temne people who lived in Conakry beginning in the late 1800s (on the early inhabitants of Conakry, see Goerg 1990). 12. According to Yair Hashachar, the Quinzaine Artistique festival was renamed Festival National des Arts et de la Culture after Guinea’s cultural revolution of 1968 (2018, 1008; also see Dave 2019, 30–­31). 13. Original French: Après 28 ans d’absence, le 14ème Festival National des Arts et de la Culture (FENAC) sera lancé en Guinée. 14. For example, when I asked a young professional man named Bachir about what Guinea was supposedly coming back to, he responded unequivocally that it was the time of Sékou Touré, when Guinea was known around the world and respected. In another conversation with Sekou, the young director of Merveilles, he said that Alpha Condé is “starting where Sékou Touré left off.” A friend of his then added that there have been twenty-­four years of “nothing positive done” and said that Condé must take up the work that Touré began. 15. Guinea is often depicted as having four “natural” regions (Guinée maritime, Moyenne-­ Guinée, Haute-­Guinée, and Guinée forestière), which correspond to major ethnic groupings (Susu, Fulbe, Maninka, and Forestier). This is a construct that has gained the status of uncontested truth in Guinea, as Odile Goerg (2011) explores eloquently.

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16. In rehearsals leading up to this show, the director Sekou spoke of ethnic and political parties as one and the same. He told the actors who were playing the politicians that each represented one of the four regions, which correspond to the four largest ethnic groups in Guinea. Chapter Three 1. Sékou Touré and the Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG) claimed to be ideologically opposed to espousing European cultural influences, and Guinean artists were not trained in Western genres of dance, music, or plastic arts production (e.g., Counsel 2009, 78, 85). Nomi Dave notes, for example, that “upon independence, one of the [Touré] regime’s first acts was to ban European music from the radio and live performance, insisting that the country relieve itself of its imperial burden” (2019, 21). In contrast, Senegal’s cultural policy was funded generously by France after independence, and the state encouraged cross-­cultural artistic sensibilities and developed schools that offered training in classical dance and hybrid “Afro-­contemporary” forms (J. Cohen 2018; Neveu Kringelbach 2013, 52, on French funding, see 37, 39, 43). Guinean ballet artists did not engage with this hybrid dance until well into the postsocialist period, and in Conakry, the genre is still only taught in periodic workshops by visiting African and European choreographers, not in formal schools. 2. This interest in novelty is in part a reflection of foreign students’ attention to individual genius, individuality, and distinction. Foreign students tend to want to learn a new set of moves in each class. Ironically, foreign students often judge teachers simultaneously on their “authenticity” (meaning knowledge of presumably rural ethnic dances) and on their ability to create novel steps. 3. The three female choreographers were from the ballets Oiseaux Blancs, Nafaya, and an all-­female percussion group called Baga Ginee (“Baga Women”). The only other female choreographer in Conakry at the time was Jeanne Macauley of Ballet Sanke, but she was not present at this workshop. 4. While otherwise speaking Susu, Nabinti interjects the French word galère here—­she says, “In artistya, you have to see ‘galère’” (Artistya, f ’i galère to). In French, the verb galérer means “to do petty work that is poorly paid, to live from day to day without assured resources” (Faire de petits travaux pénibles et mal payés, vivre au jour le jour sans avoir de ressources assurées; larousse online). I have translated her words as, “You have to see hard times.” 5. In many Conakry troupes, there are at least twice as many women as men in the ranks of dancers. The drummers, however, are usually all men, with just a few exceptions. Sometimes women are trained to play the bass drums, and I have witnessed only one ballet with a female djembe player. There is a touring group of female percussionists called Nimbaya, but it was contrived by a producer to please Euro-­American audiences interested in female empowerment and does not reflect a shift in the gendering of percussion in Conakry. 6. Nomi Dave (2020b) and Jay Straker (2009b, 192) also note that dancers they interviewed spoke proudly about the rigor and punishment involved in their formation as artists. 7. Roman Jakobson describes the phatic function of language as that which focuses on the channel of communication itself: either checking to see if the channel works (“are you there?”), confirming that the other person is listening (“do you catch my drift?”), or prolonging communication through “ritualized formulas” ([1960] 1990, 5). Jakobson’s definition of the phatic function was influenced by Bronislaw Malinowski’s earlier description of “phatic communion,”

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referring to words that serve a social function but are not intended to convey meaning ([1923] 1953, 315). 8. There is a robust literature detailing the historical centrality of poetic and performative aspects of speech in West Africa. Especially noteworthy is the literature on griots (e.g., B. Hoffman 1995, 41, 2000, 65; Irvine 1989, 1990; Jansen 2000, 10) and on political oratory (see, e.g., A. Barry 2002; Rivière 1988). 9. In most ballets, the uniform for women is a leotard of a specific color with black or white long stretch pants and a cloth tied around the waist. Merveilles had an unusual uniform of long soccer shorts with either a soccer jersey or leotard on top. Women’s uniforms in these ballets are supposed to be modest and always cover the thighs. 10. In her work on Okiek initiation ceremonies in Kenya, Corinne Kratz describes how performances of male authority became more pronounced as women in the community gained greater economic independence. She notes, for example, increased attention to and elaboration of men’s speeches at girls’ initiation ceremonies at a time when women were gaining opportunities due to market integration and economic diversification. These speeches reinforced gender hierarchies and were premised on the notion that women are weak and need guidance from men in order to endure hardship and succeed in life (1990, 456, 466). 11. One day I was listening to a young drummer from one of the national companies air his grievances to a friend. He included the fact that when they travel, the men and the women stay in different hotels and are not allowed to socialize: “They won’t let us hang out with each other.” Then he added that even in the rehearsal they are not permitted to socialize with the women. Naively, I asked if it was because the directors were worried that the young men would get the dancers pregnant. Both men laughed at me and said, “No, it is because the directors want the women for themselves.” I asked what would happen to a woman in the ballet if she refused to sleep with a director who wanted her, and they said flatly, “She won’t travel” (a mu voyagerma). As the national ballets are losing their ability to gain touring contracts, this incentive is likely to wane. Chapter Four 1. “Polyrhythm, a fundamental rhythmic feature found in much of Africa south of the Sahara, is exhibited in Mande music as a play of two or four equally spaced beats (or vice versa), often resulting in an ambiguity of a single overriding beat sequence (meter). This ambiguity—­ being able to feel a particular performance in more than one meter—­is creatively exploited by African musicians in performance and is one of the most difficult aspects of music in Africa for non-­Africans to grasp” (Charry 2000, xxvii). 2. See Meintjes and Lemon (2017) for a related account of the Zulu warrior figure in South African Ngoma dance. 3. Elizabeth Schmidt describes how women in Guinea have historically assumed male gender roles in times of crisis (2005a, 134). In the movement leading up to independence, the Guinean Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) appealed to women by addressing issues that they were especially invested in, such as health, sanitation, and education. But even as women became outspoken political activists, often adopting roles once reserved for men, their underlying goal was not to challenge gender norms, and many activists reverted to more conventional female behavior after independence (Schmidt 2005a, 114–­15, 142). Emily Osborn’s

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2011 book on the connection between households and statecraft also lays the groundwork for understanding women in upper Guinea as historically influential political actors, though they did not espouse an egalitarian approach to gender. 4. This point, made by Mike McGovern (2013, 19), is explained in further detail in the introduction. 5. Kelly Askew similarly describes how Tanzanian performance troupes she worked with were concerned with presenting “authentic” traditions, yet they were constantly making changes to rural dance and music practices in order to fit the material to a socialist and nationalist agenda, often replacing improvisation with standardization and synchrony (2002, 214–­15). She also recalls how dances and musical pieces were changed to become more entertaining or simply to fit the format of national troupes, sometimes adding erotic elements to a dance, singing lyrics inaccurately because performers didn’t speak the language, or replacing circles with lines (e.g., 2002, 205, 209, 214). Paul Schauert describes similar transformations in dances brought to the national stage in Ghana, as troupes condensed long dances and increased their tempos and volumes to make them more “exciting” (2015, 85, 87–­88). 6. In her book on dance in urban Senegal, Hélène Neveu Kringelbach similarly suggests that the “ambiguous power” wielded by Wolof and Serer griots (géwël) is being appropriated by young urban performers (2013, 71, 94–­95). 7. These rhythms are polyrhythmic and include multiple separate accompaniments and three different bass drum lines. I show here how the full arrangement sounds to a dancer. Dancers frequently sing rhythms to each other when they practice and have collectively recognized ways of accurately reproducing drum sounds. The musical notation is courtesy of Dr. John Pippen. 8. In Uschi Billmeier’s book based on the knowledge of one of Guinea’s most famous drummers Mamady Keita, Sɔkɔ (spelled Sökö) is described as a “Malinke” (French term for Maninka) rhythm from the Faranah region played before circumcisions to announce the imminence of the event (Billmeier 1999, 32). Chapter Five 1. Katrien Pype presents some similar intergenerational dynamics in her work on dance in Kinshasa. She shows how debates over what is morally acceptable in social life come through in intergenerational disagreement over dance forms. Kinshasa’s elderly people are concerned, for example, that the younger generation is embracing dances that overtly display and celebrate sexuality (2017, 164–­65). 2. The concern for core structures, expressed in Susu by the word xɔri, has direct corollaries in other Mande languages. In Maninka and Bamana, for example, the word kolo means “bone” or “kernel” and is used metaphorically to describe the “nucleus or essential structure of something” (McNaughton 1988, 109). 3. See Berliner (2005, 2007) for related discussions of cultural persistence and transmission in Bulongic communities in Guinea where much local material culture was violently destroyed long ago. 4. Recent academic and policy work on intangible heritage focuses on the reproduction of entire lifeworlds, not just cultural artifacts (e.g., Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett 2014; UNESCO 2019), but the underlying logic is still one of preservation or “safeguarding” cultural practices deemed

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“traditional.” My approach to inheritance shifts the focus from the preservation of artifacts and lifeways to the performance of social being—­the transmission of which may involve dramatic changes in artifacts and lifeways. To suggest that inheritance is about relations, not objects, is to call attention to the idea that a dynamic relationship (between material signs, objects, and the reactions they generate) may be passed across time, while the signs themselves (in this case, the dances and dance steps) change dramatically. 5. A great deal of anthropological work has challenged the supposed antinomy between the gift and the commodity form, or gifting and economic modernity (e.g., Appadurai 1986; Elyachar 2002; Gell 1992; Godelier 1999; Guyer 1993; Parry 1986; Lévi-­Strauss [1950] 1987, 49; Miller 2001; Myers 2001; Shipton 2007; Weiner 1992). 6. Hélène Neveu Kringelbach describes a similar dynamic in Dakar sabar events, noting that “the more people dance at someone’s event, the higher the organizer’s status is likely to be in the neighborhood. . . . Not being ‘danced for’ both reflects and brings about social exclusion” (2013, 90). 7. Mikhail Bakhtin developed the concept of chronotope (literally “timespace”) to describe the ways in which signs can condense spatial and temporal objects into a single experience. As Constantine Nakassis puts it, chronotopic formulations “are metasemiotic frameworks that actively construe and shape the temporal and spatial unfolding of social life, making certain kinds of experiences of time, space, and . . . sociality and personhood possible.” (2016, 334). Bakhtin offers a meeting as an example of such a framework that marks space and time simultaneously. He writes, “In any meeting the temporal marker (‘at one and the same time’) is inseparable from the spatial marker (‘in one and the same place’)” (Bakhtin 1981, 97). The concept of chronotopes has shaped anthropological inquiry into “the question of how sign users bring other times and places into relevance as they interact” (Rutherford 2015, 242). 8. This term semiotic repertoire is a more explicitly embodied way of describing what Webb Keane calls “semiotic ideology,” referring to people’s often tacit assumptions about signs—­what they are, what functions they serve, and what consequences they can produce in the world (2018, 64; 2005, 191). Chapter Six 1. While sabar was introduced in Conakry toward the end of socialism (around 1981), my in­ terviews with socialist-­era artists suggest that sabar was not widely practiced until the regime of Lansana Conté (1984–­2008) and was actively discouraged by Sékou Touré and his party’s injunction to embrace the local over the foreign (see, for example, Counsel 2009, 91). Elderly informants often claimed that sabar “replaced” two dances that had been popular in Conakry during socialism. One is called Yankadi-­Makuru, which was a couple’s dance that took place in the evening by the light of the full moon. Guinean dance teachers often describe Yankadi-­Makuru to students as a dance of “seduction,” though it was not overtly sexual as is sabar. The other practice that artists reported was supplanted by sabar is a family of Susu dances and rhythms broadly referred to as ginefare, meaning “women’s dance.” Ginefare was once popular for weddings in Conakry, but now it is typically performed in the city ceremonially for excision or by ballet dancers on stage. Yankadi-­Makuru is now only performed on stage and has lost its position as a social ceremony in Conakry. 2. Despite class differences in Mande societies regarding emotionality and public display (cf. Conrad and Frank 1995; B. Hoffman 2000), acting overly emotional (especially showing negative

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emotions) in daily life is improper behavior for any Mande adult group regardless of class (e.g., Jackson 2011, 25–­28). People are regularly discouraged in speech and song from “thinking” or brooding (Su. maɲɔxunfe; Mka. ka miiri) about negative feelings, and crying is frowned upon. 3. Lamine Lamah and Kerfalla Lamah are pseudonyms. 4. While all sabars in Conakry share the same stylistic features, those with more funding attract better artists who can make money in tips and be offered food after the party. Invitation for sabar parties works through the same process as in dundunbas, by distributing candies in troupes around the city (see chapter 5). 5. Effeminate men in Conakry are accepted in the dance community despite the fact that homophobia is widespread. These men sometimes wear female wrap skirts in sabar circles and perform “women’s” dances but do not openly discuss sexual preferences. 6. Sabar in contemporary Senegal is a women’s dance, and professional male drummers and dancers participate, but men rarely attend otherwise (Neveu Kringelbach 2013, 84). Guineans have adopted similar boundaries in sabar, though professional cisgender male dancers are less likely to dance sabar in Guinea than in Senegal. 7. Sabar has been taken up in multiple West African contexts, including Mali, Guinea, and Burkina Faso, but anthropologists and historians have largely ignored its practice outside of Senegal and Gambia. One exception is Rainer Polak’s brief discussion of sabar as a phenomenon associated with youth in Mali (2012, 268). Hélène Neveu Kringelbach suggests that in Dakar, increased moral scrutiny of women’s sabar dancing may be an outcome of the contemporary “crisis of masculinity,” whereby young men are underemployed and uncertain about their futures and their statuses as full persons (2013, 92–­93). 8. As scholars of Mande culture have described, layering can also obscure the true shape of a person or object, producing an aesthetic of concealment or ambiguity that is central to Mande notions of powerful accumulation (e.g., Ferme 2001, 168–­69; McNaughton 1988, 129–­30). Some of the “biggest” people in Mande societies—­those who command esoteric powers—­such as hunters or sorcerers, often do not display their full status on the surface but reveal “just enough to elicit . . . respect and fear in others” (Ferme 2001, 160). A politician’s bigness, likewise, can derive from invisible forces and connections to powerful persons or beings (McNaughton 1988, 130; for a similar account in South Africa, see J. and J. Comaroff 1999). Whether immediately visible or indexed like the tip of an iceberg, however, the logic is the same—­powerful persons are “big.” 9. The elements of this political vision that were most relevant to the performing arts were a focus on anti-­colonial nationalism and disdain for capitalist accumulation. Revolutionary cultural policy devalued foreign (especially European) cultural influences as bourgeois or colonial. “Bourgeois marriages” were frequently critiqued by party media outlets as anti-­revolutionary, and private property and income were tightly regulated by the socialist state (Azarya and Chazan 1987, 112). 10. Other artists from this era corroborated, in informal conversations with me, that M’Bemba’s group was the first to popularize sabar and transcribe it onto Guinean instruments in Conakry. 11. This focus on autochthonous forms was not part of the original Les Ballets Africains de Keita Fodéba, founded by Guinean national Fodéba Keita in Paris in 1952, which later became Guinea’s national company Les Ballets Africains de la République de Guinée (J. Cohen 2012). Keita’s original group was composed of people from a variety of ethnic and national backgrounds (Joshua Cohen, personal communication, January 2017).

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12. At the time of my fieldwork, a single outfit made of bazin riche could cost upwards of $150 in Conakry, the equivalent of about one month’s wages for average salaried workers. 13. At the time of this research, seven thousand Guinea francs was about $1, and most average people did not make more than $50–­$100 in a month. 14. Daniel Jordan Smith similarly writes of what he calls “conspicuous redistribution” in Nigeria, noting that “practices of conspicuous redistribution ultimately benefit elite[s] . . . and can be seen as reinforcing and exacerbating inequality rather than remedying it” (2017, 19). 15. Guinean citizens during socialism were encouraged to interpret individual suffering in the present as a necessary sacrifice for the collective benefit of the population in the long term (see McGovern 2017). 16. While electricity remains erratic in Conakry, President Alpha Condé has made electricity a priority. The Guinean state, in a partnership with the Chinese, completed a new hydropower plant called Kaléta in 2015. This plant fell short of its goal to meet Guinea’s electricity needs, and protests continue in the capital as citizens contend with energy shortages. Another hydroelectric dam project called Souapiti has also been contracted with the Chinese, designed to provide reliable power to Guinea’s growing urban centers, while also displacing thousands of people (African Energy 2018; B. Diallo 2016; Human Rights Watch 2020; hydropower-­dams 2018; Tejan-­Cole 2019). However, Guinea’s power sector faces significant challenges, including inadequate infrastructure and poor financial performance, that will have to be overcome in order to provide consistent electricity to citizens (USAID 2017). Epilogue 1. Susu speakers describe names as “rising” when someone is becoming well known: “His or her name has risen/ascended” (A xili bara te).

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Index

Note: page numbers in italics refer to figures. Abacar (Aboubacar Camara, dancer), 76, 121, 122, 142 Abbink, Jon, 139, 151n1 Abouhani, Abdelghani, 51 Abu-­Lughod, Lila, 32, 152n6 aesthetic/affecting politics, 2; aesthetic, defined, 29; within Guinean ballet institutions, 30, 45–­ 64; Guinean state policy and, 30, 33; at level of individual practice, 29–­30, 65–­81; precarious emergence of Guinean dance-­music and, 138–­40 aesthetics: defined, 29; Mande, 86, 128, 165n8; socialist, 41, 157n1 affect, 29, 126, 128, 155–­56n26; in African cities, 20, 21; collective/public feelings, 134, 140; “ugly feelings” (Ngai), 133, 139 Africa Danse (ballet), 52 African cities: affect in, 20, 21; embodiment in, 20, 21, 51; racialized segregation in, 23; theories of, xiii, 20 (see also infrastructure; resourcefulness). See also urbanization African contemporary dance, 66–­67 Agamben, Giorgio, 33 AGDP (Alliance for the Development of Dance and Percussion): and the Concert of Peace and National Unity (2013), 45–­46, 48–­58, 64; and the Festival National des Arts et de la Culture (FENAC, 2010), 60 agency, 139, 155n21 Allison, Anne, 128 Aly (Aly Mara, dancer), 52, 64, 90–­91, 105, 107, 114–­ 15, 150 Arens, W., 103 Argenti, Nicholas, 103

Arieff, Alexis, 37, 42, 159n11 Arnoldi, Mary Jo, 16, 86 artiste category, 17, 31, 34 artistya (profession of the artist): boldness and, 71; courage and, 21, 65, 70; dundunbas and, 120–­21; ethical personhood in, 41–­44, 69, 161n4 Ashforth, Adam, 80 Askew, Kelly, 12, 13, 80, 141, 152n6, 160n9, 163n5 authority: in Conakry dance troupes, 44, 65–­66, 69, 73, 74, 77–­79; dialectic with vitality or crea­ tivity, 5, 16, 27, 30–­33, 67, 80, 81, 83, 141; gerontocratic and patriarchal models of, 44, 65–­66, 69, 72–­74, 77–­79; in Mande societies, 72; resistance to, 76–­77, 127; in West African Islam, 72 Azarya, Victor, 13, 159n5, 165n9 Bâ, Ardo Ousmane, 37, 156n28 Badjibi (Djibril Morilaye Camara, director), 48, 53, 72 Bah, Amadou Oury, 37 Baker, Janice E., 14, 159n5 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 164n7 ballet (African), 1, 12–­13, 163n5. See also Conakry dance-­music; dance troupes; Guinean ballet; troupes/ballets Ballet Communal de Matam, Le. See Ballet Matam Ballet de l’Armée (national military ballet), 94, 98 Ballet Djoliba (national ballet company), 2, 50, 52, 76 Ballet Matam, 5–­6, 22, 25, 52, 71, 74–­76 Ballet Merveilles, 3, 69–­77, 84–­85, 101; and the Con­ cert of Peace and National Unity (2013), 39–­40, 45–­46, 48–­58, 64; and the Festival of Peace and

184 Ballet Merveilles (cont.) Dialogue in Guinea (2013), 58–­63, 64; Sekou and, 6, 50, 59, 61, 63, 72, 75–­78; Yamoussa and, 6, 7, 61–­63, 65, 70, 72, 77–­79, 121–­23, 122 Ballets Africains, Les (national ballet company), 2, 13, 18–­19, 31, 40, 50, 52, 99–­100, 113 Ballet Soleil d’Afrique, 6 Bangoura, Alseny (dancer), 9 Bangoura, Fatou (dancer), 42, 131 Bangoura, Hamidou (director), 49–­50 Bangoura, Laoulaou (drummer), 132 Bangoura, M’Bemba (drummer), 39, 72, 130–­31, 150 Bangoura, Moustapha (dancer), 113, 149 Bangoura, Ousmane “Zito” (director), 52, 114–­15 Barber, Karin, 135 Barry, Alpha Ousmane, 37–­38, 43, 162n8 Barry, Mamadou Aliou, 137 Bauman, Richard, 156–­57n32 Bayart, Jean-­François, 50, 59, 74, 141 Berger, Harris, 137 Bergère, Clovis, 51 Berlant, Lauren, 140 Berliner, David, 163n3 Bernstein, Anya, 60 Besnier, Niko, 69 Bierschenk, Thomas, 80 bigness (xungboe), 127, 128, 134, 135, 138–­40, 165n8 Bizas, Eleni, 125 Bonfi, Conakry, xv, 6, 21 Bountou (Damaya Soumah, dancer), 12, 15, 42–­43, 122–­23 Bountourabi (Bountourabi Kouyate, dancer), 110–­ 11, 112, 118, 121, 142 Bourdieu, Pierre, 119, 130 Boyer, Dominic, 24, 143 Boym, Svetlana, 24 Braun, Lesley Nicole, xiii, 13, 74, 127 Brownell, Susan, 69 Burawoy, Michael, 32 Burdett, Ricky, 51 Camara, Aboubacar “Abacar” (dancer), 76, 121, 122, 142 Camara, Allasane “D’Artagnan” (drummer), 78, 150 Camara, Djibril Morilaye “Badjibi” (director), 48, 53, 72 Camara, Lansana “Sege” (drummer), 8, 56, 96 Camara, Maimouna “Lala” (dancer), 76–­77, 93, 98 Camara, Mohamed Saliou, 13, 14, 36 Camara, Momo “Grand Masta” (director), 52 Camara, Mouminatou (dancer), 31, 149 Camara, Moussa Celestin (director), 48–­50 Camara, Nabilaye Moussa (drummer), 41–­42, 120 Camara, Nimatoulaye “Nima” (dancer), xi–­xii, 142, 149

index Camara, Sekouba “Wastero” (director), 56, 121–­23 Campbell, Bonnie, 19, 153n13 capacity: defined, 103, 155n21; examples of, 16, 17, 33, 88, 90, 101–­3, 113 Carter, Thomas F., 69 Castaldi, Francesca, 13, 125, 127 Celestin (Moussa Celestin Camara, director), 48–­50 ceremonies/dance gatherings: cosmopolitan cere­ monies, 3–­4, 7–­9, 11–­12, 27, 79–­80, 83–­86, 151–­ 52n2 (see also dundunbas; sabars); drumming and, 83–­84, 88–­90; emotion in, 85–­86, 108; ethnic ceremonies, 3–­4, 7, 83, 151–­52n2, 156–­57n32; model of authority in, 4; nature and evolution of, 3–­5, 9–­12; troupes/ballets and, 4–­5, 66–­67, 83; xili (name/reputation) and, xi–­xiii, 7, 19, 72, 83, 118, 166n1; youth roles in, 86, 89–­90 Chari, Sharad, 14 Charry, Eric, 40, 88–­89, 154n18, 162n1 Chazan, Naomi, 13, 159n5, 165n9 China-­Africa relations, 120, 166n16 choreography, 66–­68, 161n3 chronotope, 123, 144, 164n7 Chumley, Lily Hope, 129 Circus Baobab, 78 Cissé, I., 39 Cisse, Nabinti (dancer), 42, 69 Clapp, Jennifer, 19, 153n13 Coe, Cati, xiii, 156n29 Cohen, Adrienne, 43, 72, 107–­8, 119, 139 Cohen, Joshua, 13, 153n10, 161n1, 165n11 Cole, Jennifer, xiii, 24, 108–­9, 151n1, 152n7 Comaroff, Jean, 125, 136, 165n8 Comaroff, John L., 125, 136, 165n8 Conakry, Guinea: dance infrastructure in contemporary, 5–­9, 26, 45, 48–­49, 61, 63–­64, 142–­43; described, xv, 21; as fieldwork site, 20–­23, 25–­ 26, 49–­51, 68, 69–­73, 78, 132, 137; material infrastructure of, xiii, 20, 23, 137, 166n16; population of, 2; semiotics and, 23, 143; zones/neighborhoods of, xv, 22–­23 Conakry dance-­music: “apolitical” politics and, 43–­44; ballet genre in, 46–­48, 156–­57n32 (see also troupes/ballets; and names of specific troupes); becoming someone ( findi a ra) and, 24; cere­ monies in (see ceremonies/dance gatherings; dundunbas; sabars); contemporary dance in­ frastructure for, 5–­9, 26, 45, 48–­49, 61, 63–­64, 142–­43; dancing body as semiotic resource in, xi–­xiii, 17–­18, 20–­21, 23, 27, 33, 39, 141–­44; ethical personhood and roles of the artist, 41–­44; historical connection between aesthetics and power, xii–­xiii, 15–­18; language describing, 84–­ 86; memory and remembering in, 42–­43; nature of “good” artistry and, 42–­43; “passport moves” in, 113; postsocialist privatization of ballet in, 1, 46–­48, 49, 52

index Concert of Peace and National Unity (2013), 39–­40, 45–­46, 48–­58, 64 Condé, Alpha, 14–­15, 54, 59–­60, 63, 80 Connerton, Paul, 130 Conrad, David, 34, 104, 154n19, 164–­65n2 Conté, Lansana, 14–­15, 54, 75, 94–­96 Coquéry-­Vidrovitch, Cathérine, 22, 23 core steps (pas xɔri), 92, 104, 110, 113, 118, 163n2 cosmopolitan ceremonies, 3–­4, 7–­9, 11–­12, 27, 79–­ 80, 83–­86, 151–­52n2. See also ceremonies/dance gatherings; dundunbas; sabars Counsel, Graeme, 13, 14, 34, 60, 153nn11–­12, 154n17, 156n28, 161n1, 164n1 courage. See waakili (courage) Covington-­Ward, Yolanda, 65, 80 Creed, Gerald W., 47 cultural inheritance, 27, 110–­24; continuity between generations and, 121–­24; core steps (pas xɔri) and, 92, 110, 113, 118; Guinean ballet and, 111–­ 13; inalienable possessions and, 123–­24; “passport moves” and, 113. See also intergenerational tensions Cvetkovich, Ann, 140 Dadis Camara, Moussa, 14–­15, 54, 58–­59, 153–­54n14 dance troupes: Conakry private (see Conakry dance-­ music; privatization; troupes/ballets); national African (see ballet [African]; national ballets); socialist folk-­dance ensembles, 13 Daniel, Yvonne, 13 Dave, Nomi, 38, 59, 96, 135, 153n12, 154n17, 160n12, 161n1, 161n6 Davidson, Joanna, 79 De Boeck, Filip, xiii, 20, 21, 23, 25 Degani, Michael, xiii, 80, 137 de Gaulle, Charles, 36 democracy: African, 80; in Guinea, 2, 15, 65, 80, 154n14, 158n6 demystification campaign, 15–­16, 33, 39, 101, 112, 154n18, 158n9 Despres, Altaïr, 66–­67, 158n3 Dessertine, Audrey, 125 Diabate, Alisco (drummer), 39, 150 Diabate, Mama (singer/griot/dancer), 32 Diallo, Fatoumata Lamarana, 137 Diallo, Morelaye (dancer), 62, 116 Diouf, Abdou, 130 Diouf, Mamadou, 12 discipline (xurui), 68–­74, 83, 132 Dixinn, Conakry, xv, 3, 21 djembe drums, xii, 1–­2, 54, 84, 89, 92, 96; amplified, 128, 137, 138 Douglas, Mary, xiii Downey, Greg, 68, 69 downtown Conakry (former l’Île de Tumbo), xv, 21

185 dundunbas, 4, 7–­9; acrobats and, 106, 107–­8, 128; acts of gifting and respect in, 119–­23; ballet genre and, 133 (see also troupes/ballets); candy distribution and, 120; core steps (pas xɔri) and, 92, 110, 113, 118; electrical amplification and, 152n5; gigoteau and, 110–­11, 114–­24, 129; intergenera­ tional tensions and, 86, 132–­33; marraines and parrains (godparents/honored guests) and, 120; matongo female dance move, 92, 93; polyrhythm and speed in, 88–­90, 103–­8, 162n1; popularity of, 89–­99, 132–­33; “pump” step in, xii, 87–­89, 91–­ 99, 121, 143–­44; rural history of, 88–­89; sabars vs., 132–­33 (see also sabars); sɔkɔ/sɔkɔ chaud (dance), 104–­5, 107–­8, 110–­11; shapeshifting into animal forms and, 89, 101–­3; as “strong man’s dance”/ “power dance,” 87, 88–­90, 91–­93, 96–­98, 152n5; women as “strong men” and, xi–­xii, 86, 87–­88, 91–­93, 96–­98; xili (name/reputation) and, xi–­ xiii, 7, 19, 72, 83, 118, 166n1 dundun drums, 54, 89, 156n28 Dunn, Elizabeth C., 32 Durkheim, Emile, 140 Edmondson, Laura, 13 Ele (Moussa Sylla, dancer), 21–­22, 42, 94, 142 Elyachar, Julia, 7, 74, 143, 164n5 emblem (indexical icon): defined, 34, 158n5; exam­ ples of, 1–­2, 4, 111, 127, 132, 142 embodiment, 21, 34, 69, 71, 127, 130 emergence, 129, 130, 139, 140 emotion, 70, 85–­86, 132–­34; collective/public feel­ ing, 134, 140; display of, in Mande societies, 164–­65n2; “ugly feelings” (Ngai), 133, 139 Engeler, Michelle, 155n23 enjoyment/joy (  ɲɛlɛxinyi), 38, 70, 85–­86 ethnic ceremonies, 3–­4, 7, 83, 151–­52n2, 156–­57n32. See also ceremonies/dance gatherings ethnicity: Conakry neighborhoods and, 22, 23; in dance ceremonies (see ceremonies/dance gath­ erings; ethnic ceremonies); during First Repub­ lic, 15, 34, 37, 156n28, 158n4; in postsocialist Conakry, 4, 111, 113, 156n28 Fanon, Frantz, 40 Fanta (Fatoumata Yayo, dancer), 91–­92, 142, 150 Ferguson, James, 102, 128, 138 Ferme, Mariane, 79, 128, 165n8 Festival National des Arts et de la Culture (FENAC, 2010), 60 Festival of Peace and Dialogue in Guinea (2013), 58–­63, 64 First Republic. See Guinean First Republic (1958–­84) Foster, Susan Leigh, 130 Fouéré, Marie-­Aude, 80 France, Guinean independence from (1958), 12, 36–­37

186 Frank, Barbara, 16, 34, 104, 154n19, 164–­65n2 Fredericks, Rosalind, xiii Fulbe (ethnic group), 17–­18, 23, 37, 156n28 Ganti, Tejaswini, 128 Gbessia, Conakry, xv, 11, 21, 117–­18 Geertz, Clifford, xiii, 31 gender: all-­female percussion groups, 161n3; dancer-­ director relationships in troupes, 77, 162n11; division of roles in Guinean ballet and, 94–­96; effeminate (“womanlike”) sabar dancers and, 126, 134–­35, 165n5; female choreographers, 161n3; gender equality in Guinea, 74–­77, 92–­96, 98–­ 99; gerontocratic and patriarchal authority of directors in troupes, 65–­66, 69, 71–­80, 162n11; hypersexuality and striptease dancing, 126–­28, 130, 138–­40; in Mande oral history, 98; and oratory styles of directors and dignitaries, 73–­74; in policing and “encadrement” of women’s bodies in troupes, 74–­77, 162n9; women as gigoteau dancers, 110–­11, 112, 118, 121–­23, 142; women as sabar dancers, 126–­28, 130, 131, 133, 138–­40; women as “strong men” in dundunba, xi–­xii, 86, 87–­88, 91–­93, 96–­98; women dancers and sɔkɔ/sɔkɔ chaud (dance), 104–­5, 107–­8, 110–­11 genre, 156–­57n32 Geschiere, Peter, 131 Ghodsee, Kristen, 128, 157n1 (chap. 1) gigoteau, 114–­24; continuity between generations and, 121–­24, 129; individual person as key focus in, 118–­19; nature of, 110–­11, 114–­16; “style” vs., 116–­17 Gille, Zsuzsa, 24 Gilman, Lisa, 158n3 globalization, 2, 140; Guinean dance and, 111, 119, 125, 136, 149–­50 Godelier, Maurice, 124, 164n5 Goerg, Odile, 22–­23, 156n27, 160n11, 160n15 Gordon, Avery, 140 Graeber, David, 129 Gray, Lila Ellen, 143, 155n26 Greene, Paul, 137 griots (Mande bards): artistes vs., 17, 31, 34; during the First Republic, 16–­18, 33, 34–­36, 39, 112; in modern musical ensembles and ballets, 32, 34, 130–­31, 134–­35; nature of, 16, 34 Groes, Christian, xiii Guinea: Condé presidency (2010–­), 14–­15, 54, 59–­ 60, 63, 80; Conté regime/Second Republic (1984–­ 2008), 14–­15, 54, 75, 94–­96; Dadis Camara re­ gime (2008–­9), 14–­15, 54, 58–­59, 153–­54n14; economic liberalization in, 2, 112–­13, 125–­26, 136, 140; gender equality in, 75–­77, 92–­96, 98–­ 99; location in West Africa, xiv; massacre/coup d’état of 2009, 14, 58–­59, 153–­54n14; Touré regime/First Republic/socialist period (1958–­84)

index (see Guinean First Republic [1958–­84]; Touré, Ahmed Sékou); urbanization of, 48 (see also urbanization) Guinean ballet, 1, 2, 47, 48, 156–­57n32; Ballet de l’Armée (national military ballet), 94, 98; Ballet Djoliba (national ballet company), 2, 50, 52, 76; Les Ballets Africains de la République de Guinée (national ballet company), 2, 13, 18–­19, 31, 40, 50, 52, 99–­100, 113; in the First Republic, 13–­14, 15–­18, 34–­36, 38–­44, 66, 72–­73, 99–­101, 111–­13, 141; urbanization of, 48; “village” dance compared with, 100–­103, 111–­13. See also Conakry, Guinea; Conakry dance-­music Guinean First Republic (1958–­84), 12–­15; connec­ tion between performing arts and power, xii–­ xiii, 15–­18, 33, 39, 92–­94; cultural policy in, 12–­ 14, 31, 32–­33, 34–­44, 99–­100, 113; death of Touré in 1984, 14–­15, 19, 46, 112, 141; demystification campaign during, 15–­16, 33, 39, 101, 112, 154n18, 158n9; ethnicity during, 15, 34, 37, 156n28, 158n4; griots (Mande bards) and, 16–­18, 33, 34–­36, 39, 112; Guinean ballet during, 13–­14, 15–­18, 34–­36, 38–­44, 66, 72–­73, 99–­101, 111–­13, 141; independence from France (1958), 12, 36–­37; infrastructure for performing arts in, 13–­14, 141; music, dance, and theater as communicative media in, 1, 12–­14; nationalism and (see nationalism/ nationalist movements); Pan-­Africanist ideology and, 12, 15, 31, 100; privatization of ballet following (see troupes/ballets); Quinzaine Ar­ tistiques (festival), 14, 60–­61; relationship between authoritarianism and creativity, 33, 36–­ 40; repression during, 1, 15–­18, 37–­40, 49; Susu (Sooso) language and, ix; transition to capitalism and, 14–­15, 18, 23–­24, 27, 47–­48, 49, 78, 80–­ 81, 100, 123–­24, 128, 138–­40 Hannaford, Dinah, xiii, 74 Hansen, Karen Tranberg, 151n1 Harkness, Nicholas, 129 Harrison, Simon, 113, 131 Hashachar, Yair, 12, 60–­61, 152n8, 160n12 Hassim, Shireen, 80 “heart” (bɔɲɛ), 7, 70, 142 Heath, Deborah, 127 Hoffman, Barbara, ix, 16, 34, 98, 155n20, 162n8, 164n2 Hoffman, Danny, xiii, 20, 25 Højbjerg, Christian Kordt, 15, 33, 158n9 Horoya-­Hebdo (socialist-­era gazette), ix–­x, 13, 37, 39 Hough-­Snee, Dexter Zavalza, 69 Humphrey, Caroline, 47, 128 iconic signs/iconicity, 91, 99–­101, 103–­8, 158n5 improvisation (urban theory), xiii

index improvisational dance: in ceremonies, xi–­xiii, 83–­ 84, 110–­11, 116 (see also ceremonies/dance gatherings; dundunbas; sabars); gigoteau, 110–­11, 114–­24, 129; troupes/ballets and, xi–­xiii, 66–­67, 68–­73, 80 inalienability/inalienable possessions, 123, 124 indexicality, 18, 47, 137, 158n5. See also emblem (indexical icon) infinite repertoire, concept of, 108–­9 infrastructure: body and, xiii, 7, 20, 21; dance in­ frastructure in contemporary Conakry, 5–­9, 26, 45, 48–­49, 61, 63–­64, 142–­43; material infrastructure of Conakry, xiii, 20, 23, 137, 166n16; people as, xiii, 21; for performing arts in socialist Guinea, 13–­14, 141; semiotics and, 23, 143 inheritance, 110, 111, 113, 123, 163n3, 163–­64n4 Institute for Research on Applied Linguistics (IRLA), ix–­x intangible heritage, 27, 113, 123, 163n3, 163–­64n4 intergenerational tensions: continuity between generations and, 121–­24 (see also cultural inheritance); core steps (pas xɔri), 92, 110, 113, 118; in dundunba and sabar circles, 86, 111, 130–­33; in gerontocratic and patriarchal authority of directors in troupes, 65–­66, 69, 71–­80, 162n11; gifting and respect and, 119–­23; gigoteau and, 110–­11, 114–­24, 129; knowledge hoarding by di­ rectors, 79–­80, 142; in mixing of dance types, 111–­13; in transmission of Guinean ballet across time, 111–­13; uses and abuses of gerontocracy, 77–­80 IRLA (Institute for Research on Applied Linguistics), ix–­x Irvine, Judith, 133, 162n8 Islam, 16, 72, 75, 156n28 Jackson, Janet, xi, xii Jakobson, Roman, 74, 84, 155n26, 161n7 James, C. L. R., 69 Jansen, Jan, 16, 104, 162n8 JRDA (La Jeunesse du Rassemblement Démocratique Africain; youth wing of the PDG), 77 Juompan-­Yakam, Charisse, 2 Kaba, Lansiné, 12, 37, 38 Kaké, Ibrahima Baba, 37, 156n28 Karp, Ivan, 103 Keane, Webb, xiii, 91, 129, 155n21, 155–­56n26, 164n8 Keita, Bintu, 37 Keita, Fodéba, 13, 159n12, 165n11 kenkeni drums, 54, 89, 156n28 Kildea, Gary, 69 Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett, Barbara, 163n4 Kockelman, Paul, xiii, 7, 143, 155n26 konkɔba (dance), 89, 90–­91, 105–­8 Kourouma, Fatoumata (dancer), 85–­86

187 Kouyate, Bountourabi (dancer), 110–­11, 112, 118, 121, 142 Kouyate, Kabine, 37 Kratz, Corinne, xiii, 152n5, 162n10 Lala (Maimouna Camara, dancer), 76–­77, 93, 98 Lamah, Kerfalla (director, pseud.), 126, 165n3 Lamah, Lamine (dancer, pseud.), 126–­28, 134–­36, 165n3 Lamp, Frederick, 154n18 Larkin, Brian, 7, 132–­33, 137, 143 Leach, Jerry W., 69 Lemon, Alaina, 129 Lemon, T. J., 25, 152n6, 162n2 Lepselter, Susan, 32 Lock, Margaret, 130 Lootvoet, Benoît, 37 Lukács, János, 32 Macauley, Jeanne (directress), 131 Mahmood, Saba, 141 Mains, Daniel, 136, 137, 151n1, 152n7 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 74, 161n7 Mande: aesthetics, 86, 128, 165n8; artisans (nyama­ kala), 16–­17, 108, 154n18; bards (see griots [Mande bards]); defined, 154–­55n19; emotional display, 164–­65n2; gender relations, 98; “heat,” 102–­4; kinship, 72; languages, ix, 154–­55n19; music, 162 Mandel, Ruth, 47 Manning, Patrick, 151n1 (invitation), 158n7 Mara, Aly (dancer), 52, 64, 90–­91, 105, 107, 114–­15, 150 Maranz, David E., 79 Marcus, Greil, 83, 125 Marx, Karl, 18, 129 masks: in staged ballet vs. “village” dance, 100–­101; Yole (masked dance) and, 54–­58, 160n11 Masquelier, Adeline, 151n1 Massumi, Brian, 155n26 Matam, Conakry, xv, 4, 5, 21 materiality: performativity and (see performativity); semiotics and, xiii, 18, 143, 155–­56n26, 163–­64n4 Mauss, Marcel, 113, 124, 130 Mazzarella, William, 29, 140, 155–­56n26, 157n1 Mbembe, Achille, 20, 74, 80, 113, 155–­56n26, 157n1 McGovern, Mike, 12, 15, 31, 33, 36–­38, 42, 49, 75, 77, 80, 94–­96, 103, 137, 141, 153n12, 154nn15–­16, 154n18, 154–­55n19, 155n23, 157n2, 158n4, 158nn8–­9, 159n2, 163n4, 166n15 McNaughton, Patrick, 16, 72, 86, 102–­3, 104, 128, 154n18, 163n2, 165n8 Meintjes, Louise, 25, 152n6, 162n2 Meiu, George Paul, 78 Melly, Caroline Marie, 108–­9, 151n1 Merveilles de Guinée, Les/Ballet Merveilles. See Ballet Merveilles

188 metalevel framing, 9, 79–­80, 152n5 metasemiotics/metapragmatics. See metalevel framing migration, 18–­19, 49, 51, 78–­79, 143, 149–­50, 155n24, 160n7 militant theater, 12, 34, 35, 77, 100 Millar, Kathleen, 128 Mortimer, Edward, 36 Mouralis, Bernard, 13, 37 Munn, Nancy, 129, 138 Myers, Fred, 164n5 Nadkarni, Maya, 24 Nakassis, Constantine, xiii, 152n5, 164n7 national ballets: in First Republic, 1, 13, 15, 18, 31, 33, 37, 40, 165n11 (see also Ballet de l’Armée [na­ tional military ballet]; Ballet Djoliba [national ballet company]; Ballets Africains, Les [national ballet company]; Guinean ballet); in other Afri­ can countries, 13, 163n5; in postsocialist Guinea, 2, 14, 46–­48, 50, 159–­60n6, 162n11 National Cultural Festival (1970), 39 nationalism/nationalist movements: in Africa, 13, 34, 59, 67, 163n5; dance troupes (see Guinean ballet); festivals and, 14, 39, 60, 152–­53n8, 153n12, 160n12; in Guinea, 1, 13–­15, 31, 37, 39, 42, 94, 158n4, 159n5, 165n9 Navaro-­Yashin, Yael, 155–­56n26 neoliberalism/neoliberal economic reforms: in Africa, xii, 24, 80, 123, 155n24; anthropology of, 128, 151n1; in Guinea, 19, 24, 27, 49, 67, 78, 123, 125–­26, 136, 139, 140; postsocialism and, 47, 128 Neveu Kringelbach, Hélène, 13, 21, 66, 125, 127, 152n3, 155n24, 161n1, 163n6, 164n6, 165nn6–­7 Newell, Sasha, xiii, 108–­9, 135, 155–­56n26 Ngai, Sianne, 139, 155–­56n26 Nima (Nimatoulaye Camara, dancer), xi–­xii, 142, 149 Nimbaya (ballet), 22, 161n5 Nuttall, Sarah, 20 Nyabola, Nanjala, 80 nyamakala (Mande artisans), 16–­17, 108, 154n18 nyama/ɲama (vital or spiritual force), 16–­18, 103–­8 Obarrio, Juan M., 47, 80, 121 O’Neill, Bruce, 128 Ong, Aihwa, 140 orthography notes, ix–­x Osborn, Emily Lynn, 96, 98 O’Toole, Thomas, 14, 159n5 Oushakine, Serguei, 39 Paley, Julia, 80 Pan-­Africanism, 12, 15, 31, 100, 152–­53n8 Park, Mungo, 34 “passport moves,” 113

index pas xɔri (core steps), 92, 104, 110, 113, 118, 163n2 PDG-­RDA (Parti Démocratique de Guinée-­ Rassemblement Démocratique Africain), 34, 35–­40, 75, 77, 94 pedagogy, 65–­68, 71–­75 performativity, 16, 17, 23, 29–­30, 38, 47, 73, 123, 135, 141, 162n8 personhood: bigness and, 138; embodied training and, 69, 71; gendered, 27, 96, 98 (see also gender); individual and collective, 119; kinship and, 72 Phelan, Peggy, 108 Philipps, Joschka, 18, 155n23, 158n3 photography, 25 Pieterse, Edgar, 18, 20 Pitcher, Anne, 80 Plissart, Marie, xiii, 20, 23, 25 Polak, Rainer, 165n7 political subjectivity, 9, 18, 26–­27, 64, 155n22 polyrhythm, 88, 162n1 pop dance, 156–­57n32 postsocialism (anthropology of), 29, 47, 80, 121, 128 power, xiii; aesthetics of, 165n8; dundunba and, 88–­ 89, 91 (see also sɛnbɛ [power/strength]); esoteric/metaphysical, 15, 99, 101–­3, 154n18, 165n8. See also nyama/ɲama (vital or spiritual force) precarity: anthropology of, 127–­28, 138; Guinean sabars and, 132, 136, 138–­40; postsocialism and, 49, 109, 123; qualities and, 129, 140 privatization: and private ballets in Conakry, 46–­ 51 (see also troupes/ballets); as symbol for the end of socialism, 47 “pump” step, in dundunbas, xii, 87–­89, 91–­99, 121, 143–­44 Pype, Katrien, 21 quality: anthropology of, 129; emergent, 129, 130, 139, 140 Quinzaine Artistiques (Artistic Fortnights, biennial festivals), 14, 60–­61 Radio Télévision Guinéenne (RTG), 26, 59 Rancière, Jacques, 29 RDA. See PDG-­RDA (Parti Démocratique de Guinée-­Rassemblement Démocratique Africain) Reed, Daniel B., 13 repertoire: defined, 24, 156n29; infinite, 108–­9; in­ heritance of, 111, 113–­14, 118, 123; performance studies and, 34, 108, 156n29; semiotic, 124, 144, 164n8 reputation. See xili (name/reputation) resemblances (iconicity), 91, 99–­101, 103–­8 resonance, 32, 33, 40, 108 resourcefulness, xii–­xiii, 18, 21, 30, 108, 141–­42 respect (binyɛ), 42, 119–­21, 132

index revolution: example of term’s usage, 14, 31, 158n10; Guinean “cultural revolution,” 154n17, 160n12. See also Guinean First Republic (1958–­84) Rivière, Claude, 14, 15, 33, 151n1 (invitation), 153n11, 162n8 Robinson, Jennifer, 20 Roy, Ananya, 140 Rubiik, George, 37 sabars, 4, 7–­9, 125–­40; ballet genre vs., 130–­32 (see also troupes/ballets); dundunbas vs., 132–­33 (see also dundunbas); electrical amplification/ outage and, 130, 136–­38; excess in, 125, 126–­30, 134–­40; female dancers and, 126–­28, 130, 131, 133, 138–­40; Guinean vs. Senegalese, 125–­33; hypersexuality, 126–­28, 130, 138–­40; income generation by artists in, 120, 131, 132–­33, 134–­36; intergenerational tensions and, 86, 130–­32; introduction in Conakry, 130–­31, 164n1, 165n10; money “spraying” and, 130, 134–­36, 139–­40; rise to popularity in Guinea, 125–­26, 130–­31; Senegalese sabar, 125–­27; value transformation (Munn) and, 129, 138 Samato (ballet), 52 Samuels, David W., 113 sangban drums, 54, 89, 156n28 Sano, Sekou (director), 6, 50, 59, 61, 63, 72, 75–­78 Sarró, Ramon, 12, 79, 154n18 Schatzberg, Michael G., 12 Schauert, Paul, 13, 153n8, 155n24, 163n4 Schmidt, Elizabeth, 13, 36, 75, 94, 96, 153n13, 162–­63n3 Schneider, Rebecca, 123 sɔkɔ/sɔkɔ chaud (dance), 104–­5, 107–­8, 110–­11 Sekou (Sekou Sano, director), 6, 50, 59, 61, 63, 72, 75–­78 semiotics (Peircean): affect and, xiii, 166n26; con­ tainment and, 132–­33; infrastructure and, 23, 143; materiality and, xiii, 18, 143, 155–­56n26, 163–­ 64n4; reflexive framing and, 152n5 (see also meta­ level framing); repertoires and, 124, 144, 164n8; resources and, xii–­xiii, 18, 21, 30, 108, 141–­42; vs. Saussurian semiology, xiii; semiotic ideology, 164n8 sɛnbɛ (power/strength), 17–­18, 88, 90–­91, 103–­8, 155n20 Senegal: choreographers from, 66–­67; École Nor­ male Supérieure William Ponty and, 12–­13; Guinean sabars and, 125–­33 Serres, Michael, 7 Shay, Anthony, 13 Shevchenko, Olga, 24, 47, 121, 128 Shipley, Jesse Weaver, 13, 21, 112 Shipton, Parker M., 110, 164n5 Sidibé, Laye, 49–­50 Simmel, Georg, 102 Simone, AbdouMaliq, xiii, 20, 21, 51, 140 Sitas, Rike, 18

189 Skinner, Ryan Thomas, 13, 155nn24–­25 Smith, Daniel Jordan, xiii, 166n14 Smith, Laurajane, 123 Sneath, David, 143 socialism: anthropology of, 32, 40, 47, 60; Guinean version of, 14 (see also Guinean First Republic [1958–­84]); Socialist realism, 157n1 Somners, Marc, 151n1 Sotelo Eastman, Alexander, 69 Soumah, Alseny (dancer), 83, 149 Soumah, Assiatou (dancer), 10 Soumah, Damaye “Bountou” (dancer), 12, 15, 42–­ 43, 122–­23 Soumah, Fode (dancer), 143 Soumah, Yamoussa (director), 6, 7, 61–­63, 65, 70, 72, 77–­79, 121–­23, 122 Soumare, Mr., 59–­60 Souraxata (ballet), 22, 63 Soviet Union, 32, 39, 40, 60 Spinner, Christine Mons, 66, 158n3 state-­sponsored art, 31–­40, 158n3. See also Guinean First Republic (1958–­84); national ballets Steingo, Gavin, 141, 159n13 Stoler, Ann Laura, 30 Straker, Jay, 12, 15, 33, 35, 77, 107, 112, 158n9, 161n6 structural adjustment, 47. See also neoliberalism/ neoliberal economic reforms Susu (Sooso) language and orthography, ix–­x Sylla, Kerfalla (dancer), 95 Sylla, Moussa “Ele” (dancer), 21–­22, 42, 94, 142 Sylla, N’nato (dancer), 97 Sylla, Salimatou (dancer), 98 Tang, Patricia, 125 Taussig, Michael T., 16 Taylor, Diana, 34, 130, 156n29 Taylor, Julie M., 25 Taylor, Mary, 13 Thomas, Dominic, 38, 158n3 Thrift, Nigel, 21 Todorova, Maria, 24 Touré, Ahmed Sékou: cultural policy under, 12–­14, 17, 19, 32, 34–­36, 43, 44, 60, 66, 72, 161n1, 164n1; death of, 14–­15, 19, 46, 112, 141; independence from France (“no” vote) and, 36, 158n8; oratory of, 38; reign of, 12–­15, 38, 43, 49, 75, 154n17, 159n12 (see also Guinean First Republic [1958–­84]); at the second Congress of Black Writers and Artists (Rome, 1959), 40 Touré, M., 39 transcription notes, ix–­x transformation: and “becoming,” 23–­24; embodied, 70–­7 1, 108; “heat” and, 104–­5, 108; political-­ economic, 23–­24, 47, 80–­81, 123, 126–­27; rural to urban (in dance), 2, 24, 104, 112; subjective, 24; value (Munn), 129

190 troupes/ballets, 2–­7, 45–­64; Africa Danse, 52; AGDP and, 45–­46, 48–­58, 60, 64; Ballet Matam, 5–­6, 22, 25, 52, 71, 74–­76; Ballet Soleil d’Afrique, 6; clothing and appearance of dancers in, 75–­76, 162n9; cosmopolitan ceremonies and, 4–­5, 66–­ 67, 83; creative improvisation of dancers in, xi–­ xiii, 66–­67, 68–­73, 80; daily training of dancers, xii, 2–­3, 6–­7, 25, 67; discipline and courage of dancers in, 65–­66, 68–­73, 80–­81; fluidity of, 4–­6; funding sources for, 2–­3, 46–­47, 49, 58, 61; gen­ der divisions in ballet repertoires, 94–­96; gerontocratic and patriarchal authority of directors in, 65–­66, 69, 71–­80, 162n11; impact of Guinean diaspora and, 78–­79, 149–­50; knowledge hoarding by directors, 79–­80, 142; lack of choreographic innovation in, 66–­67, 68–­73; Nimbaya (ballet), 22, 161n5; persistence despite lack of government support, 2–­3, 6–­7, 46–­47, 49, 54, 61, 63–­64, 94–­96, 112–­13; privatization of, 45–­51; rehearsal spaces for, 5–­6, 22; Samato (ballet), 52; Souraxata (ballet), 22, 63; Wofa (ballet), 52. See also aesthetic/affecting politics; Conakry dance-­ music; Guinean ballet Tsing, Anna, 128, 138 Turino, Thomas, xiii Turner, Victor, xiii, 80 UNAMGUI/Union Nationale des Artistes Musicians de Guinée (National Union of Musician-­ Artists of Guinea), 159n1, 159nn3–­4 Urban, Greg, 152n5 urbanization: aesthetics and, 103, 105, 128; dance and, 48, 94, 99, 100, 105, 111, 112–­13, 118, 130–­33 (see also ceremonies/dance gatherings; Conakry dance-­music; dundunbas); of Guinean ballet, 48; identity and, 2, 4, 21, 44, 90–­91, 107, 119; personhood (gendered) and, 27, 96, 98; space/ place and, 20, 23, 24, 86, 90; theory of, xiii, 20,

index 21, 51 (see also infrastructure; resourcefulness). See also African cities Verdery, Katherine, 14, 18, 32, 47, 128 Vigh, Henrik, xiii, 108–­9, 151n1, 152n7 Volkov, Vadim, 128 Von Schnitzler, Antina, 18, 143 waakili (courage): defined, 21; in Guinean dance, 65, 69, 70, 80 Wacquant, Loïc, 69, 71 Wallach, Jeremy, 137 Wastero (Sekouba Camara, director), 56, 121–­23 Waterman, Christopher, 21, 152n3 Waugh, Linda R., 84 Weber, Max, 18 Wedeen, Lisa, 141 Weiner, Annette B., 123, 124, 164n5 White, Bob, 21, 80, 135 Williams, Raymond, 130, 139 Willits, Brad, ix Wofa (ballet), 52 worlding, 140 world-­making, 17, 24, 29–­30, 118, 123, 155n21, 159n13. See also performativity xɔri (core/bone), defined, 113, 163n2. See also pas xɔri (core steps) xili (name/reputation), xi–­xiii, 7, 19, 72, 83, 118, 166n1 Yamoussa (Yamoussa Soumah, director), 6, 7, 61–­ 63, 65, 70, 72, 77–­79, 121–­23, 122 Yansane, Abdoulaye (dancer), 11 Yayo, Fatoumata “Fanta” (dancer), 91–­92, 142, 150 Yole (masked dance), 54–­58, 160n11 youth (theory/defined), 151n1, 152n7 Yurchak, Alexei, 33, 40, 141