
Dear Coree,
I’m showing you this image of an Ndebele woman and her painted house because to you, and most Americans, it seems authentically “African”. This woman is the exotic “other,” untainted by the west. Although tradition has its place in the South Africa I’ve experienced so far, it has little to do with South African culture at large.
I think I have subconsciously wanted South Africa’s painting to look like Ndebele walls, its music to sound like drums, and its dancing to move like traditional Zulu dance. I wanted to pin these arts to a board like butterflies. I wanted to look at and be inspired by them. I even made a series of work based on Ndebele paintings. I wanted to use imagery that most would recognize as “African.”
When I got here, I wanted to see dance that was “African.” Of course I was thrilled when I got to see a performance of traditional Zulu dance at Cato Crest Community Center my second week in the country. The place was packed for the Jambo Dance Festival’s Youth Performance. At least a hundred young dancers crowded the edges of the room waiting to perform, and about a hundred more people, myself included, sat in folding chairs facing the stage. We watched kids stumble through modern moves thrown together to inspirational songs. One highly sexual number performed by twelve year olds was especially jarring, but overall I was delighted to see that young people were working together and being creative outside of school. The Zulu performance, however, stole the show. The group of young men who took the stage were dressed in cow-skin anklets, headdresses and ibeshus around their waists. Their wiry muscles became possessed with a wild machine gun rhythm from calfskin drums. Their legs flew into the air in signature Zulu high kicks, and they each performed funny individual pantomimes for the audience. I thought of you, Coree, and your studies of African dance in Boston. This, surely, was as authentic as African dance can get. I regretted not having my video camera to capture the show and bring it back for everyone in the States to marvel at. Luckily I saw them perform a second time this past weekend outside of the Workshop. I pulled out a video camera and recorded some of the show.
A week later I met another African dancer. Her name is Lolo and she’s a senior at Cato Crest High School. Although her mother teaches African dance at a University in New York, she knows little of traditional styles. Lolo dances hip-hop and pop-and-lock. She visited New York in December 2009 through January 2010. She told me, “In America they expected me to know African dance, but I’m a new generation. My parents grew up with that but I didn’t, so I don’t know it. I wear my swag (brand name clothing) and kicks and Americans are surprised.” She talked about seeing a lot of crump and hip-hop dancing in the streets and taking some of their quick sharp movements back to her dance group here. When they asked how she came up with the new moves she, being a joker said, “Oh I’m just clever.”
Lolo talked about how American style and culture is what this generation of South Africans consider desirable. She seems caught in between the old and the new. “It’s like I don’t know what my culture is…it’s like I’m lost” she told me. She explained that people come from America to Africa hoping to see “traditional” African dance, but no one really does that. The exceptions are the few who get paid to perform it (what I saw at the community center and in town), and the young people who live in rural areas like Zululand, where Zulu dance is still practiced often on the homestead farms. Lolo does wish this part of her culture were more accessible to her generation. She feels entitled to the old, while charging forward into the new. African arts are obviously a hybrid of many things, and rarely what westerners anticipate. I, as an artist, have the ability to change American’s perceptions of South African culture, but how to do this? I’m now critical of the video I recorded of Zulu dance, the work I’ve made from Ndebele patterns, and this postcard I send of the Ndebele woman. Are these images just servicing American entertainment at the expense of the Zulu people? Have I objectified Zulu culture with my work? Have I used Ndebele patterns to legitimize my artistic practice as intercultural and international? Is it okay for other cultures to be my material? Am I justified when my intent shifts from entertaining to educating through art? I fear I might accidentally portray African culture in a way that perpetuates so many American’s clichéd notions of Africa. The only solution I can come to now is to find the hybrid styles of dance, music and especially visual art that most precisely represent the current moment of South African culture and bring them back to the states.
Steph I know you're waiting to send me an intellectually stimulating and compelling postcard and I will gladly accept. You may call it: "Postcard to my Other Sister." :)
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