‘C’est d’abord moi’: performing the identity of a professional female choreographer

Abstract

Within the ideological frame of ‘global art’, contemporary dance promotes norms of social and gender equality and celebrates cultural diversity in the form of highly individualized representations of collective experiences and aspirations. This inherently contradictory legitimizing ideology has opened up opportunities for female choreographers from Africa, an underrepresented category in this genre. Focusing a woman artist from Burkina Faso and one from Senegal, I examine how they use cultural and gendered differences as resources to position themselves on international art markets in a way that reflects ‘the dialectical doubleness of mediation’ (Mazzarella, William. 2004. “Culture, Globalization, Mediation.” Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (1): 345–367). In representing on stage the social conditions out of which their work has emerged, they potentially forge a career, thereby recursively remediating these social conditions. At the same time, they contribute to the creation of a translocally and transnationally embedded space where difference is shared, made and unmade on discursive and embodied levels in the performances of a cosmopolitan professional community.