Infinite Repertoire: On Dance and Urban Possibility in Postsocialist Guinea

By Adrienne J. Cohen

In Guinea’s capital city of Conakry, dance is everywhere. Most neighborhoods boast at least one dance troupe, and members of those troupes animate the city’s major rites of passage and social events. In Infinite Repertoire, Adrienne Cohen shows how dance became such a prominent—even infrastructural—feature of city life in Guinea, and tells a surprising story of the rise of creative practice under a political regime known for its authoritarianism and violent excesses. Guinea’s socialist state, which was in power from 1958 to 1984, used staged African dance or “ballet” strategically as a political tool, in part by tapping into indigenous conceptualizations of artisans as powerful figures capable of transforming the social fabric through their manipulation of vital energy. Far from dying with the socialist revolution, Guinean ballet continued to thrive in Conakry after economic liberalization in the 1980s, with its connection to transformative power retrofitted for a market economy and a rapidly expanding city. Infinite Repertoire follows young dancers and percussionists in Conakry as they 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. Cohen’s inventive ethnography weaves the political with the aesthetic, placing dance at the center of a story about dramatic political change and youthful resourcefulness in one of the least-studied cities on the African continent.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Jul 23, 2021
• ISBN: 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

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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

Preface: Name-Finding

Invitation: City of Dance

PART I   Aesthetic Politics, Magical Resources

1   Why Authority Needs Magic

2   Privatizing Ballet

3   The Discipline of Becoming: Ballet’s Pedagogy

PART II   Delicious Inventions

4   Female Strong Men and the Future of Resemblance

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

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

Epilogue: Embodied Infrastructure and Generative Imperfection

Acknowledgments

Addendum: Artists in the Diaspora

Notes

References

Index

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 language sections of the socialist-era gazette Horoya-Hebdo, which I obtained from archival research in Conakry’s national library.

TABLE 1.1. Equivalencies across orthographic systems

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

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 stoically 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 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 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.

MAP 1. Location of Guinea in West Africa (map courtesy of Dr. Stephen Leisz)

MAP 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 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 circulation 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 sporadic emigrant artists’ remittances and artistic tourism and dismissed as insignificant by authorities in the ministry of culture.

FIGURE I.1. Rehearsal for the ballet Les Merveilles de Guinée, Dixinn, Conakry

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 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.

FIGURE I.2. Rehearsal for the percussion group Boca Juniors Percussions, Matam, Conakry

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 a dialectic between authority and vitality that has long informed the political subjectivities of Guinean artists.

FIGURE I.3. Rehearsal for the Ballet Communal de Matam, Matam, Conakry

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, 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.

FIGURE I.4. Rehearsal space for the Ballet Soleil d’Afrique, Bonfi, Conakry

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