Dancing Otherwise

In Senegal, a 2008 scandal involving what was rumored to be a “gay wedding” sparked a dramatic uptick in harsh, often violent, actions against members of the LGBT community there. Today, men who are gay (or perceived to be) continue to be shunned, attacked, and even jailed, as gay sex is a crime in that Muslim-majority country.

In an environment that has become openly hostile to homosexuality, performing dance works that contain homoerotic or effeminate moves might seem ill advised. But as Assistant Professor of Dance Amy Swanson points out, the contemporary Senegalese dance scene has actually become a liminal space in which artists can explore expressions of gender and sexuality that are at odds with social norms — as long as they deny they’re doing any such thing.

The key, Swanson explains, lies in this very “discrepancy between verbal framing and staged performance.” In other words, dancers are free to present the male body in ways that seem to reference sexuality, femininity, even closeting and coming out, as long as they toe the heteronormative line by publicly disavowing homosexuality. (Today’s severe homophobia is a recent phenomenon, Swanson notes. Decades ago in Senegal, there was more freedom to present oneself publicly in gender- and sexually fluid ways.) She describes the work of several Senegalese artists and their performances of these ambiguous masculinities in a paper published in the December 2019 issue of Dance Research Journal.

In 2016, Swanson embarked on a nine-month residency in Dakar, her fourth visit to Senegal after receiving her BFA in dance from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Conducting research with the company AEx-Corps as well as at other sites and contemporary dance schools — work that would inform her doctoral dissertation — she quickly noticed two changes in the contemporary dance scene since her earlier visits. “First, there were now a lot of women on the scene doing really interesting work as performers and as choreographers,” she says. “But I also started to see a trend in which men were taking up the public rhetoric of sexual surveillance and policing even as they played with gender and sexuality in their work.”

On stage, male artists performed sexually suggestive solos with effeminate gestures and feminine accessories and duets portraying homoerotic intimacy. Offstage, they denied the existence of any homosexual content. But in 2018, when Swanson returned to Senegal to conduct follow-up interviews with the artists for her research, they were more forthcoming and nuanced in discussions of their work. Her years of dancing and studying with them had built a foundation of trust, she says, and they were honored to talk about their work.

Analyses of three such performances, and their larger meaning in Senegalese society, were included in her dissertation and form the focus of Swanson’s recent article. She describes, for example, a solo in which the choreographer Hardo Kâ, a pious Muslim, deploys mirrors, lighting, and a seductive “dialectic of covering and revealing, hiding and exposing” to reference both femininity and homosexuality — only to denounce his feminine side and the immoral urge to “behave in contrast to ‘nature’” in a public discussion following his performance. Interviewing him two years later, Swanson came to understand that it is precisely because he is an artist that he can acknowledge, on stage, that he even has a feminine side, that his piece was open to the interpretation of recuperating the gender fluidity that was widely respected during his youth. Kâ’s piece and his commentary, Swanson writes, reveal the “tension between his desire to show all of himself publicly and the need to cohere to societal expectations.”

She also recounts a duet in which the dancers Mamadou Dieng and Thierno Diédhiou seem to be performing acts of homoerotic intimacy while offstage evoking the logic of contact improvisation, a dance form developed in the United States in the 1970s positing that bodies are ungendered, which enables them to disavow any sexual content in their work. Finally, she explains how the choreographer Bamba Diagne calls upon another homophobia-igniting scandal in his work, this one involving a widely condemned photo of the male pop star Wally Seck posing with a handbag to critique a hypocrisy in Senegalese society: the fact that everyone knows homosexuals exist and are tolerated (and indeed used to be celebrated) at the neighborhood level “in contradiction to widespread outcry when a transgression is carried out by a celebrity.” In his performance, Diagne ends up adorning his body with not one but five handbags in a dance that is increasingly “expansive and dynamic,” tying the accessory, Swanson explains, to “notions of pleasure and freedom imagined through the male body.”

Swanson frames her argument with the concept of “local-global entanglement,” the complicated coming together of disparate people, histories, nations, and influences. Contemporary Senegalese dance is local, for example, rooted in the communities and societal restrictions of that country, but it is also transnational, with artists traveling to and from, and studying in, Burkina Faso, South Africa, Bénin, even France, and being exposed to more progressive investigations of gender and sexuality. Its audiences are international as well and bring a variety of ideologies and expectations. And while it’s undeniably African, it is often subsidized by Western governments. This entanglement, or “this messiness,” Swanson says, enables artists to embrace ambiguity in their work. It frees them to danser autrement — to dance otherwise — and thus explore gender and sexuality in ways they normally could not.

Swanson, Colgate’s first permanent professor of dance, is keenly aware both of her privileged position as a white American scholar and of the sensitivities involved in publishing her paper. But, she says, she feels compelled to advocate for the artists’ work: “I hope that this article gets at the value of the really creative work they’re doing and how they navigate all the conflicting rhetorics, value systems, and expectations that they have to contend with.”