Infinite Repertoire: On Dance and Urban Possibility in Postsocialist Guinea
Adrienne J. Cohen
Abstract
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. Guinea’s socialist state (1958-84) 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 liberalizatio ... More
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. Guinea’s socialist state (1958-84) 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. This book links politics and aesthetics and situates 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.
Keywords:
dance,
African cities,
politics and aesthetics,
Guinea,
Conakry,
youth,
postsocialism
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2021 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226762845 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: January 2022 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226781167.001.0001 |
