Invitation: City of Dance
Invitation: City of Dance
Through a series of ethnographic vignettes about urban dancers, the Invitation introduces key ideas in the book and contextualizes its main arguments historically. This chapter describes how staged performance was a promising political tool in socialist Guinea in part because of the powerful esoteric and socio-political capacities long associated with indigenous performance practices. During the First Republic, these practices were appropriated by the nation-state both forcefully through a state-sponsored iconoclastic campaign called Demystification, and voluntarily through the recruitment of lineage bards or griots. Young artists in contemporary Conakry build on this history as they summon the force of dance and music in constructing the urban present.
Keywords: performance, urban Africa, Demystification Campaign, dance, iconoclasm, socialism, griot, Conakry
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