MOTHER AFRICA African Women and the ArtsSymposium and Aza Concert

Ohio University, April 30-May 2, 2009

Program

Thursday, April 30th Baker Center Theater

8:00-9:00am Coffee and Registration

9:00-9:15am Greetings and pouring of libation by George Amagnoh, Ohio University

9:15-9:20am Musical Interlude on Kora by Estelle Lavoie

9:20-9:30am Welcome by Maureen Wagner, Project Director, Arts for Ohio, Ohio University

9:30-10:30am Session 1: African Women and Theater

Omofolabo Ajayi-Soyinka (The University of Kansa)A Walk Across Stage: Considering Theater (s) in Africa

10:30-10:45am Coffee Break

10:45-11:45am Session 2: African Women and Visual Arts

Modou Dieng (Pacific Northwest College of Art)Afropolitan Factory: Curating Contemporary Africa

11:45 – 1:30pm Lunch

1:30-2:30pm Session 3: African Women and Dance

Kariamu Welsh (Temple University)African Dance in the Diaspora: Artistic Legacy and Aesthetic Heritage

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2:30-3:30pm Session 4: African Women, Music and Interdisciplinary Arts

Daniel Avorgbedor (Ohio State University)Radical or Rational Traditions? A Reconsideration of the Role of Women in African Performing Arts

3:30-3:45pm Coffee Break

3:45-4:45 Session 5: African Women and Theater

Esiaba Irobi (Ohio University)I Am The Woodpecker That Terrifies The Trees: Female Masquerade/Performance Traditions in Africa versus Patriarchy

4:45 –5:45 Session 6: Open Forum

5:45–7:00 Dinner

7:00-9:00pm Film and Panel Discussion by Keynote SpeakersMovement (R) evolution Africa: A story of an ArtForm in Four Acts by Joan Frosch (Producer/Director)Moderator: Esiaba Irobi (Ohio University)

Friday May 1, 2009 Meet the Keynote Speakers

9:00am-12:00pm Daniel Avorgbedor Special Workshop/Lecture Demonstration Ewe and Akan Kente (Narrow Strip Horizontal Loom) Weaving, Grover Atrium

12:00-1:00pm Estelle Lavoie Room 494, Glidden Hall, School of Music

01:00-2:00pm Modou Dieng Yamada House Seminar Room, African Studies Program

03:00-5:00pm Kariamu Welsh and Omofolabo Ajayi-SoyinkaShirley Wimmer Dance Theatre, School of Dance

7:30-9:30pm Aza Concert African Music and Dance Festival Dedicated to All Women Templeton-Blackburn Alumni Memorial Auditorium

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Saturday May 2, 2009 Drumming and Dance Workshops

9:00 -10:30am Drumming Workshop: Paschal Yao Younge, (Ohio University)

Shirley Wimmer Dance Theatre, School of Dance

10:30-12:200pm Dance Workshop: Zelma Badu-Younge, (Ohio University) Shirley Wimmer Dance Theatre, School of Dance

Biographies

Daniel Avorgbedor, PhD (IU—Bloomington, 1986) is Associate Professor, School of Music and in the Dept of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University (1995-2009). He had taught at the University of Ghana (Legon), Bretton Hall College (UK), and City College of New York. He served as editor of RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 1990-1994. His research and teaching specializations include methodological issues in studying the African Diaspora; urban ethnomusicology; dialectics of musical, cultural, and political autonomies in contemporary church music in Africa; liturgical dance in select African American churches; sacred-secular interface in contemporary African American performance culture; and social aggression and musical creativity in rural and urban Anlo-Ewe societies. Daniel’s scholarly works include entries in the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music (1998), New Grove Dictionary of Music (2000), African Folklore: An Encyclopedia (Routledge, 2004), Shamanism: An Encyclopedia of World Beliefs, Practices, and Culture (ABC-CLIO, 2004), Ewe Handbook, Vol. 3 (Woeli, 2005).  He edited the collection of essays, The Interrelatedness of Music, Religion and Ritual in African Performance Practice (Mellen, 2003) and also guest-edited a special issue of World of Music on “Cross-Cultural Aesthetics” (2003). His essays appeared in Ethnomusicology, World Music, Oral Tradition, Research in African Literatures,” Cahiers de musiques traditionnelles, etc. He is working on three book manuscripts: “Haló performance and social aggression;” “Musical Traditions in Transition: The Urban Anlo-Ewe;” and Methodological Issues in Studying the African Diaspora.”  Major research grants include H.F. Guggenheim, Wenner-Gren, and NEH (team).

Daniel’s major vocation and main source of income while growing up was the kente, the traditional narrow-strip loom weave closely identified with the Ewe and Akan. His hometown, Seva, is one of the renowned locations for the weaving industry among the Ewe people and which are frequented by Yoruba and Hausa traders, the main clientele (i.e., traveling from Nigeria to the Keta and Agbozume markets located in the Volta Region, Ghana). Daniel has conducted workshops and demonstrations on the Ewe weaving tradition at festivals, art guilds, and at the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Kariamu Welsh, Professor and the Department of Dance Chairperson, received her Doctorate of Arts from New York University and her MA.H. from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Widely published in both scholarly journals and book length studies, she is a scholar of cultural studies including performance and culture within Africa and the African Diaspora. Dr. Welsh serves as the Director of the Institute for African Dance Research and Performance. She is the author of two recently published books by Africa World Press, Trenton, NJ: Zimbabwe Dance: Rhythmic Forces, Ancestral Voices and An Aesthetic Analysis and Umfundalai: An African Dance Technique. She is the editor of The African Aesthetic: Keeper of Traditions (Greenwood Press, 1994) and African Dance: An Artistic, Historical and Philosophical Inquiry (Africa World Press, 1996). She co-edited African Culture: Rhythms of Unity (Africa World Press, 1985). Dr. Welsh is the artistic director of Kariamu & Co.: Traditions. Kariamu is the recipient of numerous fellowships, grants and awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Choreography Fellowship, the Creative Public Service Award of NY, a 1997 Pew Fellowship, a 1997 Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a 1998 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant, and three Senior Fulbright Scholar Awards. She is the founding artistic director of the National Dance Company of Zimbabwe in southern Africa. Dr. Welsh is the creator of the Umfundalai dance technique, a Pan African contemporary technique that has been in existence for over thirty-three years.

Omofolabo Ajayi-Soyinka, is Associate Professor at The University of Kansas, Department of Theatre and Film Department of Theatre Research Area - Critical Theory in African Literature, Feminist Issues in Africa. Teaching Area - African women's studies, African and African Diaspora theatre, Dance, Theatre history & critical theory. My area of specialty is African literature and theatre with emphasis on women's writing. Part of my research also borders on the African Diaspora particularly on the use of theatre and its depiction of women during independent struggles; there are remarkable similarities with the experience of continental Africans. However, in my current research I concentrate on the intersection of national and gender identities in African women's creative writings (prose and drama) and their impact on critical theory of African literature since the 1970s. For theoretical analysis, I draw largely on feminist and social semiotics. My published works include: Yoruba Dance: The Semiotics of Movement and Body Attitude in a Nigerian Culture; Negritude, Feminism and the Quest for Identity: Re-reading Mariama Bo's So long a letter; "Gender and the Revolutionary Ethos in Morountodun" in Femi Osofisan: Interpretative Essays 1; and "Performing Phillis Wheatley: Research Notes." I also enjoy the practical aspects of my theatre training, so I

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do act in, dance, and choreograph plays. Examples are the creation and performance of "Phyllis Wheatley" the 18th century African poetess, choreography of Many Colors Make The Thunder King at the Gutherie Lab. Theatre; and directing "Sistahs and Brothers in Identity Crisis”. Courses I teach reflect my diverse research interests, and these include: Women in African Literature, Women of Africa Today, Post-Modern Theory and Criticism in the African Diaspora, African Dance Theatre, Race and the American Theatre, Post-Colonial Discourse & Literature, Theatre History in Western Civilization.

Modou Dieng is a multidisciplinary artist working in mixed media, painting, photography and installation. Dieng’s interests lie in conceptualizing visions of contemporary life constituted by a mix of humanity, topography, and pastiche of forms. Dieng evokes the city’s continuously changing façade, as well as the hybrid character and eclectic combination. The issues deal with urban history, race, social status, gender, cosmopolitanism, and belonging. Modou Dieng has exhibited with numerous galleries and Museum including Steve Turner Gallery (Los Angeles) Pascal Polar Gallery (Brussels), Dakar Biennale, Carousel du Louvre (Paris), Sarah Lawrence College (NY), Umass Boston, Museum of Contemporary African and Diaspora Art (NY), Casa Encendida (Madrid), The Studio Museum (NY), JoBurg Art Fair (S-Africa). Dieng has done workshops and conferences in several institutions including – Brown University, University of West Florida, Universite Catholique de Louvain (Brussels), The Fire Station (Dublin), Denison University, and Ohio University. He is Founder and Curator of Worksound Gallery (Portland) and received his BA from Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts (Senegal), MFA from San Francisco Art Institute. Dieng is full time Faculty at PNCA.

Esiaba Irobi was born in the Republic of Biafra and has lived in exile in Nigeria, Britain and the USA. He studied at the Universities of Nigeria, Sheffield, and Leeds and holds a B.A. in English/Drama, M.A. Comparative Literature, M.A. Film/Theatre, and a PhD in Theatre Studies. His play, Cemetery Road, won the prestigious World Drama Trust Award for playwriting in 1992. His other published plays include Hangmen Also Die, The Colour of Rusting Gold, Nwokedi, Why the Vultures Head is Naked, What Song do Mosquitoes Sing? and the recently finished Foreplay commissioned by the Royal Court Theatre in London. He has directed numerous plays and productions in Ireland, Hungary, USA, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Australia, England, Nigeria, Portugal and Scotland. His forthcoming books include Theorizing African Cinema: Ontology, Teleology, Semiology and Narratology (Routledge, London) and Before They Danced in Chains: African Metalanguages in African-American Performance Aesthetics and a new adaptation of William Shakespeare's The Tempest commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival Theatre, USA. He has just completed a very exciting book of poetry: Why I Don't Like Philip Larkin which will be published by Nsibidi Publishers in Massachusetts by August, 2003.

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Abstracts

RADICAL OR RATIONAL TRADITIONS? A RECONSIDERATION OF THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN AFRICAN PERFORMING ARTS

ByDaniel Avorgbedor

This paper is guided by a number of premises and common assumptions about the status and role of women in African societies, with particular attention to the performing arts and related cultural practices. The first premise holds that past, misguided notions about women and issues of gender, in general, continue to frame our contemporary research projects and the conclusion. A second premise interrogates and clarifies local suppositions and their impact on the scope and quality of research on women’s contributions in the area of performing arts. A third premise argues that a “received,” canonical approach to and obsession with classification as a pseudo-scientific practice undermines a fundamental interrelationship among the “performing” arts, and among the arts and several domains of social, religious, political, and economic constitutions, for example. Fixed binaries such as male/female tend to accentuate differences, which is a basic challenge to the epistemological foundations of gender-oriented discourse. Thus, this paper argues for a sensitive research framework which acknowledges this interrelationship and thus able to identify and account for the expansive, significant sphere of women’s contributions in the performing arts and in society at large.

To this end, this paper raises and clarifies analytical approaches that draw on several field examples (including audiovisual and from the secondary literature) in order to demonstrate this interrelationship. The paper further examines women’s presence in religion and ritual, with focus on how and why these two performance sites embrace and is consummated through music-dance-drama. Additionally, examples are drawn from contemporary popular Christianity in order to not only establish continuity and transcendence of women’s “traditional” roles, but also to clarify the (re) inventions, and even contestations of the traditional image of the African woman in relation to various performance contexts. The legacies of postcolonial feminist and womanist orientations in the West, the expanding global crucible of ideas and products, and the emergence of new educational, economic, and political opportunities for women must be included among research sites in order to fully understand and hence appreciate the significant role and status of women in the performing arts, past and present. Male and female realms of being are always in complementary relationships; the extended vision of the performing arts (and related cultural practices) provides a fruitful space for examining and appreciating the benefits of this symbiotic relationship.

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A WALK ACROSS STAGE: CONSIDERING THEATER (S) IN AFRICABy

Omofolabo Ajayi-Soyinka

Beginning with a broad panoramic view of the different forms of theater in Africa, spiced with some anecdotal remembrances, this presentation takes a critical look at the roles, struggles and contributions of African women to theatre across time and space. Drawing largely from West African theatre traditions, but not limited to the region, it examines the aesthetic percepts as well as the socio-political, cultural, and economic contexts, whether indigenous or foreign that have structured, hindered or promoted women¹s voices and visibility as theatre artists and connoisseurs. The works of selected theatre practitioners writers, performers, choreographers and theatre owner-directors, will be used to highlight women¹s-centered issues in theatre as a gendered space of public entertainment at one level, and at another, as a microcosm of the larger cultural socio-political space of change and relevance.

AFROPOLITAN FACTORY: CURATING CONTEMPORARY AFRICABy

Modou Dieng

OutlineBeing with Reasons / Reasons of Being Reconstructing Africa! A search of identity through its global behaviors. Ethnicity, tradition, contemporary life, migration, gender, cultural heritage.

I AM THE WOODPECKER THAT TERRIFIES THE TREESFemale Masquerade/Performance Traditions in Africa versus Patriarchy

ByEsiaba Irobi

This paper examines how the female imagination, iconography, physical presence and audience participation are central to the creation, cultivation and continuity of many masquerade performance traditions in three indigenous Nigerian cultures namely Kalabari, Yoruba, and Igbo culture. It uses the Alagba, Gelede and Ogbodoanyi masquerade traditions to show how men have, at different times and places in Nigeria, appropriated, usurped or resisted masquerade traditions created or practiced by women. The paper also uses a rich harvest of visual evidence to show how and why a masculine and patriarchal institution such as the masquerade uses a vocabulary of feminine symbolism and feminine visual and kinesthetic dynamics to express the most precious values of the performing community on the African continent. This continental patriarchal monopoly is, then, contrasted with the African Diaspora where the women are in charge of such canonical and ritual performance traditions such as Santeria and Candomble and actually initiate men.

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