Only Black against a Sharp White Background: dance dramaturgy, race and the desire to remain openly faithful

Is the human zoo(1) still alive? Or, perhaps a better question: in what ways may the human zoo still be alive? What might be its afterlives? I’ve been thinking about that question ever since I started working as a dramaturg and curator at Kunstencentrum VIERNULVIER in Ghent, Belgium (2019 - 2023). The question was given form by the French academic Fanny Robles in her article “From Reverse Ethnography to Cultural Performance: Reenacting Colonial Shows in Contemporary France” (2018). Being a Black South African myself, being in a territory where the last human zoo was still functional as of 1958, sewed a slowly-germinating seed of reflection on what impact this would have on a society’s view of people of the Global South, specifically in the contexts of performance, and what consequences would that have dialogically on how artists of colour consider their own work: what limits, possibilities, assumptions, frictions and problematics does the legacy of human zoos propose?

The formal construction and viewing logic of the human zoo shares a logic with the world of performance. In fact, I don’t think it’s a stretch to call the human zoo a performance in and of itself: there is a demarcated ‘performance area’ that is accompanied by a scenography that colonial ethnologists envision of indigenous life in the Global South (from various fauna and flora, to recreations of human settlements); there is a performative score that the inhabitant-performers are made to enact (whether in the overt performativity of a figure like Sara Baartman(2) or the ‘improvised daily life’ score of other human zoos). The conventions of performance are apparent but, perhaps, of particular concern for me and my practice is the bodiliness of the human zoo. That it is not non-sentient objects that perform or are displayed but, rather, non-white humans. Black and brown bodies. And, it’s worth noting here the problematics, even in this essay, of speaking about ‘people’ as ‘bodies’ as it arguably reinscribes the colonial framing of the peoples of the Global South as a kind of object-commodity. But, I also think it’s useful in this context to pay particular attention to bodiliness when trying to unpack the specific traces of the human zoo in the bodily practices of live performance art forms and their impact on ways of seeing non-white people on stage. 

Diane Ackerman writes in A Natural History of the Senses, "Because the eye loves novelty and can get used to almost any scene, even one of horror, much of life can drift into the vague background of our attention."(3)

This seems a fitting description of what Katelyn E. Knox categorizes as “institutional spectacle” and “institutionalized spectacularism”: two categories that Knox argues inform one another to create a particular “culture of looking” informed by coloniality and the spectacle of the human zoo in relation to racialized people in France.(4) “Institutional spectacle” refers to state-subsidized interventions into or displays of race or national identity, such as the colonial expositions/exhibitions of human zoos, whereas “institutional spectacularism” refers to the legacies of racism that passively permeate society as a result of institutional spectacle that still have consequences for racialized people today.(5) In the context of Belgium, where the institutional spectacle of the human zoo dates roughly between 1897 (with the temporary exhibition of Leopold II’s country estate that would eventually become the Royal Museum for Central Africa) and 1958 (the year of the world’s fair/universal exhibition), the afterlives of the human zoos have been the subject of much academic and artistic scholarship, with a Parliamentary Commission ‘colonial past’ being set up in 2020,(6) seemingly in response to the global Black Lives Matter protests of the same period. 

Fast forward to the year 2022, I had the opportunity to work with a range of performance and dance artists as a dramaturg. One of these collaborations brought to the forefront this concern with the colonial and/or white gaze. The collaboration was with South African dance artist Moya Michael on a dance performance called Outwalkers concerned with “how to make sacred space” performed by a cast of all people of color, Michael included, and a supporting team of three black dramaturges (myself included). Michael has a longstanding practice in weaving dance, performance, history, and spirituality in her performance practice and work. Her Coloured Swan trilogy is a testament to the prevalence of these themes in her practice: investigating the histories of racial creolization and how these histories (often filled with violence) can also act as portals for considering our own senses of belonging and their proximities to histories of violent oppression and separatism. In Outwalkers, Michael brings her attention specifically to the spiritual traditions of Black and brown peoples the world over, going further to hone in specifically on the syncretic nature of many of these traditions. In this way, the focus on racial creolization is no longer in the foreground, but rather, the focus is on syncretism: the process of multiple discrete, metaphysical entities coming together to form something new and discrete from its progenitors. The work itself is primarily dance-based, with live music provided by performer Holland Andrews that ranges from the warm tones of the oboe to synthesized and looped distortions of their fearsome mezzo-soprano, and investigates certain choreographies of making sacred space. Taking inspiration from quotidian choreographies of spirituality (hands raised in prayer or veneration are a recurring motif; placing the forehead to the ground in veneration to ancestors or god is another choreographic motif, etc.) Michael in collaboration with dancer Camilo Mejía Cortés worked to deconstruct and reconstruct choreographies of sacred space-making while surrounded by a scenography of suspended bags of salt that slowly pour out from above onto the stage and, in some instances, the performers: an allegory for the cleansing rituals that salt can form a part of in spiritual traditions worldwide. 

This is when my thoughts relating to the connection between people of colour on stage and the exoticising legacy of human zoos comes in. I begin to wonder, if the history of the ‘cultural performance’(7) of people of colour in Europe has been undergirded by an exoticizing and objectifying framing, what might be our strategies for attending to this history? A history which I argue is a ‘living history’ in that there are still articulations(8)(9)(10) of the human zoo in contemporary society. Perhaps most notably in the controversial performance work, Exhibit B, by white South African Brett Bailey that literally displays people of colour in cages in an attempt to critically revisit the colonial history of human zoos. The public response, however, resulted in the presentation of Bailey’s work being cancelled in London in 2014 and creating uproar in Paris, where it was to be presented soon after the London cancellation.

To return to Outwalkers, my concern is less with the potentially exoticising gaze of the audience (the work was developed and presented in Brussels, Belgium, at the Royal Flemish Theatre), but rather about trying to pay special attention to what colonial scripts of ‘representing the Other’ may be at play as the work develops. Put another way, I am more interested in the experience, thinking and process inside of the work as opposed to the way the work is eventually viewed (though this is of course important). And, trying to identify if, and/or to what extent, colonial scripts affect the way in which people of colour represent themselves. One example of an attempted dramaturgical intervention into this might be the following: in one session of dramaturgy, I focused specifically on a section of choreography between Cortés and Michael. Cortés, in this sequence, finds himself at the front periphery of the stage, on his knees with his back to the audience, in an almost prayer-like or meditative position. Michael performs a solo of fluid movements across the hazily lit stage (very little front-of-house lighting, mostly side-lighting that gives shape to the body, but little to the details of the face, for example). These movements include arm movements where her arms create a semi-circle towards the ceiling of the space while Andrews provides a live musical score using the sound of pages being flipped into a microphone and then digitally looped. In the first iteration of this choreography, Michael performed this sequence facing the audience while Cortés sat on his haunches with his forehead to the ground. From my perspective, this read as a kind of priestess/goddess worship sequence, which was neither good nor bad, but it just seemed to very strongly suggest a certain relationality between Michael (as the priestess/goddess) and Cortés (as the supplicant). In the spirit of Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation in which he makes an argument for the right to opacity, it was my desire to make this relation between Michael and Cortés more opaque, less readable as an interpretation of a kind of ritual or cultural performance. I asked Michael if she would perform the solo with her back to the audience while paying more attention to the verticality of the space (ie: taking her gaze upward with her arms in certain moments of the sequence, allowing her upper back to bend backwards, etc) while I asked Cortés to simply watch Michael as he sat on his haunches, every now and again bringing his forward to the floor as before, but never keeping it there for long. This shifted the reading of the sequence to something that was less easily readable. The relation between Michael and Cortés became less hierarchical as Cortés actions no longer necessarily read as “for” Michael but rather “part of” what Michael was doing. Michael’s attention to the vertical read as some kind of reverential gesture towards a potential higher power, which in turn helped Cortés’ actions read as part of the same gesture while not necessarily fixing the reading of the sequence for the audience. 

To return to opacity and the human zoo, the logic of the human zoo was to use a certain level of transparency to create a certain kind of colonial meaning-making/argumentation. A literal transparency in the physical display of the people of the Global South in cages and a metaphysical transparency that juxtaposes the purported primitivity of the caged people with the modernity of the society of the onlookers. A colonially-inscribed, libidinal desire to demarcate the Other through a process of negation and abjection: not only are the people in cages the Other because they are transparently “not like us,” but they are also transparently inferior by virtue of their seemingly primitive way of life. One strategy to undermine this colonial logic and argumentation has been to undergo comprehensive historical and scientific analysis of the development of Global South societies to “prove” they are no more or less primitive or modern than the societies of the Global North. However, I align with Toni Morrison when she says,

…the function, the very serious function of racism…is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says that you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says that you have no kingdoms and so you dredge that up.  None of that is necessary.  There will always be one more thing.(11)

In this spirit, my desire and interventions for and in Outwalkers was focussed on the inner choreo-poetics of the work and framing the work — through scenography, costuming, musical score, text, etc. — in a way that is not referential or symbolic of a particular, identifiable cultural group, as if to ethnographically represent said group as in the examples of the European human zoo project, nor to “speak back” against the racist framing of peoples of colour throughout Europe. Rather, it was to hold the context of the colonial gaze in mind and use this as a catalyst to contextualise why I proposed certain dramaturgical interventions. In this way, the colonial gaze has a “use”: a certain utility that art workers of colour can be in reference to, without being totally dominated by in our attempts to speak back or re-historicise. For me, this is an important emancipatory option for arts workers of colour to not feel beholden to the history of the colonial gaze and, resultantly, somehow responsible for dealing with this gaze directly in the contemporary moment. Rather, it proposes that, indeed, the colonial gaze is (one of) the historical contexts that are present in the moment (or history) of contemporary performance, but, there are various options in how to relate to this historical context that are not either “ignoring” this context or “speaking back” against it. Removing this false binary, I believe, is useful in affording arts workers of colour access to more autonomy and creativity in relating to the afterlife of colonial ways of seeing.