Dancing Opacity

Amy Swanson's Dancing Opacity chronicles the ways in which contemporary dancers in Senegal navigate the global contemporary dance circuit while challenging heteropatriarchal ideologies at home. A longstanding hub of African performing arts, Senegal was at the forefront of the explosion of contemporary dance across the continent at the turn of the twenty-first century. Swanson demonstrates how Senegalese choreographers and dancers contend with entrenched racialized prejudices about Africa outside the continent, while pushing back against the repressive regulations of gender and sexuality within Senegal. Drawing on the concept of opacity as a refusal to adhere to the colonial logic of transparency for dominant gazes, artists create work that is intentionally ambiguous with multiple layers of meaning that are not immediately transparent to all viewers to evade Senegalese cultural norms that govern gender and sexual expression, while challenging their international audiences to expand their perceptions of African dance.

Drawing on ethnographic research, Dancing Opacity highlights Senegalese artists' accounts of their pedagogies, performances, aesthetics, and lived realities, as well as Africanist conceptions of gender, sexuality, and queerness that have yet to be applied to dance. Swanson presents contemporary dance as an intercultural and intercontinental entanglement shaped in large part by artists of color in the Global South, moving dance studies away from narratives depicting the progressive avant-garde as the prerogative of the white West while confining Africa as merely a source of dance traditions.