Voices of Strength @ YBCA

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Voices of Strength:
A Two-Night Celebration of Contemporary Dance and Theater by Women from Africa
Oct 19 & 20, 2012 • YBCA Forum
The multi-lateral silence is deafening...

Within the hollow of a genocide, against the scorched side of a drought, despite the yawning regularity of abuse and intimidation, the texture of an African female aesthetic is coming into sharp focus.

(Or not...)

Voices of Strength is what happens when a myth grows up and begins to speak for itself. It is a collection of politicized, compassionate re-tellings of the human temperament "spoken" from the perspective of a re-positioned protagonist, the African woman, split into geographic parts, filling dry chasms of narrative holes. The artists represented in the two programs come to the United States from Mali and South Africa, Cote d'Ivoire and Morocco, Mozambique and more. They are choreographers, writers, singers, and designers with dissimilar views of a continent swathed in stereotype and monolith. They draw into the mythic space that the West projects onto them, responding at turns to the sexual violence and weaponry of cultural warfare, and also to the complex tenderness of sisterhood.

And...

Maybe their work isn't as vast as the Saharan trek in a Hollywood movie, and the smallness of their stories is actually the point.

See her...

A dark dancer in a dark dress. She is from Mozambique, looking dead at you, sight impaired.

Hear them...

Wailing women, monastic and ordinary, Francophile of the desert, arcing hands slicing between them like aberrant thoughts in a meditation.

Feel this...

Mother's milk in rain form, libation on an unlit stage, soaking two female letter-writers in the middle of a correspondence.

There are, without a doubt, sights and sounds from Voices of Strength that an American audience will never have seen before. There will be, for many, a new arrival at a more distinctive and empirically based composite of the African female experience. More poignantly however, there will be over-evidence of the familiar, a temple of ordinary textured female and African. These stories are slightly less than manifestoes, and correspondingly, are scaled huge precisely because of their intimate and approximate architecture.

—Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Director of Performance

"The work of art and the work of culture is to pave the way for a qualitative practice of the imagination — a practice without which we will have no name, no face, and no voice in history." — Achille Mbembe

As part of our commitment to supporting the work of contemporary African choreographers, YBCA welcomes Voices of Strength: A Two-Night Celebration of Contemporary Dance and Theater by Women from Africa, a U.S. debut tour that celebrates the stylistic diversity of contemporary performance across the African continent. Created and performed by Nelisiwe Xaba (South Africa), Kettly Noël (Haiti/Mali), Nadia Beugré (Côte d'Ivoire), Bouchra Ouizguen (Morocco) and Maria-Helena Pinto (Mozambique), the works in Voices of Strength use humor, irony, poignancy, and power to confront personal obstacles, address political and social issues, and paint true and vivid pictures of the lives of contemporary African women.