The personal is political, interweaving history through herstory
By Thobile Maphanga
The JOMBA! Legacy Platform closed with Germaine Acogny’s Somewhere at the Beginning, directed by Mikaël Serre which premiered in 2015. This is a work that deals in oppositions as it traverses the violent schisms of Africanity and Westernisation. With the use of a book, a pillow, a smoking bowl, and an armchair; a story of our history unfolds layered with projections of her soldier father, grandmother, children, machetes and a magical forest on a fringed curtain that separates the vivid outer world from a more obscure inner world.
Acogny who is considered the “Mother of Contemporary Dance in Africa” moves in an oracle like manner as she navigates relationships in the past and present seeking answers to the possible future. Through personal journeys Acogny seems to embody questions constantly swimming in my head. Questions of what we have adopted or become are posed in relation to what we have sacrificed.
Western religion vs African Spirituality; patriarchy and polygamy vs the wounds of the mother. A constant bickering between women and a desperation to protect the children. References to cannibalism made adjacent to ideas of stuffed geese and foie gra. The idea of education and the written word ever present, held up to Mein Kampf and Hitlers ‘heroism’.
There is a longing to return to the beginning, but an unseen barrier exists as we never truly know where or what the beginning is. She seems grounded in her movement her skirt rarely leaving the floor, yet a sense of landlessness created in her circular pathways and ritualised repetitions that seem to bring us back to the same places that no longer seem to be ours. Finally landing in the armchair she recedes into the darkness possibly succumbing to the uncertainty whilst clinging to things that we believe will protect us.
The search into who we are and where we come from brings questions of can we ever go back to the beginning? And what would that look like? Post assimilation, what land will bring salvation? A pertinent topic as we, the continent, attempt to decolonise ourselves and find our innate power.
The play with darkness and light, the voice over and projection create a mystical atmosphere that plays on the interconnectedness of all the opposing elements she offers. The effect of the fringed curtain sometimes swallows her whole or mediates a somewhat digital looking matrix. Her voice becomes our voice and the effect is of a spiritual communication that happens in a dream state.
A fitting end to a programming of memory and healing.
