Lila Ann Millberry Wong

LILA ANN MILBERRY WONG, then a graduate student at University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois, was approved funding in April 2021 to aid research on “Embodiment, Communication, and Work: Women Reorienting the Art of Contemporary Dance in West Africa,” supervised by Dr. Faye Venetia Harrison. The dissertation studies how Burkinabè artists have experienced and shaped the professionalization of dancing as a career-path in West Africa since the turn of the millennium. Attending to race, gender, and socioeconomic position as structural experiences with both local and global dimensions, the project traces the articulations between semiotic production formalized under the rubric of “art” and “culture,” and the transnational political economy in which Burkina Faso is integral. Burkinabè artists developed an internationally renowned performance scene in the late 20th century. From the 1990s, increasing European and especially French patronage attributed prestige to “contemporary dance” over other, locally popular genres of dancing. This effectively conditioned “professionalization” on literal and figurative proximity to whiteness and on artists’ dexterity in handling representations of Blackness for overseas audiences. Burkina Faso’s current political transition incites artists to reassess both their role in transmitting cultural “values,” and their model for rendering economic value from art/culture. How are dancers and choreographers resignifying the profession of “artist” in Burkina Faso, and realizing themselves as artists, under the double pressure of foreign patronage and home-country responsibilities? As their country makes a serious wager for self-determination, how are Burkinabè dance artists negotiating what it means to “valorize” their art?