Infinite Repertoire: On Dance And Urban Possibility In Postsocialist Guinea - 9780226762845

In this energetic ethnography, anthropologist Adrienne J. Cohen traces the socialist political history that undergirds the practice of stage dance, or ballet" in Guinea and the rise of private troupes in postsocialist Conakry. Guinean ballet goes hand in hand with state power, as the socialist state demands loyalty, but also depends on the sincerity and spontaneity of artists' performances to win the hearts and minds of spectators. Cohen shows how, decades after the death of dictator Sékou Touré, ballet continues to command the attention of Guinean youth as an experience of both loss and liberation for practitioners. Young artists perform and comment on a postsocialist urban lifeworld through improvisational dance and semiotic framing. By concentrating on a playful emerging urban lexicon of dance moves and practices and the heated intergenerational debates they spark, we see how dancers navigate-through embodied and verbal discourse-major social and economic transformations in post-revolutionary Conakry. Infinite Repertoire expands our understanding of the connection between aesthetics, affect, magic, and politics in Guinea, even as it complicates any simple dichotomy between authoritarianism and creative freedom"--

• | Author: Adrienne J. Cohen
• | Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• | Publication Date: July 23, 2021
• | Number of Pages: 216 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover
• | ISBN-10: 022676284X
• | ISBN-13: 9780226762845