Moving Maps: African-Caribbean Dance as Embodied Mapping

Abstract

The African-Caribbean diasporic body is often understood as displaced and de-territorialised, rather than as productive of place. This essay is a critical interrogation of this tension between black mobile bodies and emplacement, suggestively re-imagining African-Caribbean diasporic dance as a form of embodied mapping (rather than as a spatial practice to be mapped). As an example, the essay presents a detailed analysis of a dance performance piece choreographed and performed by ‘H’ Patten in the early 1990s. ‘H’ Patten is a leading UK-based transnational practitioner in African and Caribbean dance, with almost three decades of performance, choreography and dance-for-camera experience, both independently and with major dance ensembles such as Adzido in the UK, Stella Maris in Jamaica, and Noyam in Ghana. The analysis has three parts, each of which explores an aspect of the dance as embodied mapping: first there is an analysis of bodily movements from a recording of a performance of ‘Ina di Wildanis’, a solo dance performance piece (the dance as spatial representation); second there are in-depth interviews with the choreographer/performer about the symbolic and representational meanings of the dance in relation to African-Caribbean diaspora and mobility (the choreographer as cartographer); and third there is an auto-ethnography of the effects of the writer being in the audience for the live performance (the audience as map-user). The essay ultimately pushes towards developing an understanding of dance as a critical form of embodied cartography, one that might better represent the complex emplacements of African-Caribbean diasporic mobilities.

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