Mami Wata painting Painting by Abdal 22 (collection RMCA Tervuren)
Lesley Braun specializes in contemporary African in popular dance performance, with a focus on Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo. She is interested in the ways in which dance in its embodied and symbolic forms participates in the construction of an urban experience. She obtained her BA from McGill University, Montreal, and a combined MA in performance studies, anthropology, and communications from Concordia University, Montreal. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Université de Montréal. Based on eighteen months fieldwork in Kinshasa, her doctoral dissertation examined the world of popular concert dance in Kinshasa, and the ways in which professional dancers challenge the status and roles of women in Congolese society through increased visibility. She is recipient of the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Doctoral Award (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council), and her research has been funded by the Fonds de Rechereche Société et Culture du Québec, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Braun recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago (2014-16). Her forthcoming articles are on the relationship between African Ballet and state patronage (2016), and material representations of dance in popular Congolese paintings.
Congolese Representations of the Female in Motion
Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo is widely known throughout Africa and internationally for its virtuosic dancers. Images of dance circulate transnationally through mobile phones and the internet. In contrast to women in other African countries, women in Congo are surprisingly absent from channels of artistic production like literature and visual art. However, women are highly visible artistic agents in the realm of dance. In documenting contemporary Congolese dance aesthetics among female concert dancers (danseuses), my project engages with the roles that women assume as artistic cultural producers within the public space of postcolonial urban Congo. There is considerable anxiety surrounding the position of the concert danseuse in Kinshasa. She is often thought of as temptresses similar to the folkloric mystical female siren called Mami Wata. Images of Mami Wata resonate and circulate across borders, and sometimes inspire dance choreography. This project explores the relationship between contemporary images of danseuses and visual depictions of women in Congolese popular painting and sculpture. I focus on the ways in which perceptions of danseuses are congruent or discordant with other visual representations of feminine figures circulating in the city.
