Dr. Celia Weiss Bambara lectures on contemporary Haitian and Burkinabe dancemaking

April 8, 12:43 PMChicago Dance ExaminerRachel Thorne Germond

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Celia Bambara    photo:Carl Wiedemann

Transforming Diaspora: Travel and Politics in Contemporary Haitian and Burkinabe Dancemaking

What: Lecture sponsored by the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
When: Thursday April 9, 2009 @ 3:00pm
Where: Jane Addams Hull House 800 S. Halstead
Who:  Dr. Celia Weiss Bambara is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Dance artist and scholar Dr. Celia Weiss Bambara will be lecturing on the the cultural production and transmission of African diasporic dance forms. African diasporic dancemakers choose to create choreographies that express their identities, personal vision, spirituality, and travel patterns amidst variable political and economic climates in Haiti, New York, Chicago, and Burkina Faso.  As artists navigate the terrain of dancemaking on an international scale they choose and invariably practice new notions of Diaspora that configure their identities and citizenship amidst institutional, state sponsored, and community pressures.

Dr. Weiss Bambara is trained in Haitian, modern/contemporary, and has professional experience in other African diasporic forms. Celia has danced with company JAKA in Haiti and Martin Dancers in Los Angeles among others. In 2006, she formed the CCBdance Project with her partner Christian Bambara.  Her choreographies have been presented in Los Angeles, Chicago, Iowa, Haiti, and Cuba.Celia's scholarly work focuses on contemporary African diasporic performance and intersects dance studies, critical race theory, Diaspora studies, ethnography, and cultural studies. Celia's written work is published in Australasian Drama Studies and she has an essay forthcoming in a volume on Caribbean dance edited by Susanna Sloat.

I recently interviewed Celia about her practice as a fusional dance artist:
How you define the term FUSION as it relates to dance?

Celia: I prefer the word fusion as it translates in English. However, in many Francophone countries métissage or creolité are employed. These are concepts/processes that express the ways in which culture is re-combined and they are incredibly useful in our global moment as people constantly trying to find space to define their identities, identifications, coalitions, and experiences. Dance is a cultural practice or a set of cultural practices that are learned, whether it is ballet, modern, or West African. In specific, each danced fusion has a politic that is linked to the artist’s ideological underpinnings, structural and racialized realities, vision, identification, and identity. For me, a fusion is a deep creative process of re-combining, breaking down, restructuring, and translating movement that is wedded to my political underpinnings, realities, experiences, spirituality, and identifications/ coalitions.