Case Study 4: Creating a Utopia Through Dance

Dance has been a common theme throughout all of the case studies within this blog series so far, as it has been used as a tool for expression and subverting dominant hierarchies. This post will explore Kuduro - one of the examples within Brown's article 'Buzz and Rumble' - a music and dance movement born in Luanda, Angola that celebrates 'the broken body'.[1] Again, in order to fully understand the principles behind the music and dance movement, I will provide some context to the origins of Kuduro. The video clip below is of an interview of Titica known as the 'Kuduro Queen', in which she explains the origins of Kuduro.[2]

[click here to access the full interview]

After becoming independent from Portugal in 1975, Angola broke out into a civil war between two anti-colonial movements: the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola and the anti-communist National Union for the Total Independence of Angola. The war was escalated by interventions from the United States, the Soviet Union, Cuba and South Africa, as it was being used as a proxy war for the Cold War. When the 27 year war ended, Angola was left extremely vulnerable: it is estimated that over 500,000 people died in the war, over 4 million Angolan's inhabitants were displaced, and the country was 'physically, politically and economically in ruins'.[3] This is an extremely brief introduction into the history and impact of the civil war to provide context to the origins of Kuduro, click here to access more resource links to research it more.

These are the circumstances that Kuduro was created in, a music genre composed by kids on cell phones who don't have access to musical instruments or Digital Audio Workstations, as Hershini Young states, in 'an example of ingenious creativity and a response to lack of access.'[4] The globalised effort of this music genre is seen here by international DJs and MCs (mostly from Europe) who create fuller, more 'polished' tracks from the samples given to them by the kids as they have greater capital and access to resource to complete the music. The music is then returned to Angola, where it is danced to in a way that 'reimagines what the body means'.[5]

[caption: video of people dancing to Kuduro][6]

According to Hershini Young, 'one out of 334 Angolans has lost a limb out of land mine detonation'.[7] This demonstrates the reasoning behind the dance movement of Kuduro, as describes by Brown: 'It is a lexicon of twisted limbs, distinguished by sudden drops to the ground, bended feet to the face; in one move, a prosthetic foot becomes a cell phone, lifted to the ear'.[8] The music and dance movement challenges economic and ableist norms by acknowledging the lingering impact of colonial violence:

Kuduro spreads, morphs, and adapts, like an Afro-futurist virus in imperial history's wake. It clings specifically to the contours of the Lusophone and socialist diasporas, demonstrating Angolan's skilful negotiation the the transnational economies that produce their inherited legacies of inequality. Kuduro marks not so much an equitable engagement with a utopia Atlantic world of exchange, but rather it manipulates diasporas sociopolitical forces that perpetuate imperial power and the growth of African poverty.[4]

This exemplifies how not only Kuduro, but dance and music also are acts of imagining utopias through creating safe spaces, within what Caspar Melville describes as 'the carcass of imperialism'.[9] This blog series has made an effort to demonstrate music and dance as a collective tool to imagining better worlds through enabling people to create alternate social spheres that counteracts hegemonic control:

like in all Black music traditions: dance is intrinsic [...] It functions to carve out perforative space for those whose access to other spaces - economic, public, moral - is severely limited and creates spaces which, in principle at least, are open to all. [10]

Brown's article 'Buzz and Rumble', which has been the backbone to this blog series, has encouraged us to looking at utopia through a lens that portrays it as a political and social ideal, generated from a need and wanting for a better future. Utopian impulse released through music and dance provides more than just escapism, as it provides hope and brief relief from personal to global oppressive infrastructures and hegemonies.

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[1] Jayna Brown, 'Buzz and Rumble: Global Pop Music and Utopian Pulse', Social Text, 28/1, (2010), 125 - 146, (141).

[2] Red Bull Music Academy, 'Titica on Kuduro and Raising Awareness With Her Music', online video clip, YouTube, 26th Octobe 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNuoBKNMpBY (16th May 2021)

[3] Lydia Polgreen, 'How Angolans Come Home to 'Negative Peace', New York Times, July 2003, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/30/world/angolans-come-home-to-negative-peace.html, (16th May 2021).

[4] Hershini Young, '"Sound of Kuduro knocking at my door": Kuduro Dance and the Poetics of Debility', African American Review, 45/3, (2012), 391-401, (395).

[5] Ibid., 395-396.

[6] Mozambiquepaul, 'Angolan Kuduro', online video clip, YouTube, 10th August 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP1AZRoo2zQ (16th May 2021).

[7] Young, '"Sound of Kuduro knocking at my door", (391).

[8] Brown, 'Buzz and Rumble', 141.

[9] Young, '"Sound of Kuduro knocking at my door", (395)

[9] Caspar Melville, It's a London Thing: How Rare Groove, Acid House and Jungle Remapped the City, (Manchester University Press: Manchester, 2020), xii.

[10] Ibid., 22-23.