Dancing Altars

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Yearly, in September, performers from Guin-Mina and Ewe-speaking communities along the coast of Togo perform in the popular festival called Epé Ekpé (Fig. 1).1 Attended by tourists, government officials, visiting performers from neighboring nations, and local community members in the city of Aného, Epé Ekpé culminates in the revelation of a sacred stone, the color of which predicts the future of the small town of Glidji for the coming year (Fig. 2).2 Recognizable by their lavish adornments, participants process onto the festival grounds through a broad archway. Dancers alternately perform to songs of adoration for water spirits and observe the celebrations of others while seated on ceremonial stools. With images advertising event sponsors as backdrops, initiated performers display immense wealth and intercultural linkages upon the spectacularized surfaces of their bodies (Fig. 3). Each performer exemplifies “dressing for success” and “too muchness” in their selection of festive attire in ways that afford generative confrontations with the performance modalities of African carnival.3Epé Ekpé displays lavish wealth incongruous with the daily lives of performers, takes over the streets with celebrations, and visually disrupts gender norms that emerge from Christian moral discourses among local communities. As in the carnival forms presented in coastal West African nations like Guinea-Bissau, Ghana, and Nigeria, Epé Ekpé performers emerge from the struggling urban working classes of fisherfolk, market women, small business owners, artisans, and farmers. In established West African carnivals like Fancy Dress in Ghana and Calabar Carnival in Nigeria, performances invert rich and poor, turn gender inside out, and take over the streets with wild abandon as participants represent diverse circumstances of migration and cultural exchange from the perspectives of working-class groups. Epé Ekpé participants make claims to economic power and sociocultural mobility in ways that speak to carnival inversions by introducing ambiguities of gender and ethnicity through the complex embellishment of their bodies. Yet, this state-sponsored festival contrasts with carnival practices like Fancy Dress and Calabar Carnival by mediating coastal cultural collision and regional migration through explicitly religious performances.The 353rd edition of Epé Ekpé festival held in Glidji, Togo in 2015 illustrates how communities navigate coastal contact zones in Vodun festivals by creating carnival space.4 A primarily coastal phenomenon, carnival space comments on trade through the integration of imported goods and images into presentations of resistant understandings of identity. Carnival space emerges from a particular spatiotemporal relationship of body, object, and performance space that constructs diasporic subjectivity.5 In Epé Ekpé, for example, participants construct identities across the Ghana/Togo border and claim places of origin in Elmina, for Mina people, and Accra for Guin people (Fig. 4).6 This construction of diaspora extends even further, since festivals draw Guin-Mina and Ewe-descended peoples from all over the world to commemorate the year's funerals at this one major event. Though many other African festivals similarly construct regional diasporas, this article approaches the specific interethnic exchanges within the popular and rarely studied Epé Ekpé festival as ongoing embodied discourses with African carnival forms and global diasporas.7Though performers frequently instrumentalize ostentatious adornment in African festivals, focusing on the carnivalesque foregrounds the flesh in ways that move beyond scholarly preoccupation with masqueraders whose faces remain veiled or obscured.8 Recentering “the flesh” itself as a nexus of excess continues the work of the 1998 African Arts special issue on women's masquerade (edited by Sidney Kasfir and Pamela Franco), which sought to rethink categories of masking and gendered performance in histories of African art.9 Public ritual processions in West Africa make elements of Black Atlantic carnival arts—like transoceanic and intercultural exchanges of images and the primacy of procession—more visible. Epé Ekpé performances exemplify carnivalesque adornments, since the word “carnivalesque” encompasses the imaginative overabundance theorized by Mikhail Bakhtin in which “all that is bodily becomes grandiose, exaggerated, immeasurable” (1984: 5, 18-19). In festival, as in carnival, stylized movement, body paint, dress, and jewelry extend the body, while lending visual opacity to performers in conversation with other times, places, and enlivened flesh. From images indicating state sponsorship to objects referencing spirits drawn from “elsewhere,” festivals incorporate commercialized ritual performances to broach histories of commodity exchange. Carnivalesque adornments in festival and carnival foreground ways West Africans actively participate in global markets to resignify images and objects through adornment.The fashioning of diasporic subjectivities in these spaces of embodied display produce processes of dislocation and relocation that enact claims to geopolitical reach in postcolonial nations. In such cases, performers become “dancing altars,” living archives of accumulated objects. The body arts upon dancing altars, in combination with coordinated processional movements, allow performers and viewers to apprehend the flesh in new ways. Performance spaces created through such excesses contain notions of “encounter” within, among, and upon the bodies of community members even as communities dictate the bounds of contemporary public spaces.10Rather than adapting Caribbean carnival, Epé Ekpe constructs “carnival space,” a realm of performance...