Transatlantic Gestures: Perspectives on Germaine Acogny, Her École des Sables, and Dance as a Critique of Coloniality

Abstract

Based on multidisciplinary research that intersects various fields of knowledge production—most notably dance and anthropology—this article explores the ideas of thinker and choreographer Germaine Acogny and her contributions to shaping contemporary thought on the body, autonomy, and African cosmologies from a Senegalese perspective. We develop a discursive arc beginning with the period of African independences, contextualizing public policies for the arts—particularly the significant yet ambiguous proposal by Léopold Sédar Senghor—moving through the Mudra Afrique school in Dakar and culminating in the École des Sables, the International Center for Traditional and Contemporary African Dance. The article also addresses Acogny’s time with the São Paulo City Ballet in the 1990s and the provocative dialogues that emerged from that unexpected encounter at the time. We draw on the concept of transatlanticity, forged by historian Beatriz Nascimento, as a lens through which to read the redefined Black experience from Africa to the Americas. The article offers reflections on how this reinvention requires a reconsideration of African agencies and their responses to Eurocentric paradigms. South-South collaborations enable the reconstruction of images and the emergence of new perceptions of bodies and territories.