Silen(ced)t dancers: an Other South African story

My postdoctoral host, Dr. Myer Taub describes me as ‘decolonisation personified.’ It has taken four generations of South African indentured, two generations of dancers, 65,000 years of DNA, a family archive, and an accident that left me with mobility issues to achieve that. Colonialism and apartheid attempted to marginalise subaltern practitioners of any form of cultural, traditional or artistic expression. Loss and erasure left the majority of Africans bereft of citizenry and identity. A performance at Goree Island, a former slave market, in Senegal (2016), allowed me to use spoken word in a performance that celebrated the various cultures in South Africa and the African continent in an interweaving of dance cultures (from Indian classical to dances of World Cultures) that my family utilised in our dance repertoire and performances since the 1960s. By exploring the archive as a performative process and expansive practice (or performance/learning as research), I posed the question: How can the ‘unarchival’ process be a functional framework with which to make meaning in transmuting or liberating the artefacts of my family archive, my embodied self, and the ‘Indian-ness’ of South Asian dance, through reconfiguration of experimental iterations that reflect the current reality of this dance form as it unfolds and develops in the South African dance industry and academy? The process of utilising and developing decolonial methodology involved experimenting with ‘unarchival’ of my 65-year-old family archive while exploring ‘Indian-ness’ and interwoven dance cultures and its pedagogical contribution to or implications for the reconfiguring of the archive with a primordial lens. It was transmuted and re-storied through ‘Paper Choreography,’ which mapped archival imaginaries or being in a liminal and non-entity space. Were we silenced? Or, were those silent moments opportunities for the subaltern to find their voice and develop a fresh perspective on their identities/stories?