Day 2 / 21st June 2023
Session 12 / 3:30 pm - 5:00 pm
Performing the City: Youth, Popular Arts and Social Movements in Urban Africa Workshop (Part II)
From “Our Area” to “Naija”: Traveling with Young Artists in Bariga
Location: Ilaje Bus Stop and The Art Factory in Bariga
In this session we invite Lagos-based dance and theatre troupes to collaborate with invited artists
from Nairobi and Mumbai for a “performative tour” in Bariga, Lagos. The artists will take the conference participants to a journey of “informal” artistic spaces in Bariga.
****Please note that this is an off-campus session in Bariga (about 2.5 kilometers away from UNILAG). We will hire a danfo to take the conference participants from MTN Library Foyer, UNILAG to Ilaje bus stop, Bariga at 3:30 pm. After the performance, there will be a roundtable discussion between artists, curators and scholars on performance art as knowledge production at the Art Factory in Bariga.
Chairs and Organizers
Ying Cheng (Peking University) cy1@pku.edu.cn
Min Tang (Tongji University) tangmindesign@gmail.com
Anuj Daga (University of Mumbai) anuj@sea.edu.in
Invited Artists
Illuminate Theatre Productions and Ennovate Dance House: “Dance is a Weapon”
Crown Troupe of Africa: “Iya Oja”
Nitesh Patel: 7Bantai’z
Session 16 / 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Performing the City: Youth, Popular Arts and Social Movements in Urban Africa Workshop (Part III)
Street, Stage and Seminar: Performance Art as Knowledge Production (Artists + Curators + Scholars Roundtable Discussion)
Location: The Art Factory in Bariga
The roundtable gathers urban scholars, curators and young performance artists from Lagos, Nairobi, Mumbai, Beijing and Shanghai for an in-depth dialogue on the multi-layered, mobile “Southern urbanity” and the role of performance art in it. We aim to collaboratively intervene in the theoretical debates around the following questions: how, why, and what are the multiple meanings of youth performing in African urban space; how do performance arts construct alternative ways knowledge production in urban Africa?
Chairs and Organizers
Ying Cheng (Peking University) cy1@pku.edu.cn
Min Tang (Tongji University) tangmindesign@gmail.com
Anuj Daga (University of Mumbai) anuj@sea.edu.in
Invited Participants
Segun Adefila (Crown Troupe of Africa)
Aderemi Adegbite (Vernacular Art Lab)
Olowu Busayo (Illuminate Theatre Productions)
Obiajulu Ozegbe (Ennovate Dance House)
Msia Kibona Clark (Howard University)
James Yeku (University of Kansas)
Day 1 / 20th June 2023
Session 3 / 10:00 am - 11:30 am
Performing the City: Youth, Popular Arts and Social Movements in Urban Africa Workshop (Part I)
Launch of Seminar Series “Youth on the Move”
Keynote Speech by Msia Kibona Clark
From Occupy Nigeria Movement in 2012 to #EndSARS Protest in 2020, Nigerian youth and their popular art practices are increasingly shaping the course of social and political events through performance, providing the participants with the language and actions necessary to renegotiate their place in society. Across the continent, popular performance arts are also constituting an essential means of knowledge production and forging a new sense of political and cultural identities among the youth. By constructing a repertoire of personal stories and local histories, these practices and movements centralize the body and the living realities as essential sites for decolonial politics, and they demand alternative frameworks for interpreting citizenship and publicness in Africa today.
Echoing the theme of 2023 LSA “Rethinking Decoloniality: African Decolonization and Epistemologies in the 21st Century”, the workshop aims to understand how popular art practitioners in the urban margins interrupt the institutional norms of pedagogical approaches and interrogate the hierarchies of knowledge production. Inspired by the approaches of the Bariga artists who navigate between the streets and the stages, we encourage in-depth dialogues and interactions between art practitioners and art scholars. In particular, we suggest a special offcampus
session at different venues in Bariga (e.g. The Art Factory and Ilaje Bus Stop) where the artistic practices are generated and rooted in. This workshop is part of the “Youth on the Move: Performing Urban Space in the Global South” Project, sponsored by Urban Studies Foundation Seminar Series Award. In order to help the participants travel between the different venues, we will hire a danfo during the conference to facilitate these “movements” (see also Session 12a and 14b).
Chairs and Organizers
Ying Cheng (Peking University) cy1@pku.edu.cn
Min Tang (Tongji University) tangmindesign@gmail.com
Anuj Daga (University of Mumbai) anuj@sea.edu.in
Keynote Speaker
Msia Kibona Clark (Howard University) msia.clark@Howard.edu
on 'Hip Hop, Afrobeats, and the Importance of Genre Classification'