Gule Wamkulu: Dancing Indigenous Governance

Every couple of months I contribute between six and nine 275-word articles to a regional visual arts magazine. Research materials come from the magazine, who in turn receive them from the contributing museum or gallery.

Most times this is a fluid process. We receive images of the exhibited works (author, title, medium and date), an artist statement and/or a curatorial text within the imposed deadline. But on some occasions the source is chasing a deadline of its own. When that source is a university, well, it's no excuse, given their resources, certainly when compared to artist-run centres and some smaller commercial galleries, who run on shoestrings.

Below is an article I wrote (twice), but we chose not to run because we were not supplied with the necessary materials in time. I am posting the article at websit rather than trashing it because I think it is worth preserving -- at the very least for Simone Blais's Dance Like Everyone is Watching (2020) video, which needs to be seen for its teeter-tottering of attitude versus ideas, but also for an important conversation between her and curator Dr. Diva Muncia, who is also the Director of the Indigenous Governance Program in the Faculty of Human and Social Development at the University of Victoria.

*

Gule Wamkulu: Dancing Indigenous Governance

Simone Blais: Dance Like Everyone is Watching

University of Victoria Legacy Galleries (downtown)

January 14 - April 18, 2023

 

Located on unceded Coast Salish land, Victoria, British Columbia is an overwhelmingly white city. White in its population; white in its abundance of Edwardian architecture. Simone Blais addresses this in her video Dance Like Everyone is Watching (2020), an intertwining portrait of three Black dancers who express what it means to be where they are, and where they are without. Issues raised include racism, tokenism, stereotyping and, most compellingly, cultural appropriation.

 

A powerful moment in Blais’s video occurs after her visit with a white West African dance instructor in Shawnigan Lake, which she recounts to curator Dr. Devi Mucina. “She was saying everything right, and everything was so perfect, and yet I had this visceral, bodily -- like I was just mad.” To which Mucina responds, “Colonialism was about colonizing lands and bodies,” and a moment later, “So dance, really, if you look at it at its most core, most fundamental level, it is governance,” a point Mucina illustrates in his rousing exhibition Gule Wamkulu: Dancing Indigenous Governance

 

Comprised of photographs, films and objects, Gule Wamkulu takes its name from a dance (the Great Mask Dance of Life from the African Chewa people) performed by the Nyau or mask carriers, who become conduits through which ancestors can commune with the living. Central to this communication, which Mucina describes as a “totalizing governance structure,” is community wellness, and at its heart are questions of gender, where both the masculine and the feminine are embraced in one body. Traditionally, it is men who dance Gulu Wamkulu in public, and it is their feminine self that is shared.