Lesley Braun: "Dancing Visibility, Virtue, & Virtuosity: Women, Work, and Dance in Kinshasa, DRC"

Research Colloquium Social Anthropology

Presentation by Dr. Lesley Nicole Braun, Institute for Asian and African Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Young women in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, despite their political and economic marginalization, have been making their presence felt as social actors in the realm of popular dance music. Congolese artists like Werrason pack stadiums across Europe and Africa, performing with bands composed of male singers, musicians, and dancers. Women, save for a few exceptions, are limited to being dancers (danseuses) and occupy the lowest rung in band social hierarchies. Despite their low status, danseuses’ dance performance is vital to live concerts, as it helps attract a paying audience—one that demands a spectacle.

Not only does popular dance express young people’s urban experience, popular concert dancers have come to embody and represent social change. In particular, danseuses visibly participate in the production of popular culture, and can be seen as performing some of the moral anxieties associated with women in the workplace.

Danseuses are dynamic “movers” par excellence, testing and challenging the moral landscape, thereby unwittingly shedding light on the modern Congolese condition in all its complexity. This ambivalent status is not simply the product of tensions between “traditional” and Western values filtering into Congo, transmitted via previous colonial and current women “empowerment” initiatives. It is also the result of economic uncertainty and evolving Pentecostal discourses about women’s sexuality as a source of danger and retribution for men. This talk will consider how local notions of visibility, virtuosity, and virtue dance together to reveal the “double binds” that have become an everyday part of life for young women in Kinshasa.

Lesley Braun specializes in African popular dance performance, with a focus on Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo. She is interested in the ways in which dance, in its embodied and symbolic forms, participates in the construction of an urban experience. She obtained her BA from McGill University, Montreal, and a combined MA in performance studies, anthropology, and communications from Concordia University, Montreal. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Université de Montréal.

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