Spirited Choreographies: Ritual, Sacred Art, and History-Making in Ewe Performance: ISM Fellows Lunch Talk with Elyan Hill

Through layered visual displays, Ewe people in Togo map histories of cultural exchange with Indian merchants and African Muslims onto contemporary social relations. Some communities perform memories of trade with Indian merchants through festival arts that embody Hindu chromolithograph images as depictions of local water spirits. Practitioners also produce living histories of domestic slavery during vivid rituals honoring a family of slave spirits called Mama Tchamba. Since they remember their enslaved ancestors as practicing Muslims captured in northern Togo, practitioners exaggerate Northern aesthetics as they dance adorned with fez hats and sequined scarves imported from “the North.” Festooned with meaning-clad layers of beads and bracelets, dancers march across open-air home courtyards and festival grounds to connect themselves to histories of trade and forced migration. Bringing dance studies into conversation with Black Religious Studies, and African and African Diaspora art history, this research frames the “body as altar,” a living archive of accumulated objects and adornments. These lavish embodiments illustrate the interplay of the performers’ identities with the lives of sacred objects and the images through which Togolese communities fashion transoceanic and interethnic dialogues. This event will be held at the Yale Humanities Quadrangle, Room HQ276, 320 York St., New Haven. Free, but registration is required. Lunch will be provided. Open to Yale Community only. Contact: Katya Vetrov Photo credit: Ewe girls waiting to dance, Tsévié, Togo, Photo by Elyan Hill, 2013. Speaker Bio: Elyan Jeanine Hill is an interdisciplinary scholar of African arts. Her research interests include festival arts, religious materiality, Black feminisms, and embodied renderings of the domestic and transatlantic slave trades in Ghana, Togo, Liberia, Haiti, and their diasporas. Her first book, Spirited Choreographies: Ritual, Sacred Art, and History-Making (under contract with Duke University Press), engages with narratives of migration featured in ritual performances and festival events by Ewe communities in coastal regions of Ghana and Togo. To understand these fraught narratives of forced and free regional dispersal, the book traces practices honoring water spirits and a pantheon of slave spirits called Mama Tchamba, or “grandmother slave.” The book frames the body as an altar, a living archive of accumulated objects and adornments. These lavish embodiments illustrate the interplay of performers’ identities with the objects and images through which religious communities fashion transoceanic and interethnic dialogues. At Yale, Hill will develop a second project that redefines Atlantic African women’s masquerade based on partial concealment, diasporic practice, and ritual adornment. This new project compares Ewe bodily inscriptions used in festival performances to the work of Brooklyn-based Haitian artist Fabiola Jean-Louis in her photo series Rewriting History. Hill’s written work has been featured in African Arts, Africa, Art Journal, Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies, and in the edited volume Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas. She has received fellowships and grants from the Fowler Museum, the West African Research Association (WARA), the Africana Research Center at Penn State, the Wolf Humanities Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Women’s Studies and Religion Program at Harvard University. She is currently assistant professor of African and African diaspora art history at Southern Methodist University.