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PROFESSIONAL PERSPECTIVES
DANCE CHALLENGES
INTERVIEW
AN INTERVIEW WITH THOMAS TALAWA PRESTØ
CAMERON BALL HOTFOOT EDITOR WWW.TABANKADANCE.COM Tabanka Dance Ensemble is based in Norway, and uses the rich aesthetics of Africa and the Caribbean in order to create vibrant contemporary work.
There has been a huge rise in dance ‘trends’ on social media platforms, particularly on TikTok which now has over 800 million users. As more people than ever take to social media to showcase their dance talents, it has revived much-needed conversations around cultural appropriation. HOTFOOT Editor Cameron Ball talks about this development with Thomas Talawa Prestø, Artistic Director and Founder of Tabanka African & Caribbean Peoples Dance Ensemble.
How have you seen creativity and the communication of dance change with the rise of social media dance content, where dance styles of African origin are so often appropriated? Can you see parallels with previous generations? I do not find that creativity has changed, but I would say that it is speeding up. Dance styles of the African Diaspora have always been appropriated and misappropriated, ever since the first forceful migration of African peoples across the Atlantic, and across the Mediterranean even before that. Thomas Talawa Prestø © Tabanka Dance Ensemble
What we can see - from the jazz era especially - is how dances and dance moves ‘crossed over’ the racial divide: by misappropriation first, and then with a sprinkling of black bodies to ‘authenticate’. Usually these processes of dance craze adaptation took some years and then months. [Editor’s note: Read an article on the development of jazz dance in the Autumn 2020 edition of HOTFOOT] With TikTok and similar platforms, we have seen a dance movement being appropriated, the originating Black contributor overwritten and erased, and the craze ending in less than a month, This speed is newer and will test the limits of creativity over time I believe.
Tabanka Dance Ensemble perform Jazz Ain’t Nothing but Soul, co-produced with Dansens Hus © Maskinen
