Performance Ethnography: The Role of Embodiment in Cultural Authenticity

Abstract

During February 2001, I created a performance installation based on my research in Nigeria on the Yoruba deity Osun. The installation, "Searching for Osun," was performance ethnography that charted my overtly subjective and selective meditation on Nigeria. The audience who came interacted with the aspects of Yoruba life that moved me most--dance and music, divination, Osun's relationship to children, "women's work," and food preparation. I was deeply aware of the ways that my African Americanness at times converged with Yoruba realities and at other times sharply veered away from them. While in Nigeria I felt simultaneously foreign and indigenous, welcome and invisible, comfortable and utterly disoriented. These dynamic tensions among African diasporic peoples were suggested in the performance installation through the juxtaposition of Yoruba art with the work of artists in the Caribbean and the Americas, and in the U.S. performers' negotiation of Yoruba movement, language, and sensibilities. The performance ethnography sought to disrupt notions of "the real" by encouraging the participants to question what they accept as truth, and to examine how their truths are shaped by their perspectives. This work allows for the melding of many authoritative texts, many realities, by prodding the participants to create their own truths as they move through the installation. This essay is an exploration of the successes and failures of that project.