A Sharing Vs a Performance

This past weekend I was privileged to be part of an African dance festival called Dance Africa DC at Dance Place in Washington DC.  The whole festival was focused on African heritage with vendors selling every kind of African merchandise you could think of, and of course we had amazing dance performances from groups such as Umkhathi Theatre Works from Zimbabwe, Farafina Kan from DC, and other amazing African performance groups.  The thing that really caught my attention and provoked much reflection was during one of the performances Baba Chuck, the mastermind of the festival and leader of each performance, got up and was talking with the audience about how they don't like to call these performances or show, rather they like to call them "sharings".

This brings me to a dichotomy, what is this contrast in Performance and Sharing?  In a performance we pull together a show that is meant to be watched, reacted to, and then left/discussed after wards.  What I felt defined a "sharing" was there were pieces created to be presented, but not so much in a way to just have the audience react, they want the audience to interact.  I didn't feel this interaction was supposed to just happen between dancers and audience members but amongst the audience members themselves throughout the show, which truly created an open, energetic, and improvisational atmosphere to the whole night.  I believe the cultural aspect of the show helped create this environment since most of the people were emotionally, religiously, and ancestrally invested in the show, but because of this atmosphere I felt that I was at a family gathering where we were the performers were not deemed as better than us for their talent and performance, rather they were same as us, just they were the medium through which this spirit of sharing was facilitated.

Some things I saw that I don't usually see at a performance included:

• People throwing money on stage for the company
• Audience members actually running on stage to collect the money and put it in a pile for the company
• One lady taping a bill on a drummers forehead
• Kids sitting on mats right in front so they could be close to the dancers and be able to move if they needed to
• People talking and yelling throughout pretty much the whole show
• The "imperfections" in the performances themselves, which no one cared about because those were humans on stage, and they were dancing their culture not putting on a performance
• And the way the performers smiled into the audience as if they knew them and were just performing for their family.

This concept of sharing I think is beautiful and creates a whole new experience for everyone involved in a show like this.  I now have a new question to ask myself while creating I am creating a show or a choreographic work, "how do I want the audience involved?"  do I want to "perform" this for them or "share" it with them?