Music and dance are the basis for a collaborative creative youth project on migration, featuring groups in Colombus OH, and Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

Following the drastic political shifts towards the right in Europe and North America over the last few decades, strengthening civic engagement and fostering political development has become a primary focus in youth development on both continents. As the future shapers of society, youth should have the opportunity to learn about both the meaning of membership in the society, and their rights—and responsibilities—in shaping that society. Creative youth development has become a critical strategy for youth empowerment, for youth to learn how to navigate the transition into adulthood and their full participation in society (Montgomery 2017, 2).

There are different forms of creative youth development, ranging from after-school programs and curricular programs to informal creative learning settings in community work (Hilary Pennington cited in Montgomery 2017, 14). This article reports on a cross-border creative youth development project, that connected informal and formal learning environments in the United States, Burkina Faso, and Germany. In line with the principles of problem-posing education (Freire 2005), the project engaged intercultural learning and dialogue about contemporary understandings of migration through music. 

The impetus for the collaboration was building cross-border connections between two independent creative youth development projects focusing on music and dance, in Columbus OH in the United States and Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso. The Columbus West African Thiossane Dance Institute, founded in 2000 by Abdou Kounta and Suzan Bradford-Kounta, is an informal community project that introduces young people to the traditional West African culture of music and dance, as a form of cultural preservation but also to foster “a lifestyle of physical and mental wellness” (Thiossane Institute 2015). 

The Burkinabé project partner, the Association Pour la Promotion de L’Education, de Culture et de L’Artisanat (APECA), is based in the country’s capital Ouagadougou, is a local community-based creative development initiative focusing on promoting and enabling creative local solutions for sustainable education through arts and craftwork. Initiated by musician Ezé Wendtoin in 2013, APECA has since founded an art house, “La Cour Warc-En-Ciel,” in Ouagadougou’s district Pissy Bonnam; and a high school and art center, “Centre Warc-En-Ciel,” in Nahartenga, a village 30 km north of Ouagadougou. An initial connection between Wendtoin and Ohio developed during his first residency at The Ohio State University (OSU) in 2018.

Our 2019 collaboration focused specifically on anti-immigration sentiments spread globally by right-wing populism. In the United States, negative attitudes and violence against immigrants—regarding welfare reception, for example—are similar to the experiences of African Americans (Garand, Xu & Davis 2015). Media documentation of migrants’ experiences of racial prejudice made experiences of exclusion relatable to participants in this project. For participants in Burkina Faso, on the other hand, migration is imbued with the ambiguity of opportunity and disaster. Limited access to social and natural capital in rural areas prompts continental migration—which in turn creates economic and educational disparities within the country (Wouterse & Van den Berg 2011). Besides that, Eurocentric perceptions of West African migration often disguise the fact that continental migration can also be a path of opportunity for youth migrants (Thorsten 2014).  

We recognized that the communities that Wendtoin has links with—his home country of Burkina Faso, the migrant community in Germany that he became a part of, and the African American community that he came to know in Columbus in 2018—each experience inequality in different forms. We wanted to think through these issues, using music as the vehicle for communication, and from this to find ways of bringing different experiences and cultures of knowledge into conversation. The project relied on the low-threshold ways in which music, through its rhythms and lyrics, can support the development of reflections on the meanings of home, and the impact of migration on participants’ local communities. We used collaborative rhythm and lyric-development strategies to encourage the youth participants to engage in political issues that affect their lives but are difficult to address due to their complexity. For this, we developed a 10-day residency concept, facilitating engagement between participants from Burkina Faso and the United States. The project was divided into five stages: exploration, lyric and beat development, recording, editing, and presentation. APECA president Aristide Nikiema joined Wendtoin for the 2019 residency. Acting as the liaison between Ouagadougou and Columbus, Nikiema assisted with translations between English and French, guided the arrangement of the music, and edited the recording together with OSU’s Paul Kotheimer.

 

Our project was based on a collaborative design drawing from strategies for youth engagement practiced in Columbus and Ouagadougou, and from Wendtoin’s growing experience as a creative youth development workshop coordinator in Germany—a country where migration remains a hot topic. To allow peer-learning across borders and time differences, the collaboration used the WhatsApp portal to channel communication between project partners. WhatsApp has already been researched as a useful tool for creative refugee youth development (Caruso 2018; Beckles Willson 2020), and music development in and during moments of crisis (Emery 2018), facilitating long-distance collaboration. Channeling the communication between workshop leaders and participants through WhatsApp allowed us to share our progress after each stage of the project, and to collectively determine the next steps. We were able to use the platform to create a dialogue that supplemented meetings between workshop leaders and participants in their respective locations. The virtual exchange about the music we were making, the rhythms we chose, and the languages that we sang in allowing us to bring different cultural influences and cultural knowledge into the reflexive process.

The exploration stage of the project started with afterschool workshops in the “Centre Warc-En-Ciel” in late August 2019. In the workshops, Nikiema brainstormed with the youth about their understanding of migration. Filmmaker Inoussa Sakandé captured the brainstorming sessions on film, which Nikiema brought to Columbus to share with the participants there. After listening to the reflections from our partners in Burkina Faso, participants in Columbus discussed their understanding of migration, what it entails, the forms of migration that they knew about, and how learning about migration through different media made the participants feel about the experiences of migrants. The goal of this reflection was to identify meaningful themes that the youth participants could further explore through musical engagement. The participants in Columbus were surprised by the different views that their partners in Ouagadougou shared: for example, that migration can both be a possibility for economic opportunities and leave the local communities left behind deprived of knowledge and resources. The outcomes that the Columbus group brainstormed were translated into French by Nikiema, and then shared with the project participants in Ouagadougou via WhatsApp.  

Based on the theme collection and reflection thereof, Wendtoin and Nikiema encouraged both groups to develop lyrics expressing their understanding and viewpoints. 

 

Columbus participants	Ouagadougou participants
Traveling  Moving to a different place Have to get used to different people going home sometimes you have to move a lot learning a new culture	Je reve d’un monde de liberté de bouger Ou la dignité de personne n’est bafouée Liberté, liberté de voyager Ou la dignité de tout le monde est respectée Combien de personne sont mortes noyées dans le désert combien se sont écroulés? dans quelles conditions vivent les survivant exposés aux tempetes, marées et vents
Figure 1: song lyrics of the first part of the song © Ezé Wendtoin, Aristide Nikiema

 

 

Alongside text development and reflection, Wendtoin and Nikiema anchored the participants’ lyrics with guitar and keyboard accompaniment, exploring possible shared rhythms that could accompany the words. Participants in Ouagadougou proceeded in the same way, guided by APECA workshop leaders Pierre Simpore and Alasco Tiendrebeongo. 

As a project manager, I assisted in recording vocal tracks during the workshop in Columbus and organized local musicians already connected to either the Thiossane Institute or the project to help create the audio track. Musicians at APECA used the “Centre Warc-En-Ciel” studio to record the participants’ vocal tracks, thereafter sending the recorded files to the editing studio at OSU.  

We shared a draft with participants in both locations so that each group could develop a dance to accompany the song. At the end of the residency, we held a presentation at OSU, inviting all the community members and university collaborators. Partners from APECA held a similar event at La Cour Warc-En-Ciel, and we connected both via Facebook live. The event reflected the process of the project and concluded with a joint presentation of the song and dances. 

Overall, the project was a simultaneous cross-border reflection on the topic of migration, taking as its starting point the understanding that participants could relate to the feelings associated with displacement through their own experiences of inequality. In their work, participants used their words and the beat of the song to musically verbalize a way in which to develop affective empathy toward the experiences of migrants as they travel and move to different places, paraphrasing the participants’ lyrics. 

The participants’ lyrics (see Figure 1) connect the experience of migration with experiences once the migration has taken place. Migrants have to get used to new people but are not always met with respect by those who they meet. The idea of making a new home can be at odds with a journey to this new place complicated by human and natural barriers. Later in the song, participants empathize with the importance of human rights. To illustrate the importance of treating other humans with respect regardless of origin, participants chose a rap rhythm. The accompanying music underscores the urgency of this request. Whereas the keyboard and guitar in the first section curate a space of reflection, within which the lyrics set the stage, the pace picks up in the second part of the song. Whirling trumpets mimic gusts of wind; as the pounding of the talking drum reaches its crescendo, voices and instruments meet in the final declaration of the song, pointing to the biggest struggles of all, that for identity: “I gotta find who I really am/ Learn something new/ Find some new friends/ Sooner or later it will come to an end.”

In conclusion, the entire project team worked together toward the goal of developing a critical awareness of migration through reflecting on experiences of displacement in the participants’ own communities and their own experiences of migration. Over the course of the project, trust developed between the participant groups, workshop leaders, and organizers. Conducting the exchange through song and joining creative powers across borders, all the participants had the opportunity to learn from and with each other. The collaborative making of a song was a form of empowerment, showcasing the potential of song-making for developing critical literacy and finding a common form of expression. The cultural knowledge for building critical literacy among the youth shared between workshop leaders also enriched Wendtoin’s strategies for addressing migration in the context of Germany. The collaborators agreed to reflect on the process in a short documentary, plan future collaborations, and continue sharing resources to keep the conversation going.

 

Works Cited:

Beckles Willson, Rachel. 2020. “The Individual Outside the Community.” In My Body Was Left on the Street: Music Education and Displacement, by Kính T. Vũ and André de Quadros, pp. 49–61. BRILL. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004430464.

Caruso, Fulvia. “Sio Toumolaa Meeta (Patience Is Hard): Giving Voice to Migrants.” Venice (2018). https://www.geocities.ws/musicalfreespace2018/.

Emery, Ed. “Towards a Radical Politics of Musical Freespace.” Notes From Below (November 30, 2018). https://notesfrombelow.org/edemery/towards-radical-politics-musical-free....

Freire, Paulo. 2005. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York, London: Continuum.

Garand, James, Ping Xu & Belinda Davis. “Immigration Attitudes and Support for the Welfare State in the American Mass Public.” American Journal of Political Science, 61 no. 1 (2015): 146-162. 

Montgomery, Denise. “The Rise of Creative Youth Development.” Arts Education Policy Review 118 (1) (2017): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/10632913.2015.1064051.

Thiossane Institute. “About.” Thiossane West African Dance Institute (blog). (2015). http://thiossaneinst.org/about/.

Thorsen, Dorte. “Jeans, Bicycles and Mobile Phones: Adolescent Migrants’ Material Consumption in Burkina Faso”. In Child and Youth Migration, by Veale A. and Donà G., 67-90. Palgrave Macmillan, London (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137280671_4

Wouterse, Fleur & Marrit van den Berg, 2011. “Heterogeneous migration flows from the Central Plateau of Burkina Faso: the role of natural and social capital.” The Geographical Journal, 177 (2011): 357–366. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4959.2011.00423.x

 

This essay was written with the support of the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

DR. CAROLIN MÜLLER

Postdoctoral fellow with the Martin Buber Society for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is currently working on performance and aesthetic forms as means of expressing belonging and identity in activist settings. Carolin is particularly interested in the transnational connections and exchanges through music and performance art. In this context, her work also addresses questions of discrimination and antiracism, sustainability of practice and networks, and education as a tool for social transformation.