🔗 Share this article

“If you talk about the legendary singer in South Africa, it’s akin to referring about a queen,” states the choreographer. Referred to as Mama Africa, Makeba also spent time in Greenwich Village with jazz greats like Miles Davis and Duke Ellington. Beginning as a teenager dispatched to labor to support her family in Johannesburg, she eventually served as an envoy for Ghana, then Guinea’s representative to the UN. An outspoken anti-apartheid activist, she was the wife to a Black Panther. This rich life and legacy motivate Seutin’s latest work, the performance, set for its UK premiere.

A Fusion of Dance, Music, and Spoken Word

Mimi’s Shebeen merges movement, live music, and spoken word in a theatrical piece that is not a straightforward biodrama but draws on Makeba’s history, particularly her experience of banishment: after moving to New York in 1959, Makeba was prohibited from her homeland for 30 years due to her anti-apartheid stance. Subsequently, she was excluded from the United States after wedding Black Panther activist Stokely Carmichael. The show resembles a ceremonial tribute, a deconstructed funeral – part eulogy, part celebration, some challenge – with a exceptional vocalist the performer leading reviving Makeba’s songs to dynamic existence.

Strength and elegance … the production.

In South Africa, a shebeen is an unofficial venue for home-brewed liquor and animated discussions, usually presided over by a shebeen queen. Her parent the matriarch was a proprietress who was arrested for producing drinks without permission when Miriam was a newborn. Unable to pay the penalty, Christina was incarcerated for half a year, bringing her infant with her, which is how her eventful life began – just one of the details Seutin learned when studying her story. “Numerous tales!” exclaims she, when they met in Brussels after a show. Her father is from Belgium and she mainly grew up there before moving to learn and labor in the UK, where she established her company Vocab Dance. Her South African mother would perform Makeba’s songs, such as the tunes, when Seutin was a child, and move along in the living room.

Melodies of liberation … Miriam Makeba sings at the venue in the year.

A decade ago, Seutin’s mother had cancer and was in medical care in London. “I stopped working for a quarter to look after her and she was always requesting the singer. It delighted her when we were singing together,” she remembers. “I had so much time to kill at the hospital so I started researching.” In addition to learning of her victorious homecoming to the nation in the year, after the release of the leader (whom she had encountered when he was a legal professional in the 1950s), she found that she had been a someone who overcame illness in her teens, that Makeba’s daughter Bongi passed away in childbirth in 1985, and that due to her exile she could not attend her own mother’s funeral. “Observing individuals and you look at their success and you overlook that they are facing challenges like anyone else,” states Seutin.

Development and Concepts

All these thoughts contributed to the creation of the production (first staged in the city in 2023). Thankfully, her parent’s therapy was effective, but the idea for the piece was to honor “loss, existence, and grief”. In this context, Seutin highlights threads of Makeba’s biography like flashbacks, and references more broadly to the idea of displacement and dispossession today. Although it’s not overt in the performance, she had in mind a additional character, a modern-day Miriam who is a migrant. “And we gather as these other selves of characters linked with Miriam Makeba to greet this young migrant.”

Melodies of banishment … musicians in the show.

In the performance, rather than being inebriated by the shebeen’s home-brew, the skilled performers appear possessed by beat, in harmony with the players on the platform. Her dance composition incorporates various forms of movement she has learned over the years, including from Rwanda, South Africa and Senegal, plus the global performers’ own vocabularies, including street styles like the form.

Honoring strength … Alesandra Seutin.

She was taken aback to find that some of the newer, international in the cast were unaware about the singer. (Makeba died in 2008 after having a cardiac event on stage in the country.) Why should new audiences learn about Mama Africa? “I think she would motivate the youth to stand for what they believe in, expressing honesty,” remarks the choreographer. “However she did it very elegantly. She’d say something poignant and then perform a lovely melody.” Seutin aimed to take the same approach in this work. “Audiences observe movement and hear melodies, an aspect of enjoyment, but mixed with powerful ideas and instances that resonate. This is what I respect about Miriam. Because if you are shouting too much, people may ignore. They retreat. Yet she did it in a way that you would accept it, and hear it, but still be blessed by her ability.”

• The performance is showing in London, 22-24 October