MUSOYA in conversation with PATRICIA BADIN, 2022. Musoya, a term equating to “femininity” in Bambara (a Malian dialect), is a performance by Patricia Badin (artist and dancer) in collaboration with Divine Southgate-Smith. Drawn from a series of conversations, interviews, and workshops, the performance is an audio-visual re-centring of the Black gaze—a beautifully choreographed collage of Twerk, Afro-Fusion, improvisation, and film. Its staging is intentionally sparse: raw, unembellished, and resistant to spectacle. Here, the filmic element assumes the role of a Dancehall MC, guiding the rhythm, asserting presence, and shaping the narrative voice.

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At its core, MUSOYA is a celebration—an embodied declaration—of the Black female body in motion. It is also an inquiry into the layered histories that inform that motion. The performance focuses on the significance of Twerk and its evolution in the Caribbean, most specifically within the Jamaican Dancehall scene. Isolated movement of the hips, pelvis, and abdomen has long been central to various African dance traditions, where such gestures carry social, spiritual, and communal meaning. “Twerk” is a contraction of “twist” and “jerk”—two American dance forms that emerged in the 1960s. The term first reached mainstream audiences with DJ Jubilee’s Do the Jubilee All (1993). Yet the movement itself far predates the terminology. Its origins extend back to pre-colonial African societies, resurfacing across diasporic geographies as a form of embodied memory—one that persisted despite, and sometimes because of, the histories of structural dehumanisation, colonial violence, and cultural suppression that attempted to contain and distort Black expressive forms.

 

This tension—between memory and erasure, agency and distortion—sits at the heart of MUSOYA. In its contemporary global iteration, twerking is frequently misread through a white-centric gaze: dismissed as hyper-sexual, vulgar, or morally questionable. These judgments are not incidental; they emerge from a longer colonial project that positioned African cultures as pagan, excessive, or inherently sexual. As a result, many Black women encounter a complex relationship to the dance. What might feel instinctive, joyous, or cathartic can instead become laden with shame—a shame often reinforced within Black communities themselves as a means of ensuring survival and respectability for Black women under white scrutiny.

 

Within this context, the performance asserts twerking as something deeply internal: an act of self-possession rather than exposure; a trance rather than a spectacle. The dance becomes a site of liberation—of returning to the body, to lineage, and to forms of expression that refuse imposed boundaries of propriety. It reveals how Black women’s embodied knowledge has been historically policed, vilified, or extracted, and how movement continues to operate as a quiet yet profound form of resistance.

 

As Badin reflects:

 

“In Dancehall, the words are important—they are instructions to the dancers and a reflection of the community’s values and beliefs. Often it can be empowering, but it can also be homophobic and sexist.”

 

This duality is essential. Dancehall, like many cultural spaces shaped by the Caribbean and wider African diaspora, holds multitudes: empowerment and constraint, celebration and critique, liberation and contradiction. MUSOYA holds space for these complexities, acknowledging that the dance—and the bodies that carry it—exist within layered and sometimes conflicting cultural realities. The work positions embodiment as a site of knowledge, continuity, and power. It invites us to consider how cultural forms travel, mutate, and endure, and how Black women continue to navigate and negotiate their visibility within systems that both desire and fear their expressive autonomy.