Remember Mama Africa: The struggles of brave singer Miriam Makeba told in this bold dance drama platform

“Y“You talk about Miriam Makeba in South Africa as if you were talking about a queen,” says Alessandra Soutine. Legendary singer Makeba was known as Mama Africa, the Empress of African Song; But she also toured in Greenwich Village with Miles Davis and Duke Ellington. She was a teenager sent to work to support her family in Johannesburg who later became a diplomat for Ghana, then an official for Guinea. Representative to the United Nations. She was an outspoken anti-apartheid activist and the wife of a Black Panther. Her rich life and legacy are the inspiration for choreographer Soutine’s latest work, Mimi’s Shebeen, which is about to premiere in the UK.

Mimi Shebin combines dance, live music and spoken word in a theatrical piece that is not a straightforward biodrama but draws on Makeba’s history, particularly the story of her exile: after moving to New York in 1959, Makeba was banned from entering South Africa for 30 years because of her anti-apartheid stance. She was later banned from entering the United States after marrying Black Panther activist Stokely Carmichael. The show feels like a ritual of remembrance, a disjointed funeral – part eulogy, part celebratory, part provocative – with the great South African singer Toto Bowan at the center bringing Makeba’s songs to vibrant life.

In South Africa, the shebeen is an under-the-radar gathering place for home-made alcoholic beverages and lively conversation, usually presided over by the queen of the shebeen. Makeba’s mother Christina was a shebeen queen who was arrested for illegally brewing alcohol when Makeba was 18 days old. Unable to pay the fine, Christina went to prison for six months, taking her child with her, and thus began Miriam’s eventful life – just one of the things Soutine discovered as she began researching Makeba’s life. “So many stories!” says Soutine, when we meet at the KVS Theater in Brussels after the show. Soutine’s father is Belgian and she grew up there before moving to study and work in the UK, where she founded her company Vocab Dance. Her South African mother would sing Makeba’s songs, such as Pata Pata and Malaika, when Soutine was a child, and dance to them in the living room.

A decade ago, Soutine’s mother had cancer and was in hospital in London. “I took three months off work to take care of her, and she was always asking Miriam Makeba. She was so happy when we sang together,” Soutine recalls. “I had a lot of time to spend in the hospital, so I started researching.” As well as reading about Makeba’s triumphant return to South Africa in 1990, after the release of Nelson Mandela (whom she had met when he was a young lawyer in the 1950s), Soutine discovered that Makeba had been a teenage breast cancer survivor, that Makeba’s daughter Bungi had died in childbirth in 1985, and that because of her exile she had been unable to attend her mother’s funeral. “You see people and you look at their success and you forget that they’re struggling like everyone else,” Soutine says.

All of these ideas went into creating the show (which was held for the first time in Brussels in 2023). Fortunately, Soutine’s mother’s treatment was successful, but the idea of ​​the piece was to celebrate “death, life, and mourning.” Within this, Soutine extracts threads from Makeba’s biography such as flashbacks, and nods more broadly to the theme of displacement and dispossession today. Although it is not made clear in the exposition, Soutine had in mind his second protagonist, the contemporary Miriam, an immigrant. “And we come together with these changing personalities associated with Miriam Makeba to welcome this young immigrant.”

In performance, rather than being intoxicated on the house-made shebeen, the multi-talented dancers seem obsessed with rhythm, in sync with the musicians on stage. Soutine’s choreography incorporates multiple styles of movement that she has absorbed over the years, including from Rwanda, South Africa, and Senegal (from 2020-24, she was co-artistic director of the School of Sands in Senegal, a center for traditional and contemporary African dance), as well as the vocabulary of international actors, including street styles like cromb.

Soutine was surprised to discover that some of the young non-South Africans in the cast didn’t already know about the singer. (Makeba died in 2008 after suffering a heart attack on stage in Italy.) Why should younger generations learn about Mama Africa? “I think it will inspire young people to stand up for who they are and tell the truth,” Soutine says. “But she did it very gracefully. She would say something poignant and then sing a beautiful song.” Soutine wanted to follow the same approach in this work. “We see the dancing and we hear the beautiful songs, which is an element of entertainment, but interwoven with powerful messages and poignant moments. That’s what I like about Maryam. Because if you scream too much, people won’t listen. They back off. But she did it in a way that makes you receive her and hear her, but still enjoy her talent.”