ARTS If cultural appropriation didn’t already have a bad name, Karole Armitage’s Itutu (until Saturday) would give it one. That the choreographer doesn’t notice that her troupe mixes with the charming and engrossing experimental Afropop band Burkina Electric like oil with water is dumb enough. But to use the Burkinabè band members as props for her preening dancers is something else again. Has the lady not heard of colonialism?
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| Megumi Eda and Zoko Zoko |
Soon her slick crew is copying the moves of the band’s own dancers, Vicky and Zoko Zoko, and depriving the steps of sense. When Zoko Zoko undulates from side to side, it’s as if an electric wire were running through him. Burkina Electric includes dancers in its mix not to prove its choreographic mettle but to show us musical possession in the flesh. Armitage doesn’t care. When she borrows, she takes without transforming or honouring.
The disrespect culminates in a duet between Megumi Eda, the choreographer’s favourite and most self-regarding performer, and the burly Zoko Zoko in which he serves as ballet barre, providing Eda with the leverage to power her leg overhead (for the millionth time). That Lingani can bring some gravity and humanity to Itutu, looking upon the dancers buzzing around her with the magnanimity and delight of a strict vegetarian towards flies, is a testament to the singer’s star power.
Without the band – drummer Lukas Ligeti’s score descending into a whirring, chirping thicket of sound before emerging again as pop – and the backdrops by Philip Taaffe that imagine Matisse cut-outs in the bold colours of African prints, we’d be stranded. The choreography is all indulgence and surface effect. At one point, the dancers act as if they’re on a catwalk, strutting to the lip of the stage to jut out a hip and shoot us a smouldering look, and it occurs to me that Itutu really could be a fashion show. Instead of presence, it gives us attitude. 
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