🔗 Share this article

“When you speak about the legendary singer in South Africa, it’s akin to referring about a sovereign,” explains Alesandra Seutin. Known as Mama Africa, the iconic artist additionally spent time in New York with jazz greats like Miles Davis and Duke Ellington. Beginning as a young person sent to work to provide for her relatives in the city, she later served as an envoy for Ghana, then Guinea’s official delegate to the UN. An vocal campaigner against segregation, she was the wife to a Black Panther. Her remarkable life and legacy motivate the choreographer’s new production, Mimi’s Shebeen, scheduled for its UK premiere.

The Fusion of Dance, Music, and Spoken Word

The show combines movement, instrumental performances, and spoken word in a stage work that isn’t a straightforward biodrama but draws on Makeba’s history, particularly her story of exile: after moving to New York in the year, she was barred from her homeland for 30 years due to her opposition to segregation. Later, she was excluded from the United States after wedding Black Panther activist Stokely Carmichael. The performance is like a ceremonial tribute, a reimagined memorial – some praise, some festivity, some challenge – with a fabulous vocalist the performer leading reviving her music to dynamic existence.

Power and poise … the production.

In the country, a shebeen is an under-the-radar gathering place for locally made drinks and animated discussions, often managed by a shebeen queen. Her parent the matriarch was a shebeen queen who was arrested for illegally brewing alcohol when Makeba was 18 days old. Unable to pay the penalty, she was incarcerated for half a year, taking her infant with her, which is how Miriam’s eventful life started – just one of the details the choreographer learned when researching her story. “Numerous tales!” exclaims Seutin, when we meet in Brussels after a performance. Seutin’s father is Belgian and she mainly grew up there before moving to study and work in the United Kingdom, where she founded her company Vocab Dance. Her South African mother would sing Makeba’s songs, such as Pata Pata and Malaika, when she was a youngster, and move along in the home.

Melodies of liberation … the artist sings at Wembley Stadium in 1988.

A decade ago, Seutin’s mother had cancer and was in medical care in the city. “I paused my career for three months to take care of her and she was always asking for Miriam Makeba. She was so happy when we were singing together,” Seutin remembers. “There was ample time to kill at the facility so I began investigating.” As well as reading about her victorious homecoming to the nation in 1990, after the freedom of the leader (whom she had encountered when he was a legal professional in the era), she found that she had been a breast cancer survivor in her teens, that her child Bongi died in childbirth in 1985, and that due to her exile she hadn’t been able to be present at her own mother’s funeral. “Observing individuals and you focus on their success and you forget that they are facing challenges like everyone,” states Seutin.

Creation and Themes

All these thoughts went into the creation of the show (first staged in Brussels in 2023). Fortunately, her parent’s treatment was effective, but the concept for the work was to honor “loss, existence, and grief”. Within that, Seutin highlights elements of Makeba’s biography like flashbacks, and references more broadly to the idea of displacement and dispossession today. While it’s not overt in the performance, she had in mind a additional character, a contemporary version who is a migrant. “And we gather as these alter egos of personas connected to Miriam Makeba to welcome this newcomer.”

Melodies of banishment … performers in the show.

In the performance, rather than being intoxicated by the shebeen’s local drink, the skilled performers appear possessed by rhythm, in synthesis with the players on the platform. Her choreography includes various forms of movement she has absorbed over the years, including from African nations, plus the global performers’ own vocabularies, including urban dances like krump.

Honoring strength … Alesandra Seutin.

She was surprised to find that some of the younger, non-South Africans in the cast didn’t already know about the singer. (Makeba passed away in the year after having a cardiac event on the platform in the country.) Why should younger generations discover Mama Africa? “I think she would inspire young people to advocate what they believe in, speaking the truth,” remarks Seutin. “However she did it very elegantly. She expressed something meaningful and then sing a lovely melody.” She wanted to adopt the similar method in this work. “We see movement and hear melodies, an element of entertainment, but intertwined with powerful ideas and moments that resonate. That’s what I admire about Miriam. Because if you are being overly loud, people may ignore. They retreat. Yet she did it in a manner that you would receive it, and understand it, but still be blessed by her ability.”

• The performance is showing in the city, the dates