Old Medicine for Current Problems: Dancing Aids in Malawi

In addition to the enormous collection of Native American masks, the Museum of Anthropology now has some African masks from Malawi on temporary exhibit for The Village is Tilting: Dancing AIDS in Malawi. I have been trying to get out to UBC to see this for a really long time and although smaller than I expected, the masks are well worth the wait.

The Chewa people have long been mask-makers, and used this tradition historically to show what is culturally important and relevant to them through dancing. Now they've updated the tradition to the modern age, to portray the AIDS epidemic and its affect on their people.

Here's a blurb from the museum:

For over a thousand years the Chewa people of Malawi have reaffirmed their collective voice and identity through the masked spirit dances of Gule Wamkulu (The Great Dance). Yet, like the Chewa themselves, the community rituals of the Gule Wamkulu have continually re-adapted to changing forces and events. The most recent of these forces has been the devastating AIDS pandemic and its uncompromising sweep across Africa.

The Village is Tilting: Dancing AIDS in Malawi features a series of masks, photographs, and videos documenting the depth of awareness and cultural response to the AIDS pandemic by rural Malawians. More than a plaintive victim's cry, The Village is Tilting uses elements of Gule Wamkulu itself - dance, drama, dialogue, and humour - to strip away conventional images of AIDS to reveal its inextricable links to an interconnected set of conditions and causes: poverty, gender inequality, and civil injustice.

I love it when old traditions are merged with new ones and updated and changed along with the community, so I was fascinated with this exhibit. The masks show a number of different "characters" in various stages of declining health, but also carrying strong messages. One in particular, "Beware of the Penis" cautions girls about being sexually active. Another called "The Philanderer" warns about seemingly charming men (interestingly, this character wears western dress) with money.

The exhibit does a nice job of showing the mask accompanied by a photograph of the full costume, and also has video footage of the masks being danced ceremonially in Malawi. These three levels of detail are imperative in understanding the masks in their culturally context, I think, but here's where I think the Museum of Anthropology could have done it a bit better - it's very dark in the room, and the write-ups about the masks are printed underneath them, in gold ink on red lacquer. This means you have to look at the mask from arm's length, get right in there up close to read about it and then back up again to see what you just learned. I'm sure that my eyesight isn't the problem here, and while it's hardly the end of the world, I did find it inconvenient. A further inconvenience are that the videos seem to be placed wherever they could find a power outlet - in the hall, in a dark corner, and none of them really nearby the masks they were illustrating. But it is a temporary exhibit space and they are no doubt doing the best they can with what's available.

The exhibit will be at the Museum of Anthropology all summer, until September 3rd. If you haven't been to the Museum of Anthropology before, make sure you take some extra time to check out the Grand Gallery and the Bill Reid collection.

Image courtesy of wax lion on flickr.