History of Stilt Dancing In Africa
According to the beliefs of many communities, traditional African dancers not only represent a spirit, but embody that spirit during the dance. This is particularly true of the sacred dances involving masquerade. Dancers use a range of masks and costumes to represent spirits, gods, and sacred animals. These masks can be as much as 12 feet high; sometimes they cover the entire body and sometimes just the face. At funerals and an annual festival, members of the Yoruba Egungun ancestral society perform in elaborate costumes representing anything from village chiefs to animals and spirits as they mediate between the the ancestors and the living.
Masquerades take a number of different forms. Some masquerades are representative. For example, many of the pastoralist groups of Sudan, Kenya, and Uganda perform dances portraying the cattle upon which their livelihood depends. During one such dance the Karimojon imitate the movements of cattle, shaking their heads like bulls or cavorting like young cows. In stilt dances, another variety of masquerade, stilts extend the dancers' bodies by as much as 10 feet. In the gue gblin dance of Côte d'Ivoire, dancers perform an amazing acrobatic stilt dance traditionally understood as a mediation between the ancestors and the living.
Acrobatic dances, such as those performed on stilts, are increasingly popular outside of their original sacred contexts. The Shope, the Shangana Tonga, and the Swazi of southern Africa perform complex dances in which dancers manipulate a long shield and spear with great finesse as they move through a series of athletic kicks. The Fulani acrobats of Senegal, the Gambia, and Guinea perform movements similar to those of American break dancing, such as backspins and head- and handstands.
Traditional African Dance Forms African dances are as varied and changing as the communities that create them. Although many types of African dance incorporate spirited, vigorous movement, there are also others that are more reserved or stylized. African dances vary widely by region and ethnic community. In addition, there are numerous dances within a given community. African communities traditionally use dance for a variety of social purposes. Dances play a role in religious rituals; they mark rites of passage , including initiations to adulthood and weddings; they form a part of communal ceremonies, including harvest celebrations, funerals, and coronations; and they offer entertainment and recreation in the forms of masquerades, acrobatic dances, and social club dances.
European explorers of Africa hardly understood either the aesthetics or the meanings of dances in the cultures they sought to scrutinize and conquer. Writers such as Joseph Conrad depicted African dance as an expression of both "savagery" and aggressiveness. European observers often focused on certain types of African dance that reinforced their stereotypes of blacks as sexualized, warlike peoples. Abandoning these stereotypes, a careful survey reveals extraordinary variety in both the social meanings and aesthetic styles of African dance forms.
Traditionally, dance in Africa occurs collectively in a community setting. It expresses the life of the community more than the mood of an individual or a couple. Dances mark key elements of communal life. For example, dances at agricultural festivals mark the passage of seasons, the successful completion of projects, and the hope for prosperity. In an annual festival of the Irigwe in Nigeria, men perform leaps symbolizing the growth of the crops.
Dance does not merely form a part of community life; it represents and reinforces the community itself. Its structures reproduce the organization and the values of the community. For example, dances are often segregated by sex, reinforcing gender identities to children from a young age. Dance often expresses the categories that structure the community, including not only gender but also kinship, age, status, and, especially in modern cities, ethnicity. For example, in the igbin dance of the Yoruba of Nigeria the order of the performers in the dance reflects their social standing and age, from the king down to the youngest at the gathering. Among the Asante of Ghana the king reinforces his authority through a special royal dance, and traditionally he might be judged by his dancing skill. Dance can provide a forum for popular opinion and even satire within political structures: the Ubakala and Bambara use dance as a form of criticism and commentary. Spiritual leaders also use dance to symbolize their connection with the world beyond.
Dances provide community recognition for the major events in people's lives. The dances of initiation, or rites of passage, are pervasive throughout Africa and function as moments of definition in an individual's life or sometimes key opportunities to observe potential marriage partners. Highly energetic dances show off boys' stamina and are considered a means of judging physical health. The learning of the dance often plays an important part in the ritual of the occasion. For example, the girls among the Lunda of Zambia stay in seclusion practicing their steps before the coming-of-age ritual. Throughout Africa dance is also an integral part of the marking of birth and death. At burial ceremonies the Owo Yoruba perform the igogo, in which young men dance over the grave and pack the earth with stomping movements.
Dance plays a central role in therapy and healing in many parts of Africa. In the West African religious practice of bori, or ajun, women suffering from mental illness are brought to a shrine where they learn a ceremony involving song and dance for three months. This process of learning is as important for the women's therapy as the ceremony itself. The Tiv of Nigeria have a dance that expresses the vital life force in the world that combats disease and death. The Kung San of Botswana perform a healing dance that includes both sexes and all ages, the healthy as well as the sick. Possession dance is another form of therapeutic ritual movement. Among the Shona in Zimbabwe the mhondoro spirit occupies the bodies of dancers, who move to a rhythm as the ancestors communicate wisdom.
Dance traditionally prepared people for the roles they played in the community. For example, some war dances prepared young men physically and psychologically for war by teaching them discipline and control while getting them into the spirit of battle. Some dances are a form of martial art themselves, such as Nigerian korokoro dances or the Angolan dances from which Brazilian capoeira is derived.
Dances often tell stories that are part of the oral history of a community. For example, the bamaya dance of Ghana narrates the legend of a man who was hungry and entered the market dressed as a woman in order to steal a chicken. During the dance men play the role of the women in the market, imitating women's hip movements as women call out. Such stories often lie at the heart of a community's identity. The Ewe people of Togo and surrounding countries have created a dance to narrate a tale of the origin and migration of the community. Imitating the movements of a bird with the arms, dancers relate the story of the Ewe who followed the path of a bird when the group migrated from Benin to the west.
The one unifying aesthetic of African dance is an emphasis upon rhythm, which may be expressed by many different parts of the body or extended outside the body to rattles or costumes. African dances may combine movements of any parts of the body, from the eyes to the toes, and the focus on a certain part of the body might have a particular social significance. The Nigerian Urhobo women perform a dance during which they push their arms back and forth and contract the torso in synchronization with an accelerating rhythm beat by a drum. In Côte D'Ivoire a puberty dance creates a rhythmic percussion through the movement of a body covered in cowrie shells.
Africans often judge the mastery of a dancer by the dancer's skill in representing rhythm. More skillful dancers might express several different rhythms at the same time, for example by maintaining a separate rhythmic movement with each of several different parts of the body. Rhythm frequently forms a dialogue between dancers, musicians, and audience.
Typically, the rhythmic dialogue occurs between the dancers and the drums in West Africa and between the dancers and the chorus in East Africa. The call-and-response dynamic found in African traditions all over the world characterizes the rhythmic dialogue among dancers, music, and audience. Unlike many Western forms of "art" dance, in which musicians and audience maintain a distance from the dance performance, African dance incorporates a call-and-response relationship that creates an interaction between those dancing and those surrounding them. The integration of performance and audience, as well as spatial environment, is one of the most noted aesthetic features of African dance.
Observers describe many of the dances as "earth centered," unlike many floating or soaring European ballet forms. Gravity provides an earthward orientation even in those forms in which dancers leap into the air, such as the dances of the Kikuyu of Kenya and the Tutsi of Rwanda.
One of the most remarkable aspects of African dance is its use of the movements of daily life. By raising ordinary gestures to the level of art, these dances show the grace and rhythm of daily activities, from walking to pounding grain to chewing. In the Côte d'Ivoire dance known as ziglibit, stamping feet reproduce the rhythm of the pounding of corn into meal. During the thie bou bien dance of Senegal dancers move their right arms as if they were eating the food that gives the dance its name. The Nupe fishermen of Nigeria perform a dance choreographed to coincide with the motions of throwing a fishing net.
Modern African Dance Forms
Colonialism and nationhood have transformed African society, and new African dance forms have developed in new social contexts. Colonial rule shifted borders and the cash economy prompted labor migrations. These migrations, often to multiethnic towns, undermined the tight-knit communities so basic to traditional dance, though the art form has survived in rural areas and in connection with traditional ceremonies. At the same time, urban living has given rise to an abundance of new dance forms. Thus modernization in Africa has allowed for some continuity, but it has also encouraged much innovation.
Christian missionaries initially forbade or limited traditional dance among Christian converts for fear of the dance's connection to indigenous religions. In parts of West Africa colonial administrators banned dancing, which they felt might keep workers out too late at night or, worse, stir anticolonial sentiment.
Meanwhile, traditional dance shifted along with its social context. As people traveled during the colonial period, their dances went with them. As a consequence of labor migrations, people from a given ethnic group found themselves next to neighbors with very different dance styles. As rural migrants gathered in cities, for example in South Africa, dance forms gained new significance as markers of ethnic origin and identity. Since the 1940s at the Witwatersrand gold mines, "mine dancers" have competed in teams organized around ethnic origins.
New dance forms expressed nationalism and resistance. One dance of the Zulu in South Africa used rhythmic stomping and slapping of leather boots to express both the meter of work and a march against the oppression of apartheid. As a stirring cultural expression, dance could both express tradition and forge a new national identity. During the nationalist period, nationalist movements and later governments used dance as a way of expressing a country's identity. With schools such as Mudra-Afrique, founded in 1977 in Dakar, and events such as the All-Nigeria Festival of Arts, national governments used dance to transcend ethnic identity. Some dance companies, such as Les Ballets Africains in Guinea, the National Dance Company of Senegal, and the National Dance Company of Zimbabwe, gained international renown and represented their new nations abroad.
In recent years modern artistic productions have increasingly drawn on traditional dances. Dance troupes performing on stage have integrated traditional forms with new, improvised themes and forms. The dance theater of the Ori Olokun Company of Ife, Nigeria, for example, created a performance called Alatangana that depicts a traditional myth of the Kono people in Guinea. Dance has influenced several of Wole Soyinka's plays, including The Lion and the Jewel (1963), A Dance of the Forests (1963), and Death and the King's Horsemen (1975).
After World War II hybrid forms of dance emerged that integrated European and American dance influences. Highlife was the most famous of these forms, synthesizing the European ballroom dance techniques learned by soldiers abroad with traditional dance rhythms and forms. The highlife music and dance rose to popularity in the cities of West Africa during the 1960s, cutting across ethnic boundaries to express a common regional identity derived from the experience of colonialism and urbanization. In southern African people danced in discos to the modern African beat of kwela, and in Central and East Africa "Congo beat" music gained popularity.
The modern transformation of Africa has thus fostered remarkable creativity and diversity in dance forms. An essential element of everything from improvised traditional performance to ritual coming-of-age ceremonies to the nightlife of dancehalls and discos, dance remains a vibrant and changing part of African life.
