Search

Building on my argument in a recently published book chapter, 'Toward Decoloniality and Artistic Citizenship' (2023), this article discusses how the concept of artistic citizenship could create a conceptual space for decolonial thinking for dance teaching within the Higher Education (HE) curriculum. This interrogation is informed by my role as a lecturer who teaches dance practice based on African dance styles and principles in UK HE. I argue that making artistic citizenship an explicit part of the critical framework for dance pedagogy creates a common vantage point for students of all cultural backgrounds and better conditions for their development as culturally literate artists who will work in globalised contexts. The concept of citizenship in relation to artistic practice can be used to generate a theoretical context for existing hybrid dance training in HE, which in Britain has evolved to reflect the multicultural nature of society. This theoretical context will support the research and practice of Black students and those of global majority heritage who require conceptual maps delineating how dance practices that draw on their cultural heritage have existed as part of professional practices, as well as enhancing the cultural literacy and political awareness of the whole student body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This provocation reflects on the experience of taking a class in contemporary African dance in Senegal, arguing that it represents a physicalisation of solidarity. The class included dance students from Europe and the African continent who came together through moving rhythmically despite having no common verbal language. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's proposals about solidarity and Judith Butler's theory of performative assembly, this intervention argues that the aesthetic underlying these students' dancing was one that challenged dominant aesthetic values and the power relations underling them to generate solidarity as feeling the feeling of this challenge. This is a short provocation that was prepared for the roundtable discussion on 'Decolonisation and Solidarity' as part of the conference, Borderlines IX: Seeking Solidarity and Wonder Through Performance, which took place at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK, on 30 June and 1 July 2022. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the future of music and dance education in Ghanaian senior high schools as envisioned by administrators, teachers, and students. Participants illuminate issues requiring action, including (1) curriculum content, (2) access, (3) resources, and (4) infrastructure. The study employed a qualitative multiple case study approach incorporating post-colonial theory, interdisciplinary African arts theory, and educational leadership and organizational behavior theory. The study contributes to the literature on dance education in Ghanaian, post-colonial, and global contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Diaspora dances. It mentions the African diaspora in the Caribbean with dance being the powerful, non-verbal, expressive form of bodily communication, meanwhile it can articulate resistance within historically oppressed and marginalized religious rituals, and can articulate resistance within historically oppressed and marginalized religious rituals; and it can articulate economic dimensions at the core of tourist contexts.

Somatic memoirs from the author's participation at dance intensives with acclaimed dancer-choreographer Moustapha Bangoura in the West African Republic of Guinea reveal how solo dance experiences can test acoustic literacy, promote music interaction, and foster an aptitude for movement invention. These skills are fundamental to West African dance and are learned in the fare ra lankhi (dance circle). This dance ethnography explores the pedagogical attributes of the circle and strives to provide dance educators an enhanced awareness of indigenous approaches to dance education inherent across the region. Distinct West African objectives of dance, musicality, improvisation, dance education, and choreographic practice are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her transdisciplinary work, The Venus (2009), Nelisiwe Xaba reimagines Sara Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus, as a cosmopolitical black feminist African figure. Her work disrupts the meanings attached to the colonial spectacle of hypervisible black flesh, as well as the logics that keep these meanings intact in the postcolonial world now. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces eight performers from Burkina Faso, who in 2014 protested unfair labor practices at the Africa Museum of Original Art in South Korea, where they had been hired to perform. In the process, they demonstrated political and artistic endeavors in live concerts and dance workshops to reclaim both their monetary compensation and their artists' status. Nevertheless, public and media discourse that followed this nationwide news—no matter how sympathetic—tended to treat the artists' experiences as merely a failed Korean dream. Using performance studies methodologies and ethnographic methods, this article uses the terms performance and performativity more capaciously to include a range of embodied acts. With this, the article argues that framing the artists' experiences within the narrative confines of struggling migrant workers fails to capture the complex, often contradictory relationship that they have with acts of performing beyond the existing categories of migrant labor. Furthermore, the sympathetic discourse capitalizes on hypervisibility of blackness, through which the artists' suffering becomes a spectacle. This article suggests consideration of the concept of uncapturability—the embodiment of which exposes failures of a nationalist and racialized language—as well as existing theoretical frameworks mobilized to understand the interiority of performance and the artists' work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The partner dance kizomba became fashionable in the eighties in Portuguese-speaking Africa and its European diasporas. Its commodification in Portugal in the late nineties turned it into a global craze, supported by a linear story: Angola is the source of kizomba, and Lisbon, its international capital. This essay moves beyond the methodological nationalism and the post-imperial geographical concept, lusofonia, that supports this narrative. Examining instead the circulation of people and practices through sites conceptualized as "hubs," I present kizomba as a transnational field of practices deriving from deep histories of transoceanic, inter-African connections. Presenting Lisbon as the main hub for kizomba during the eighties and nineties, I develop the idea of the transnational dance floor, webbed across cities and connected through transnational ties that challenge post-imperial and linguistic geographies. Thus, despite the essay's ostensible Lisbon-centrism, I propose building collaborative geographies whereby transnational phenomena such as kizomba may best be examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What constitutes African dances as valid knowledge? Do the learning processes of African dances in local communities entail rational consciousness and epistemological interpretations of the learner? How do the processes of dance practice double as frameworks of construction of meanings? The foregoing questions provided parameters for critical examination of pedagogy of cultural heritage dances as epistemological domains. Drawing on the stories, reflections, and practices of teachers of cultural heritage dances in nonacademic settings in central Uganda, the article reveals the different mechanisms through which these dance teachers acquired competences in content knowledge of the dances. The theory of constructivism is engaged to illuminate the content knowledge of the dances as a constructed reality that is anchored in the Afrocentric worldview. The individual learners claim agency in embodied, reflective, participatory, and communalized learning processes as knowers, thinkers, doers, and collaborators. Immersion into pedagogic processes cultivates interface with dance as an object and subject of knowledge. The article offers insights into the complexities entailed in pedagogic processes of African dances as epistemological and ontological foundation of human life and experience. This analysis critiques reductionist notions that objectify, fetishize and exoticize the learning processes of African dances as just instinctive, innate, and imitative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of FIAR: Forum for Inter-American Research is the property of Forum for Inter-American Research and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article offers information on the warrior-inspired masquerades in the Calabar region of Nigeria and their importance as expressive currencies. Topics discussed include the Ukwa dance performance, which is meant to be a satire of marriage and deals with topics such as jealously, trust and emotional turmoil; the use of skin-covered masks in the performances; and the work of anthropologist Keith Nicklin and art historian Jill Salmons in tracing the history of the performance arts. Also mentioned is the study of Dogon masks from Mali by anthropologist Polly Richards.

Around the mid-16th century, in Italy, a group of anonymous humanists - courtiers versed in the arts of music, letters, and theatre - created a set of songs that depicts African slaves and freedmen singing and playing in an Italian town, probably Naples. While serenading their girls, the African characters in this song cycle cherish to to be freed by their masters. While singing, courting, and quarrelling, they speak an Afro-Neapolitan pidgin that combines the mispronounced local dialect with authentic African words and sentences in Kanuri -- an Afro-Nilotic language still in use in the Bornu region (North-East Nigeria). The songs are known as 'canzoni moresche', meaning Moorish (i.e. black African) songs. Although the 'moresche' were intermittently studied by a handful of European musicologists since the late 19th century, nobody had recognized yet that the most obscure sections in the lyrics were not a zany made-up of African speech, but a true language. Talking Kanuri, moresche's characters utter conventional greeting formulas and idiomatic expressions of racial pride, summon the black slaves in the neighbourhood, and make reference to song and dance as traditional ways to celebrate and communicate. For a long time, the first known evidence of written Kanuri have been considered those founded in scattered European manuscripts and documents dating around late 18th-early 19th century. Only the 'canzoni moresche' offer earlier traces of written Kanuri. They are also powerful cultural effect of African diaspora. A whole microcosm of African tradition, customs, feelings - and probably also shreds of original melodies and rhythms - appear to be featured in the Italian Renaissance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the years, dances from African cultures have been viewed in the Western world as caricatures of exotic bodies and representations of experiences that are abundant in the natural order of things. Valentino Y. Mudimbe (1988) has defined this otherization and objectification as the invention of Africa. With the continuous mobility of people and constant flow of ideas, teachers of African dances in Europe, North America, Asia, Australia and New Zealand have developed teaching methods that transcend tokenistic exocitization and objectification of these dances. This article examines the reflections of selected teachers on how they utilize particular pedagogical processes when teaching African dances to facilitate civic engagement and understanding. The analysis unveils how the teachers apply pedagogies to allow learners to (a) explore the ontologies and epistemologies of the dances; (b) dissolve stereotypes about the continent of Africa and her people; (c) learn about the African communities and cultures where the dances originate; (d) locate the relevance of the dances to the prevailing global conditions, needs and challenges, and; (e) identify how they can utilize the dance knowledge, experiences, and skills to enhance their individual well-being. The article points the reader to the complex ways through which African dances can be engaged as valid and valuable knowledge to advance responsible global citizenship in this era where intolerance of difference is on the rise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This piece focuses on the dance style and methodology developed by Katherine Dunham combining African diasporic dance traditions with Eurocentric dance traditions. Dunham was able to use this new choreographic technique to subvert the white-patriarchal gaze and create a space that forever changed the Broadway stage. In the early 1930s, she travelled to the Caribbean to complete ethnographic research on African-rooted dance styles on the islands. She was then able to bring these back to the United States and slowly integrate them into the choreography for her concert dance piece La'Ag'ya (1938) and her choreography for the hit musicals Pins and Needles (1940) and Cabin in the Sky (1940). Her innovation discovered and exploited the possibilities for subversion or transgression within dance using a hybrid movement style performed by black bodies in order to create an opportunity for an authentic black musical theatre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article constitutes part of my continuously evolving fascination and research into the life, legacy, and visual significance of Féral Benga (1906-57). It foregrounds, in particular, the critical discourses surrounding (Afro)modernism generated by his presence in, and influence on, twentieth-century American, European, and black diasporic art and culture. It seeks to contextualize as well as critique a select sampling of visual representations and performative operations of this enigmatic African, who conscientiously exploited the interests and conceits of modernism and primitivism. Benga's appearance in the work of modern visual culture makers of the period constitutes an important parallel and underground dialogue with conventional histories of modern American and African American art, as well as the critical contours of black diasporic cultures more generally. The ideas and themes presented in this article constitute part of a larger book project of the same title, now under way, that interrogates the cultural, aesthetic, and ideological discourses fostered by Benga's physical presence and position as transnational icon of black agency within American and European modernist practice and experience from the mid- 1920s to the mid-1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of African Studies Review is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Human rhythm perception and sensorimotor synchronization are both constrained by temporal thresholds on several levels. The lower limit for durations that allow for entrainment at the level of metric beat subdivision has been estimated at about 100-120 ms (London, 2002; Repp, 2003). Tempos and subdivision durations reported for American jazz and East African xylophone music performance, however, suggest that the perception of shorter subdivisions within a range of 80-100 ms may well be possible. This paper musicologically analyzes and empirically measures the fastest metric subdivisions in two sets of live recordings of vernacular dance music from West Africa. In two recordings of Ewe drumming from Ghana, subdivision durations display mean values within a range of 90-100 ms for extended periods of time. Four recordings of jembe drumming from Mali feature subdivision IOIs of about 80-90 ms during their final and fastest sections. A lower limit for metric subdivision durations is hypothesized to perceptually constrain West African drumming within a threshold range of about 80-100 ms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the DanceAfrica African dance festival held in the U.S. from May 26-29, which featured community events, dance workshops and visual arts.

The article discusses the significance of African dance and music for African societies which serves as an holistic art form. It mentions role of dance and music as an art form to trigger the process of self-reflection and identity construction in Africa. It also discusses its importance in addressing issues of cultural identity and cultural representation.

The article discusses the status of African dance and music, and establishes their validity as disciplines of academic rigor and tools of academic research. It mentions incorporation of African dance in college and university campuses in the form of the itinerant African dance and music class taught in the format of a typical modern.

In 1964, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. This Act mandated courses on Black and Minority studies be included in the curriculum of schools throughout the nation. Before departments of African or Black Studies could be built and sufficient Black scholars with earned doctoral degrees to chair these departments were a reality, the political wrecking arm called 'Benign Neglect' by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was launched to purposely retard the growth of the field of African music and dance. It has been more than half a century since African music and dance became part of the curriculum throughout the nation. Benign Neglect has attacked all avenues in the area of African music and dance. As the first person to teach African music and dance in Brooklyn College and as the creator of Greenotation system, I have written copious articles on this area of specialization. Needless to say that this field of study remains largely an oral tradition whereupon no comprehensive thesis or dissertations can be written, Therefore, it continues to be lost upon the death of its holders. I feel there are a number of facts that have not reached the classroom or textbooks This article will concentrate on some of the important elements of African music and dance that are not commonly known, such as the classification of African music found on the continent, categories of African dance, cycle of life activities and events of causation. Each of these factors will afford the viewer a better comprehension and promote a better understanding of African music and dances found on the continent and in remnants of the Diaspora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the role of African music and dance in preserving the cultural identity and art forms of Africa and passing them on to the next generations. It discusses the need for establishing schools dedicated to the teaching of African music and dance. It also states the significance of African invention such as Greenotation, for encouraging music and dance.