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African dance
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What is African dance?
African dance is integral to African culture and serves diverse social purposes. It expresses communal values and relationships, often merging ritual celebration with social recreation. Performances feature skilled movements fitting specific purposes, appreciated as social events and activities that express communal life.
Rooted in the interaction between spiritual forces and the community, African dances involve possession of human mediums and therapy through ritual societies. Dances reflect environmental, historical, and social conditions, with movements varying across cultures. Accompanied by percussive music, song, or both, dancers externalize rhythmic patterns, emphasizing rhythmic precision over spatial accuracy.
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What are some common features of African dance?
African dance styles vary radically across the continent's diverse cultures, reflecting different environmental, historical, and social conditions. Despite this diversity, several common features can be identified.
African dances are earth-centered, with dancers often returning to the earth, interpreting music's percussive rhythms through steps and gestures. Rhythm is a key element, with dancers assessed on their ability to follow the percussive musical rhythm, often described as "playing the drums with their feet".
There are four main formations: formalized team patterns, free-flow group patterns, formations where soloists emerge, and solo performances. Music and dance are inseparable, with music-making often collective, featuring complementary contributions from performers.
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How are music and rhythm used in African dance?
African dance is earth-centred, with dancers interpreting music's percussive rhythms through steps and gestures. Skill is judged by rhythmic accuracy rather than spatial precision. Musicians lead with percussive instruments and voices, though dancers can initiate rhythmic exchanges.
Rhythm is key; each dance has a distinct rhythmic pattern expressed via footwork, torso contractions, or leaps. Basic rhythms repeat steadily, sometimes for days. Complex rhythms feature drummers using different rhythms per hand to reflect the dance's mood. Dancers may set rhythms with feet while marking others with the torso, creating varied patterns. Igbo dances have distinct rhythms dictating movement, while Yoruba dancers improvise, responding to drum cues.
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What are some traditional African dances and what do they celebrate?
African dances serve diverse social purposes, expressing communal values and relationships. These dances often blend ritual celebration with social recreation.
For example, the Gelede ritual festival in Nigeria and Benin features the Efe mask, honoring the Earth Mother and elders through a powerful stamping dance. In Yorubaland, the crowning of an oba (king) involves formal dances that display his authority.
Dance also serves as an educational tool, teaching children physical control and accepted standards of conduct. Transition rites, such as initiations for adolescents, use dance to emphasize sexual fertility and customary behavior between the sexes. Additionally, dances can be designed for funeral rites, burial ceremonies, and anniversaries, offering a cathartic role during key social transitions.
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How do costumes and body movements play a role in African dance?
In African dance, costumes and body movements are essential to the performance and its meaning. Costumes, such as animal masks, can influence the dance style, with heavier masks restricting movement and lighter costumes allowing for more acrobatic displays.
Body movements vary across cultures, influenced by environmental, historical, and social factors. For example, savanna farmers use firm foot placements, while the Ijo people in swampy regions exhibit light, rapid foot movements, mimicking balancing on canoes. Additionally, gestures can be extensions of movements, and posture can reflect social status, with upright postures signifying authority. These elements combine to express communal values, social relationships, and the diverse purposes of the dance.
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How has African dance influenced modern dance styles around the world?
African dance has significantly influenced modern dance styles globally. Characterized by flexion of the hips and knees, movement from the body's core, isolated movements, and rhythmic complexity, African dance emphasizes a connection to the earth and expressive interpretation of music.
Figures like Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus integrated African and Caribbean themes into their choreography, exploring the black diaspora and expanding modern dance boundaries. These innovations broke from European traditions, emphasizing weight and natural movements, and continue to shape contemporary dance.
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African dance, performing art deeply woven into the social fabric of Africa and generally involving aspects of music and theatre as well as rhythmic bodily movement. See also African music and mask.
The cultural position of dance
In African societies, dance serves a complex diversity of social purposes. Within an indigenous dance tradition, each performance usually has a principal as well as a number of subsidiary purposes, which may express or reflect the communal values and social relationships of the people. In order to distinguish between the variety of dance styles, therefore, it is necessary to establish the purpose for which each dance is performed.
Often there is no clear distinction between ritual celebration and social recreation in dance performances; one purpose can merge into the other, as in the appearance of the great Efe mask at the height of the Gelede ritual festival in the Ketu-Yoruba villages of Nigeria and Benin. At midnight the mask dramatically appears to the expectant community, its wearer uttering potent incantations to placate witches. The dancer then moves into a powerful stamping dance in honour of the great Earth Mother and the women elders of the community. The dance continues as the performer pauses to sing the praises of people of rank, carefully observing their order of seniority. In this way a ritual act becomes a social statement, which then flows into recreation as the formal dancing by the Gelede team gives way to free participation by spectators until sunrise. The great Efe holds a central position, entertaining his audience with tales that make comic and satiric reference to irregular behaviour within the community over the past year.
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The more significant the concept expressed in a dance, the greater the appreciation of the audience and the more insistent their demands for a skillful performance and for movements that fit its purpose. Dance is appreciated as a social occasion but is simultaneously enjoyed as an activity in its own right, entertaining and giving pleasure as an expression of communal life.
The religious context
Thought systems traditional to African cultures are rooted in a world view in which there is continuous interaction between spiritual forces and the community. Spiritual beings may inhabit natural elements or animals and may also take possession of human mediums. This possession of persons is usually temporary and confined to ritual, as when the priest of the Yoruba god Shango dances into a state of deep trance at the annual festival, expressing the wrath of the god of thunder with the lightning speed of his arm gestures and the powerful roll of his shoulders. In Zimbabwe the Mhondora spirit mediums, who relate the Shona people to the guardian spirits of the dead, enter a trance through the music of the mbira lamellaphone, to which they sing while performing simple, repetitive foot patterns. Thus, the dances of priests and mediums confirm their ritual leadership.
Dance is used as therapy by ritual societies in many cultures. Hausa women, for example, find healing through dance and spirit possession in the Bori cult. Among the Jukun of Nigeria, a similar organization is called the Ajun, whose elders deal with hysterical disorders in women by exorcising evil spirits in initiation ceremonies. During a three-month period in a house shrine, the sufferer is taught songs and dances that have a therapeutic function culminating in a ceremony in which the initiate publicly joins the members of the society to perform the Ajun-Kpa dance. The female spirit mediums of the Kalabari in the Niger delta, using dance and song as an essential part of their therapy, are also credited with powers of healing.
Many African religions are based on a bond of continuity between the living and their dead ancestors, who, in some cultures, return as masquerade performers to guide and judge the living. The complex web of human relationships is continuously renewed and restated at ritual festivals through the arts.
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