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The Status of African Dance Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2012

Judith Lynne Hanna
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Extract

With the exception of such pioneering efforts as Evans-Pritchard's structural functional analysis of the Azande beer dance, which appeared in this journal in 1928, African dance has rarely been the focus of research. Thirty-eight years after that article appeared I can write, as Evans-Pritchard did then, that African dance is usually given a place quite unworthy of its social importance. The typical report on African dance is either a limited, vague description without reference to context, or a discussion of the context of a dance without explicit reference to its function, style, and structure.

Résumé

LA PLACE DE L'ÉTUDE DES DANSES AFRICAINES

Les danses africaines ont rarement figuré au cœur des recherches en dépit de leur importance sociale. Leur description systématique a été entreprise récemment et leur explication scientifique date de moins longtemps encore. Il y a plusieurs raisons du sous-développement des e'tudes sur ce sujet. En effet, de nombreux Européens s'opposaient aux danses africaines pour des motifs moraux séculaires ou désiraient les interdire parce qu'elles dérangeaient leur sommeil ou leur travail. Les missionnaires, normalement, voulaient les proscrire et empêcher les amateurs de les étudier et, par ce biais, de les légitimer. Les eŕudits n'ont légitimé que récemment les recherches sur la danse en la considérant comme un important élément de culture. Les disciplines académiques ont manifesté pendant longtemps leur traditionalisme en rejetant son étude. Enfin, jusqu'à une époque récente, le poids de l'équipement portatif audio-visuel à l'usage des pays tropicaux constituait encore une entrave à l'enregistrement des danses.

La première étape pour remédier à cette négligence de l'étude des danses africaines doit être leur insertion au rang des principales disciplines pratiquant des analyses structurales fonctionnelles et stylistiques. Muni d'une connaissance de base des danses, d'ordre sociologique et chorégraphique, le chercheur devra être apte à les commenter intelligemment, à contribuer aux sciences sociales et humaines et à aider le chorégraphe et l'artiste exécutant. La seconde étape consisterait en un entraînement aux danses modernes, qui stimule la sympathie kinesthétique et permette la participation aux danses africaines.

A l'intérieur du processus universel d'homogénéisation culturelle, les cultures africaines, avec leurs danses, peuvent trouver tout aussi bien leur mise en relief que leur nivellement.

Type
Research Article
Information
Africa , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , July 1966 , pp. 303 - 307
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 1966

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References

page 303 note 1 Evans-Pritchard, E., ‘The Dance’, Africa, i, October 1928, pp. 446–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 303 note 2 During the 1965 Spring Quarter, I taught a lecture-practicum course on African dance at Michigan State University. The course focused on the functions, structures, and styles of African dances, and included a laboratory component which gave students an opportunity to see demonstrated, and to participate in, African dance movements or complete dances of various African groups. Motion-picture films and tape-recordings from my 1963 field-work were used as illustrative material. Hazel Chung, of the University of California at Los Angeles, includes some dances from Ghana in her ethnic dance practicum course.

page 303 note 3 These were held at Oberlin College, 1964; Michigan State University, 1965; and Western Michigan University, 1965; they included lectures, films, and demonstration-participation sessions.

page 303 note 4 Gorer, Geoffrey, Africa Dames (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1962), pp. 175–6.Google Scholar

page 303 note 5 Malinowski, B., ‘Native Education and Culture Contact’, International Review of Missions, xxv, 1936, pp. 480–515, at p. 500.Google Scholar

page 304 note 1 Gertrude P. Kurath, remarks at the 1954 and 1964 Annual Meetings of the Society of Ethno-musicology.

page 304 note 2 Munro, Thomas, The Arts and their Interrelations (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1951), p. 498.Google Scholar

page 304 note 3 Merriam, Alan P., The Anthropology of Music (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 18.Google Scholar

page 304 note 4 Safier, Benno, ‘A Psychological Orientation to Dance and Pantomime’, Samīksā, vii, 1953, pp. 236–59, at p. 236.Google Scholar

page 304 note 5 Merriam, Alan P., ‘The Music of Africa’, Africa Report, vii (6), 1962, pp. 15–17, and 23, at p. 15.Google Scholar

page 305 note 1 Kurath, Gertrude P. has indicated some of the links between the two approaches in her ‘Panorama of Dance Ethnology’, Current Anthropology, i (3), 1960, pp. 235–54.Google Scholar

page 305 note 2 Mitchell, J. Clyde, The Kalela Dance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, for the Rhodes–Livingstone Institute, Papers, no. 27, 1956).Google Scholar

page 305 note 3 Hanna, Judith Lynne, ‘African Dance as Education’, Impulse: Dance and Education Now, 1965, pp. 48–56.Google Scholar

page 305 note 4 Kealiinohomoku, Joann, ‘A Comparative Study of Dance as a Constellation of Motor Behaviors among African and United States Negroes’, Unpublished Master's Thesis, Northwestern University, 1965, p. i.Google Scholar

page 306 note 1 Harper, Peggy, ‘Experimental Drama’, Cultural Events in Africa, no. 7, June 1965, p. 7.Google Scholar

page 306 note 2 Tracey, Hugh, African Dances of the Witwatersrand Gold Mines (Johannesburg: African Music Society, 1952)Google Scholar. But see the quotation from Gorer, below.

page 306 note 3 Hanna, Judith Lynne, ‘Africa's New Traditional Dance’, Ethnomusicology, ix, 1965, pp. 13–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 306 note 4 Gorer, op. cit., p. vi. See also Hanna, ibid., and Merriam, Alan P., ‘Music’, Africa Report, ix (8), 1964, p. 31Google Scholar, for a discussion on the change from traditional African dance to entertainment dance.

page 306 note 5 See, for example, the comments of Keita Fodeba, who worked with Guinea's Ballet Africain, ‘African Dance and the Stage’, World Theatre, vii (3), 1958, pp. 164–78Google Scholar, and Skelton, Thomas R., ‘Staging Ethnic Dance—The Dance and the Dancers’, Impulse: International Exchange in Dance, 1963–4, pp. 64–70—the author staged dances in the Ivory Coast.Google Scholar

page 307 note 1 For researchers interested in the dance I have, available upon request, copies of a selected bibliography on African dance and the dance research guide used in my ethnochoreological field-work. They call attention to the functional possibilities and structural elements of dance.