Dance in the African Diaspora

Abstract

aesthetic domain, it is often a nexus to religious, political, and even economic dimensions of social life. In one of the earliest English-language studies of dance behavior, anthropologist E. Evans Pritchard (1928) analyzed an Azande beer dance from Central Africa in which the obvious instrumental and vocal music, as well as the gen-dered dance organization, were linked significantly to economic and religious concerns. On the surface, the social context of dance/music was festive dancing and music making in the distribution of beer, but at other levels of analysis, it connected with deep religious convictions associated with ancestral funeral pyres and the economic demand for a labor force to build them. Other studies show how dance and music intersect several social purposes simultaneously (e.g., relating history and philosophy, projecting politics and ethnicifies, etc.). Dance/music performance can provide physical, psychological, and cognitive satisfaction as it releases stress and tension. Dance performers report its effects in terms of a sense of balance and wholeness within the individual, as well as solidarity within the group. Even in a technologically advanced world, dancing is spirit giving and essential excitation; it is a meaningful resource for many African and African-derived peoples. Researchers who have focused their analyses on dance performance in the African diaspora have followed the groundbreaking paths with countless unnamed, dance-infected enthusiasts who have performed and taught the healing pleasures of African dance. These courageous foremothers/fathers not only took the primacy of dance in African diaspora communities to theatrical stages, but also through the halls of academe. They shared its potency and spread its understanding to other cultures. Many African-derived dance forms involve the suprahuman body, since most traditional dance/music springs from African belief systems. The suprahuman body is a human body that has been transformed by a spiritual incorporation. It is a common thread across the diaspora for particular gestures, special rhythms, and vocal or percussive music to align the social community with the spiritual world. In the United States, for example, Africanized versions of Protestant religious practice involve human worshippers as they receive the Holy Spirit; characteristically there is congregational swaying, call-and-response singing, and spiritual "jumping for joy." Similarly, in the Caribbean and on the African continent , many traditional religions involve dancing divinities that are masked, or entranced worshippers who dance as divine beings. In fact, much of the dancing in diaspora cultures reveals legacies from hundreds of uprooted or migrating African ethnic groups that express belief in the corporeal inhabitance of African spirit, relief from immediate suffering and social realities, and the splendor and ecstasy of expressive dance movement. EXPERIENTIAL AND EXPERIENTIALLY ORIENTED RESOURCES We are indebted for knowledge of African dance and music, first, to the experiential archivists, the "living librarians," the musicians and dancers themselves, who have provided differing aural and kinesthetic traditions across the diaspora (Martinez Fur6 in Daniel, 1995, p. 167). Our knowledge of African dance is what it is through reliance on the body knowledge that these specialists have maintained and passed along for centuries through performance (Daniel, 2004). Performers have continuously examined and matched the resources they found within music making and spirited dancing. They have ultimately relied on and preserved a literal body of knowledge. We owe special consideration to three dancers/ researchers who forged a specialization within the field of anthropology called dance anthropology, human movement, choreology, and/or dance ethnology (and sometimes, ethnomusicology), and who thereby affected African diaspora dance tremendously. By any of these names, dance research is the serious consideration of a dance practice, not simply as a universal human behavior or an exotic element of a given society's behaviors, but as a viable sociocultural framework that yields substantial data within its aesthetic display. Research writing, together with film, video, and television, have augmented knowledge of dancing African-American communities from the Americas to continental Africa, as well as to the world of interested dance and music specialists.