Last Friday, 22/11 was the West African Dance and Drumming Ensemble. It was so much fun! I’m in West African Dance II, after having taken the preliminary class last semester. Our professor, Iddrisu Saaka (Iddi), trained at the University of Ghana, home to the Ghana Dance Ensemble (GDE). The GDE was founded by Ghana’s first president and prime minister, Kwame Nkrumah, as part of an effort to formulate a distinct and unifying national identity in the wake of Independence. By celebrating and uplifting Ghanaian cultural heritage, Nkrumah hoped to instill pride in tradition and solidify Ghana’s international presence. In order to collect material for the GDE, Musicologist J.H. Kwabena Nketia and dancer/choreographer Mawere Opoku toured the country, working with communities to adapt a wide sampling of music and dance to the stage (Cornelius and Iddrisu).
In class we talked about this process of adaptation and translation: what happens when a dance that has grown up around a certain set of cultural values and practices is removed from its cultural context? In its new context, how is the dance received by cultural insiders vs. cultural outsiders? What kind of new associations and meanings might take root, and how do we balance a dance’s evolution with its origin? One thing that stood out to me from Cornelius and Iddrisu’s article was the idea that evolution infuses vitality. We are performing Ghanaian dances in an international context: Iddi learned particular choreographies at the University of Ghana, and has adapted these further to suit his pedagogical needs and personal style. His students come from all different places, and we perform the dances he teaches us on stage at a university in Connecticut, for an audience of people who also come from all different places. This arrangement necessarily generates a proliferation of meanings and affective orientations. But the layering produced does not undermine the framework of a given dance; rather, it reinforces and stories it. This is something I felt most strongly at the end of the performance when audience members were invited up on stage to dance, and a giant circle was formed. People came into the circle at will to dance: students, drummers, and finally Iddi. The spontaneity and idiosyncrasy of this dance circle reminded me how easy and joyful it is to celebrate all we are individually, and all we can be together.
Works cited:
Cornelius, Steven, and Habib Iddrisu. From Village to International Stage: Baamaaya and the Politics of Adaptation. 2019, pp. 228–48, https://doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252042959.003.0014.
