Dance in West Africa

Beschreibung

The study centres on the subject of Dance in West Africa, namely a dance of the Ewe in Southern Ghana. Although modernity is having an adverse effect on traditional dancing, it is still important in the society and may be viewed as a mirror of culture. The objectives are to describe the dance and embed this form of expression within a theoretical framework. Every movement has a meaning and in this way it is possible to explain a whole story, a person is speaking through dance.
The study centres on the subject of Dance in West Africa, namely a dance of the Ewe in Southern Ghana. Although modernity is having an adverse effect on traditional dancing, it is still important in the society and may be viewed as a mirror of culture. The objectives are to describe the dance and embed this form of expression within a theoretical framework. Every movement has a meaning and in this way it is possible to explain a whole story, a person is speaking through dance.

Autor*in

Ulrike Groß
Ulrike Groß studied Phonetic Sciences, Linguistics and Slavonic Languages at the University of Cologne; Dance at Laban Centre London and in Westafrican Countries. She also studied Fine Arts at the University of Zuid Limburg, Academie Beeldende Kunsten, Maastricht, NL. Her research interests are in Non-verbal Communication and Phonetics in Second Language Acquisition.

Themen in »Dance in West Africa«

West Africa Togo Ghana Ewe non-verbal communication gestures body language Soziolinguistik

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Grounding her research within a genealogy of dance scholarship and communication theories, Ulrike Groß contributes to the growing literature on how dance is a mechanism for nonverbal communication. While she does an excellent job showing how dance is “a unique form of communication and of equal purpose [to spoken language]” (44), her reliance on structural communication theories and pictographic notations of an individual body does not allow for investigating how Adzogbo communicates to participants in the dance event (see Royce 1977).
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