Beyond Collaboration: Making and Staging Connections, Co-Becoming, Co-Construction, and Relationships through African Dances in Tertiary Education

Abstract

ABSTRACT How do dancers, drummers, and singers cultivate connections, collaborations, and co-becoming through dance-making and staging African dances in higher education? This critical question provoked inquiry into processes and experiences of creating and staging African dances in higher education contexts. Taking the philosophy of Ubuntu and the worldview of Vā as an interrogative lens and engaging the data collected through talanoa as a methodology, the discussion frames and unpacks dance-making and performance processes as socio-spatial locations where dancers embodied, negotiated, experienced, and shared notions of connection to the community, co-becoming, and constructive relationality. The analyses disclose how African dances can nourish (a) knowledge, (b) meaning of being, and (c) values that cultivate diversity, equity, and inclusion as guiding and anchoring principles of the 21st century university. The article invites educators, choreographers, performers, researchers, and other dance practitioners to reimagine and reorient African dances beyond the stereotypical objectification, fetishization, and exoticization.