Contexts and Meanings of Indigenous Dance Education Practices

Abstract

The contexts of Indigenous dance education practices in Uganda include home environments, village communities, schools, universities, and dance troupes, among others. The environments in which dances are taught, learned, shared, and practiced bring complex perspectives to how the meanings are re/constructed, deconstructed, and rationalized by the participants in the dance activities. In homes and village communities, the dance knowledge and skills are negotiated through relationally interactive processes between individual participants and the rest of the people in the communities of dance practices. In this configuration, there is a reciprocal flow of skills, ideas, and experiences between the individual and the community and vice versa. On the other hand, teaching and learning in environments such as schools, universities, and dance troupes emphasize individual innovation as a means of cultural production and creative progress. These complex contexts cultivate experience, activity, and agency, which continue to define the diverse meanings that people derive from learning, teaching, sharing, and performing Indigenous dances and the complex phenomena that dance practices in Uganda are experiences.