Learning to Speak in My Mother Tongue

Abstract

Taking an ethnographic turn, this chapter does not offer any definitive contemporary solutions towards decolonising dance practice in South African (and Africa) but offers instead, as the title suggests, ruminations on an embodied and personal dance journey that reflects on two distinct pedagogical arenas; the first is a need to re-evaluate and assess the viability of chosen dance training methods (or what we might call technique) and with this, secondly, the cognate teaching practices. Potentially what I journey into proposing is an attempt to create a critical dance pedagogy that does not always look at Western/Northern based models as the only viable – often defined as universal – training methods. I go back to Ngûgî wa Thiong’o (1981) and his call to mitigate the effects of the cultural bomb and think about what this means for dance practice.