Reimagining and Reimaging Indigenous Dances and their Contexts of Practice in Postcolonial African Environments

Abstract

ABSTRACT The contexts of Indigenous dance practices in postcolonial African environments have continued to evolve. The phenomena of dance bears on the meanings that individual dance practitioners construct as active agents in Indigenous dance knowledge production. This work draws on the following question to examine how contexts of practice impel the reimagining and reimaging of dances, dancing, and the dancing body in Indigenous dance practices: What meanings do Indigenous dance practitioners construct from partaking in Indigenous dance education practices in varied contexts? Using Indigenous knowledge systems theoretical frame and decoloniality as lenses of analyses, the article reveals how reimaging and reimagination of Indigenous dances transcends framing the body as an exotic, fetishized, and objectified artefact. The dance practitioners rationalize the dances and dance experiences as affective and conceptual-expressive epistemology and ontology that is grounded in community connection, self-guided creative imagination and innovation, intercorporeal embodiments, socio-economic positionalities, and intersubjective situatedness. The complex meanings are anchored in dynamic contexts, experience, agency, community, situations, and epistemological holism. The article provokes a radical rethink in how pedagogy, performance, research, and recreation of Indigenous African dances can be understood and engaged in ways that rise above the Anglo-European objectification, exoticization, and fetishization of the Black body.