Steps include: scuffing, stamping, jumping and hopping steps. Feet are flattened against the ground in a wide stance. All parts of the body articulate in African dance arms, legs, and torso all appearing angular, bent, the body slightly forward. During stage performances the fourth wall often comes down, communication extending between dancer, drummers, and audience members.Īfrican dances are performed in lines or circles of dancers. African dance is notable for the close, multi-directional relationships among participants, often called a conversation, between drummer and dancer, and also drummer to drummer and dancer to dancer. Dance scholar, Brenda Dixon Gottschild, wrote in 1993, “Any serious attempt to study Black dance (in the United States) demands a study of African and New World Black cultures.”Īfrican dance is polyrhythmic-the simultaneous sounding of two or more independent rhythms in drummers and dancers, the relationship of rhythm to movement is key. African dance most often refers to traditional social dance, and to ceremonial or religious dance-danced communal religious observances led either by priests or girots who perform ritual dance-dramas that share cultural traditions or community history through metaphorical statements expressed in music and dance.Īfrican dance has also been an important influence on social dance in all parts of the African Diaspora, but particularly throughout the Americas and the Caribbean, and on modern dance since the second half of the 20 th Century. African and African-American Dance is a broad term referring to the many dance styles from the cultures and countries of the African continent, but particularly Southern Africa.
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