Learning Senegalese Sabar: Dancers and Embodiment in New York and Dakar

ISBN-13: 9781782382560 / Angielski / Twarda / 2014 / 168 str.

Eleni Bizas

Opis

Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in New York and Dakar, this book explores the Senegalese dance-rhythms Sabar from the research position of a dance student. It features a comparative analysis of the pedagogical techniques used in dance classes in New York and Dakar, which in turn shed light on different aesthetics and understandings of dance, as well as different ways of learning, in each context. Pointing to a loose network of teachers and students who travel between New York and Dakar around the practice of West African dance forms, the author discusses how this movement is maintained, what role the imagination plays in mobilizing participants and how the cultural flow of the dances is punctuated by national borders and socio-economic relationships. She explores the different meanings articulated around Sabars transatlantic movement and examines how the dance floor provides the grounds for contested understandings, socio-economic relationships and broader discourses to be re-choreographed in each setting.Eleni Bizas publishes on dance, learning, migration and West Africa and is currently a Research Fellow at the Programme for the Study of Global Migration, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland.