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Invented Dances, Or, How Nigerian Musicians Sculpt the Body Politic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2021

Dotun Ayobade
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Abstract

Popular dances encapsulate the aliveness of Africa's young. Radiating an Africanist aesthetic of the cool, these moves enflesh popular music, saturating mass media platforms and everyday spaces with imageries of joyful transcendence. This essay understands scriptive dance fads as textual and choreographic calls for public embodiment. I explore how three Nigerian musicians, and their dances, have wielded scriptive prompts to elicit specific moved responses from dispersed, heterogenous, and transnational publics. Dance fads of this kind productively complicate musicological approaches that insist on divorcing contemporary African music cultures from the dancing bodies that they often conjure. Taken together, these movements enlist popular culture as a domain marked by telling contestations over musical ownership and embodied citizenship.

Keywords

body politicdance fadsNigerian musicpopular embodimentyouth expressivity
Type
Article
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , April 2021 , pp. 5 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Dance Studies Association

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