Call-and-Response: Teacherly Texts, Dancing Publics

Invented dances seek to elicit from their listeners a historically situated, embodied form of participation rooted in call-and-response. Evident in much of African-derived musical production, call-and-response is a theory and configuration of performance in which the body yields to and generates vocalized and rhythmic frequencies.Footnote ⁴ To call and to respond, or to be called upon and respond, is to reproduce culture through embodiment and to express decipherment and a capacity for complementary creative action (Jones, Moore, and Bridgforth Reference Jones, Moore and Bridgforth2010, 154–258). The practice manifests a philosophy of relationality, the actuation of completeness. It is consistent with this thinking that African-derived social dance constitutes itself as “communicative collaboration” with rhythm (DeFrantz Reference DeFrantz and Lepecki2004, 66), and not simply as its derivative. One approach to Nigerian popular music might prioritize the sociohistorical context of particular music genres, or artists’ aesthetic and political intentions (Waterman Reference Waterman1990; Veal Reference Veal2000; Olaniyan Reference Olaniyan2004). Another approach complements these efforts by proposing the popular as a terrain of beckoning. Confronted with increasingly dispersed and heterogenous publics, African musicians have resorted to multiple strategies for calling forth their publics or outreaching to existing and potential fans. The gesture of weaving dance scripts into songs offers but one dimension of this outreach effort. Artists compose songs to act as probing scripts capable of eliciting a targeted danced response. Should enough listeners yield to produce a critical mass of dancing bodies, a single tune might conjure an imagined community of listeners and dancers that shape the material world and, ultimately, produce subtle revisions in culture (Noland Reference Noland2009).

Dancing grants consistency to a receptive but discerning public, whereas the act of performing together makes legible a shared moral project (Brennan Reference Brennan2018). The cycle of scripting and dancing, of calling and responding, authorizes the political projects of the listening publics as well. Denied access to formal instruments of agency and subjectivity, such as through political power, work, leisure, and education, African youth have continually constructed new spaces of sociability that demonstrate their difference either at society's margins or at its heart (Diouf Reference Diouf2003, 5). In this way, communities of real and imagined dancers animate a body politic of the dispossessed that counters dominant and negative imagery of youth as socially unfit or as a threat to order. This reveals one of the ways that collectivized dancing invites youth to mark themselves legible and to assert their “somebodiness,” in a fashion that echoes the othering of racialized subjects as being of no appreciable value (West Reference West, Kruger and Mariani1989, 96).

Musicians, like their listeners, position themselves as moral agents in this circuit of sonic and embodied exchange. Harry Garuba's exploration of “teacherly texts” describes the efforts of scholars-activists who utilize public art in the spirit of outreach and education. Teacherly texts, Garuba offers, are literary works produced during the period of decolonization with the goal of educating Africans on their history, culture, and on citizenship. The authors about whom Garuba writes imagined themselves as teachers, part of whose mission was to attune Africans to full participation in the field of cultural and political modernity (Garuba Reference Garuba2017, 15–16). Garuba delimits his conception of teacherly texts to written literature, but extending the teacherly from the literary text to the embodied, and specifically to dance, has the potential to expand the study of African popular culture. When musicians invent dances, as many do or claim to do, they actively train their publics on emergent bodily and cultural idioms. They also teach their publics how to orient their bodies in public spaces. Whether this pedagogy occurs as part of a youth outreach project or a dance challenge that utilizes online mediums, these practices have a serious impact on youth behavior and on the body politic writ large.

Dance as teacherly text has kinship with another tradition: the artist as sculptor, which is an idea that has elsewhere been deployed to achieve explicitly political goals. Joseph Beuys, a postwar German sculptor and performance artist, used the idea of “social sculpture” to describe art that requires public participation for its completion. Beuys believed that citizens could transform society through popular creativity fueled by socially engaged public art (Moore Reference Moore2009). In much the same way, applied theater practitioners imagine the human body as moldable clay. Participants in applied theater workshops might manipulate volunteers’ limbs, torsos, and facial expressions to express abstract concepts or stimulate otherwise difficult topics.Footnote ⁵ These examples illustrate how artists guide audiences toward empowering ends, and, in turn, shape the body politic in literal and figurative ways.

As vernacular, grassroots creative action that lies beyond state control, invented dances embroil themselves in decadent enjoyment (Mbembe Reference Mbembe2005). They shun the lofty political goals implied in the foregoing examples. Mass incorporation, reproduction, and disuse are the rules that govern the market of invented dances. When in vogue, West African youth ferociously enact these dances, facilitate their virality through mobile technologies, and discard the dances when they fall out of fashion. Some musicians and their youth audience capitalize on already reigning dances in ways that minimize risk. In this sense, invented dances might be best understood as “African” to the extent that they reveal the market logic that oils the machinery of contemporary popular culture. These dances are quickly produced, widely consumed, hotly contested, and then ditched in the wake of digital fatigue or as soon as they yield no further value for artist or public (Shipley Reference Shipley2013). Musicians might also use popular dancing to enlist youth support for the agendas of powerful political actors who readily coopt emergent youth culture to undercut its radical potential.Footnote ⁶ Music entrepreneurs endowed with an acute sensitivity to the moves of the moment adapt emergent music technology or tailor song compilations to specific dance fads.Footnote ⁷ The vitality of these exchanges underscore a fraught dynamic of invented dances: musicians seeking to mold youth bodies into cultural products while inevitably revealing those bodies as elusive, untamable substrates in the matrix of African cultural production.

Sketches: Open & Close, Shoki, and Shaku Shaku

Three examples reveal the power of invented dances to instantiate vital exchanges among a network of creative actors. When Fela Kuti, famed Afrobeat musician and activist, released Open & Close in 1971, the album also ushered in the birth of a new, eponymous dance style. Centered on the lower body, the signature song, “Open & Close,” asks the listener to flex the knees inward and outward, repeating a sequence of tension and release of the thighs. The dancer might place the hands on the knees or stretch them out; what is essential is that the hands facilitate or mirror the contraction and release of the knees. The body's weight rests on the balls of the feet, as the dancer continues the movement in a mild squat. Despite their releases sixteen years apart, the original album artwork (1971) and the reissued edition (1987) read like pictorial dance manuals. Both editions conveyed the essential message that dancing of a particular kind was a critical aspect to enjoying the song. The reissued album art (Figure 1), like the original, represents women frozen in midmovement. The women on the left splay their arms and spread their legs; the women on the right contract their bodies, with arms crisscrossed and legs close together. In either sequence, the arms hang just above waist level, while the torso contorts forward or falls slightly sideways. The song's lyrics detail the execution of the dance, amplifying the album's not-so-subtle discursive and visual cues:

Figure 1. Album art of reissued edition of Fela Kuti's Open & Close. Photo: Lemi Ghariokwu.

The album's artwork combined with the song to convey the unmistakable message that “Open & Close” requires a particular danced response. Together, these elements suggest that a rounded musical experience is predicated on collaborative decoding of its integrated danced aspects.

The four women featured in the album artwork register the prompt on a somatic-affective level, at the level of a mirror sensory awareness, inviting whoever held the album to mirror the contraction or extension of their bodies whenever they get around to listening. The title “Open and Close,” neither simply a description nor a command, provokes the listener's curiosity: What is being opened or closed? To whom is this command/description addressed? The lyrics, artwork, and embodied response render explicitly that what is required of the listener is to listen and, subsequently, to perform a particular sequence of moves. The various aesthetic components of “Open & Close” combine to make clear the song's stated intent: to elicit dancing. What is more, answering this call signaled belonging to an emergent community of urban, innovative, and socially aware Nigerians of the early 1970s. In a fashion consistent with the circum-Atlantic travel of African-derived cultural idioms, Fela adapted the release and contraction technique required to perform Open & Close from the Caribbean butterfly dance (Olorunyomi Reference Olorunyomi2005). The butterfly dance itself expressed the growing influence of Caribbean popular culture in the United States and on global pop from the 1960s onward. The Caribbean influence was also expressed in the spread of the boogaloo, a dance that shaped the musical and performative textures of Black musical forms like soul and funk (Veal Reference Veal2000; Allam Reference Allam2020). Through “Open & Close,” Fela Kuti revealed himself as especially alert to the ways in which music and dance of the United States were transforming the taste of Nigerian and West African youth, who were taken by the American and Black popular culture of the 1960s and early 1970s. Fela would become known for his savvy adaptation of key elements of soul, funk, and jazz to local musical sensibilities and, later, to addressing political concerns of the day.Footnote ⁹ The musical cross-fertilization is readily evident in Fela's work, but the danced adaptations were just as crucial.

The timing of Fela's release of Open & Close in 1971 was significant in Nigeria's postcolonial history. Preceding his rise to global fame, the album was published by Fela as part of a larger experiment in adapting his Afrobeat music to reflect the cosmopolitan sensitivities of young, urban, working-class Nigerian audiences, many of whom hungered for new musical idioms in the wake of a brutal civil war, economic mismanagement, and a cultural scene dominated by highlife and James Brown's soul music. Harboring little interest in antiestablishment politics, Fela published “Open & Close” alongside its eponymous dance while solely preoccupied with gaining traction in the music industry. As the dance became the ubiquitous move in nightclubs, at parties and social gatherings, and in schools, it also announced Fela's as a musical force to be reckoned with.

The commercial success and widespread embrace of Open & Close enabled Fela to accrue social and economic capital for a lifelong challenge of a set of Nigeria's moral and political orders. The album and its accompanying dance script joined a litany of hits that declared Fela as the definitive voice of Nigeria's restive young. But Fela also registered his rising stature by seizing aesthetic control of the bodies of Nigeria's dancing youth publics, a fact that gave credence to his claims to musical superiority. Fela deployed Open & Close dance in a fashion reminiscent of James Brown's electric boogaloo in the 1960s, but the move prefigured Fela's fierce opposition to state repression and entrenched inequities later in the decade. The boogaloo illustrates that Fela had not pioneered the perennial desire by musicians to deploy dance scripts as tools of elicitation. Fela, however, offers a prominent example of Nigerian musicians’ enchantment with the promise of seizing aesthetic hold of the bodies of their listeners. Few artists follow this trajectory of deploying a dance to advance visibility in a fashion that accrues into a mass political project.

The practice of inventing dances has continued to structure more contemporary examples. Forty-three years after Open & Close a comparatively obscure Nigerian pop singer, Keshinro Ololade (a.k.a. Lil Kesh), declared the birth of Shoki dance. Lil Kesh couched “Shoki” within the familiar scriptive and pedagogic form of Open & Close. The song issued an instruction to the listener, offering lyrical signposts about how they should deploy their body according to the beat:

Well-executed, Shoki resembles a sideways scooping motion that begins from a half-squat and ends in an upright position. Alternately flexing each knee inward at each pulse of the beat, the dancer makes a gradual and rhythmic rise. The palms turn skyward in a scoop as the dancer gradually rises; the palms capsize to coincide with the body's erect stance. The dancer repeats the scooping, rising, and capsizing motion with varying degrees of flair. The left arm sits across the body throughout the dance, while the right arm extends away so that the right elbow stays around waist level. Repeat the sequence to your level of comfort; now put style into it. Completing the dance requires urging, and Lil Kesh obliges with the prompt. There is no notable change in the rhythm or melody as Lil Kesh seamlessly glides between gentle imploring (“Let me” and “Let your”) and brazen prescription (“Na o̩wọ́ s’íwájú” [Stretch your hands forward]). The goal of this shift in tone, it appears, is to prompt the listener to surrender their bodies and elicit as little resistance as possible. The listeners’ attention to the dance script becomes crucial not just to completing the movement, but to gaining admission into a community of listeners/dancers who, although dispersed by time and space, are imagined to be rehearsing and performing the same dance. The participatory ethos of the Shoki enabled its quick spread, along with Lil Kesh's rising profile within and beyond Nigeria.

The eponymous hit song, “Shoki,” announced Lil Kesh's arrival on the music scene, so much so that the notion that he did not create the dance likely astonished many. The dance's journey to popularity was in fact not a straightforward one. Lil Kesh had poached the movement from another artist, Esegine Allen (a.k.a. Orezi), who himself simply published a dance already resonating with young dancers on Lagos streets. By poaching Shoki for monetary gain and social status, Lil Kesh and Orezi completed a familiar circle of dominant popular culture in Nigeria. Previously emergent and underground, Shoki transitioned to the mainstream in commodified form, becoming accessible to consumers, all the while wrestling to reclaim its ties to the grassroots. Both artists merely amplified and recycled an existing movement vocabulary, each motioning to the street-level creativity that inflects Nigerian pop music, while also appropriating said creativity for self-promotion. Lil Kesh's efforts with “Shoki” eclipsed Orezi's, a fact underlined by his equally successful remix, which featured two A-list Nigerian artists: Davido and Olamide. Invented dances such as Shoki almost certainly transcend their nations and communities of origin, fielding new transnational contestations over ownership. For instance, Lil Kesh's strategic claims to authorship of Shoki gained traction when the move appeared fleetingly in the single “Where They From” (2015) by renowned African American songwriter, rapper, and emcee, Missy Elliot. Online commentators promptly read Missy's work not simply as a recognition of African popular music, which it was, but also as a powerful validation for Lil Kesh, an artist who sought to consolidate himself on the Nigerian and African pop scene.Footnote ¹⁰ Riding on the infrastructure of dancing bodies, cellphone cameras, and the Internet, these dances powerfully underscore how dance fads might foster feelings of national belonging, even as the digital channels necessary for their transnational circulation also render those dances boundaryless (Shipley Reference Shipley2013). Shoki ushered Lil Kesh and Orezi into and, inevitably, out of the limelight in the pattern of embrace and disuse that defines the lifecycles of invented dances. Shoki, like dances in this subgenre of popular dancing, might define the artistic lifespans of artists who tether their careers too closely to specific dance fads. It should come as no surprise that neither Lil Kesh nor Orezi could sustain the musical momentum created by the once-dominant Shoki dance.

When Nigerian rapper Olamide Adedeji made an appearance on the remix of Lil Kesh's “Shoki,” he registered an alertness to the persuasive power of dance scripts. Investing his songs with dance scripts is a practice that has come to define Olamide's own musical trajectory. From the cool, inward pull of the arms that materializes Shakiti Bobo dance (“Bobo” [2015]) to the instructions issued to the listener in “Position Yourself” (2018)—to support “your waist with your left hand or your right hand,” suspending the other “like a linesman”—Olamide has long established himself within a genealogy of male musicians for whom dancing operates as a textual and performative strategy for conjuring their publics. Few contemporary Nigerian musicians have consistently succeeded at deploying dance scripts and “inventing” dances as has Olamide. Born in Lagos's working-class coastal suburb of Bariga, Olamide rose to fame on an artful blend of Yoruba lore and lyricism with the cadence and ethos of commercial rap music. His songs mobilize street lingo to advance controversial views on topics such as conspicuous consumption, sex, and drug abuse. To appeal to a largely religious Nigerian public, Olamide often skirts direct meaning and responsibility by activating the Yoruba penchant for ambiguity and indirection. What often goes unspoken, however, is that Olamide's success derives from his tried ability to script dances for his listeners. Shaku Shaku became one of many dances attributable to Olamide's discography. Performed in a half-squat position, Shaku Shaku features two complementary moves, both of which might be combined and sequenced based on the listener's skill level and improvisational instincts. The first move might be described as a dynamic base stance, which is characterized by exaggerated backward lifts of the lower legs. The pronounced lift is punctuated by the rebound of the legs. The dancer lands each foot at an angle that alternately opens up the body before the next lift. Both arms extend in front of the body to create an X at the wrists (Figure 2), but the dancer might manipulate the knot with an inward roll without disentangling the X. The second movement is underscored by variation. Here, the dancer pulls back the right arm, opening up the body to simulate the tension of tugging at an invisible object, or of exaggerating a phone call. The right foot rhythmically stamps the ground in a half-squat as the trailing left leg pulsates at the knees. With the body's weight largely on the right foot, the ball of the left foot barely lifts off the ground. When Shaku Shaku (#shakushaku) became hashtagged in dance videos on YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter, it digitally indexed widespread embodied response to Olamide's call. The hashtag prompted a flurry of self-directed, user-generated cell phone videos as well as how-to dance tutorials, all of which represented Nigerians and Africans forging a sense of national, continental, and diasporic community as they performed the dance.

Figure 2. Still image from music video of Olamide's “Science Student.” Photo: YBNL Nation.

Everyone, from ordinary Nigerians and celebrities to politicians and athletes, have had a go at Shaku Shaku. But when Shaku Shaku first emerged in Olamide's music video “Wo!,” it lacked a name and was barely sketched out as a coherent movement. To complicate matters, Shaku Shaku, the name by which it would later be known, had no obvious etymological links in Nigerian Pidgin English or Yoruba, further marking its improvised origins in the popular imagination. Instead, Shaku Shaku debuted in the music video “Wo!” as a series of disjointed moves to be refined over time by popular participation. Other artists picked up the dance and incorporated it into their own songs, entrenching the culture of poaching while helping the dance's refinement process. Lil Kesh, for instance, sensed a critical opportunity when he composed and released “Rora” (2017), a lesser-known song in which he and a male co-dancer performed a more cohesive version of what was destined to become Shaku Shaku. Soon after, Olamide released an Instagram video of himself enacting a more effortless version of the dance, a tacit counterstrike aimed partly at reminding his followers about the dance's creative debt to his song “Wo!.” Accelerated by social events as much as by online shares and hashtags, Shaku Shaku dominated much of West Africa's blogosphere for roughly three years.

The release of Olamide's song “Science Student” (2018) also helped to announce Shaku Shaku as a distinctly Nigerian dance style, delineated, for instance, from contagious dances like Ghana's Azonto and South Africa's Gwara Gwara. “Science Student” (Figure 2) also named Olamide as its most likely choreographer. Design choices in the music video helped advance both of these claims. The set features a makeshift laboratory with bottles bearing ominous substances. Olamide makes a break from the laboratory scene, emerging in an abandoned storage complex. Visibly stoned dancers slump in awkward postures, and suspicious-looking scientists litter the first half of the video's overall aesthetic, punctuating the song's controversial treatment of willful drug mixing. The striking colors of the set and costumes, upbeat tempo, and witty lyrics overwhelm Olamide's attempt at rectitude. One scene features the warning “Say No 2 Drugs” scribbled on a wall, but Olamide's treatment of drug mixing is a playful, even mischievous one. For instance, one of the most notable lines in the song is “wọ́n ti po chemical pọ̀ / ojú ti dirty / wó̩n ti p'omi gutter pọ̀, àwo̩n science students” (they have mixed all sorts of chemicals / the eyes have become blurry / they have mixed in gutter water, the science students). The humorous phrase “science students” promptly entered Nigerian public discourse, indicating that indulgence had trumped the song's oblique moral project. The climax of Olamide's video showcased Shaku Shaku as a delineated sequence of movements by invoking the aesthetic of Michael Jackson's “Thriller.” Olamide's choreography comes complete with the jerking movement of the shoulders that defined Jackson's timeless work. The music video, and the widespread dancing of Shaku Shaku it spurred, might be read superficially as evidence of the erosion of morals among Nigerian youth. But when the expression “science student” entered into public discourse, it contained at least one important critique of the state of affairs: it called attention to the critical underfunding of Nigeria's public education. The figure of the science student became a synecdoche for youth who, finding no outlet in formal laboratories or studios, pour their creative talents into risky, even self-destructive, experiments. The catchy tune traveled from nightclubs to music apps, from social media to Lagos parties, consolidating Shaku Shaku as a dominant bodily idiom that also materialized a potent critique of society. Whereas the music video's culminating choreography draws from a wide array of movement sources, including South Africa's Gwara Gwara dance, Shaku Shaku was the song's signature movement, the sequence that defined the choreographic routine and the song itself. Everyday Nigerians vied to showcase mastery of a previously inchoate bodily idiom. The movement established itself as a choreographic and stylistic precursor to emergent dances, such as Zanku (legwork), but its ambivalent moral critique more closely resembled Tèṣùmó̩lè̩ (“step on the enemy”)—the latter being performed by Marlians, the fans of artist Naira Marley that self-celebrate their unruliness. Both of the latter moves became mainstream during the course of this writing.

The examples of Open & Close, Shoki, and Shaku Shaku exemplify how invented dances might derive as much from the creativity of individual musicians as they derive from quotidian cultures of play, leisure, humor, and community. These dances animate the body politic, lure real and imagined publics into choreographic surrender, and expand musicians’ social capital (pejoratively known as street credibility). For their part, the youth who respond to this form of dancing do so to render themselves visible members of a national, transnational, and global collective. Whether as individuals or as collectives, Nigerians and West Africans perform these dances to register their belonging local, national, continental and diasporic communities. They perform these movements in contexts that range from casual to highly symbolic pursuits, from political events to online challenges or pedagogic how-to videos. What emerges within this circuit of collectivized embodiment is a complex practice of call-and-response that crisscrosses Nigerian and African communities as they negotiate self, belonging, and identity across expanses of time and space. The hashtagged response to Olamide's “call,” for instance, became crucial to completing a circuit of embodied dialogue between artist and the listening-dancing publics for whom participation represented the civic act of making themselves legible as part of a public. But the movement also entered into a regional, continental, and global circuit of Africanness constructed through dance. Like the unfettered global appropriation of Black social dance, invented dances are trailed by a neoliberal discourse of freedom that threatens to unmoor culturally-situated movements from the particularities of place and community (DeFrantz Reference DeFrantz, Nielsen and Ybarra2012). For this reason, invented dances constitute part of an ever-evolving nomenclature of Nigerianness understood within, and in excess of, nation. Shaku Shaku might have evinced Olamide's stature in a fiercely contested fan culture, but it also authorized public enjoyment and, with it, a politics of visibility for many youth. Choreographing the body politic in such a decipherable fashion validates the musician's claims to a slice of power. When contextualized within histories of dispossession, the act of conjuring a coherent public imbues dancing en masse with political meaning, especially given how collectivized dancing contains within itself the specter of subversive mass action.

Regimes of Movement

Invented dances challenge the idea that collectivized dancing is simply a fortunate accident of well-crafted music. Open & Close, Shoki, and Shaku Shaku reveal a high degree of intentionality in how musicians orchestrate public embodiment through their songs. The strategic use of dance scripts by Nigerian musicians and the sometimes-dramatic tussle that attends ownership of dance moves powerfully to illuminate the political stakes around popular embodiment. These musicians clarify that popular dancing does not idly proceed in the wake of musical creativity. Instead, the promise of collectivized dancing animates the musical imagination itself.Footnote ¹¹ It should be clear that the convergence of music making and public embodiment proliferates well beyond the three examples that I have so far surveyed. Indeed, there is an overabundance of invented dances that have emerged in Nigerian popular music culture between the 1970s and the first decade of the twenty-first century. A longer historical treatment from the 1970s is both possible and enticing, but instead, I will offer brief sketches of more contemporary examples.

The last two decades alone have been defined by patterns of boom-and-bust in this form of popular embodiment. The late 1990s ushered in an explosion of dances whose proponents resided at the margins of Lagos, Nigeria's commercial capital. Galala and Suwo were two dances that dominated the national imagination at the turn of the millennium. Both movements captured the ethos of the ethnically diverse Ajegunle ghetto, an urban margin populated by migrants from Nigeria's hinterlands. Daddy Showkey and Mad Melon, both of whom performed dancehall-style music, are generally credited with popularizing these dances and for ushering Ajegunle into public consciousness. Both artists migrated from the oil-rich but economically sidelined South South region of Nigeria.Footnote ¹² When Galala and Suwo dominated the popular music scene, the dances fomented a renewed national appreciation for life, creativity, and humanity at the urban margins. Yahoozee came on the heels of these two dances to coincide with the proliferation of Internet fraud, a phenomenon by which Nigeria would earn international disrepute from the early 2000s onward. Yahoozee embodied an unabashed celebration of conspicuous consumption and ill-earned wealth. The cool, self-indulgent style of the Yahoozee dancer celebrates the guile of the subaltern in a globalized world that, at the time, became increasingly marked by the abstraction of wealth from the processes of production.Footnote ¹³ Yahoozee's assertion of belonging was one punctuated by urban poverty and exclusion from the Nigerian commonwealth as well as from the concentration of economic wealth in the Global North. “Yahoo Yahoo,” the infamous epithet for Internet fraud, presented itself as an option for large swaths of disgruntled youths to both insert themselves, via the Internet, into the global circuit while celebrating said arrival.Footnote ¹⁴

These dominant popular dances of the 1990s and early 2000s paled in comparison to the proliferation that marked the mid-2000s onward. It is hardly coincidental that subsequent dances and the public participation that they helped to galvanize would see a progressive boom in the wake of Nigeria's transition to democratic rule in 1999. A hallmark of the early 2000s was the liberalization of the national economy in favor of private capital by Olusegun Obasanjo, the leader of Nigeria's first democracy after two decades of military rule. The democracy turn spurred a nearly unbroken chain of dances such as Alanta dance by Art Quake; Shoki by Lil Kesh/Orezi; Shakiti Bobo and Shaku Shaku by Olamide; Skelewu by Davido; Konko Below by Lagbaja; Etighi by Iyanya; Gaga Shuffle by 2Face; Azonto by Fuse ODG and Tiffany in Ghana, which was later popularized in Nigeria by Wizkid; and Alkayida by Guru, also in Ghana. The point being made here is that, taken together, post-1999 pop dances both signaled and secured renewed access to the public and civic spaces. This access would, at the same time, underscore relentless, albeit elusive, attempts at the commodification of dancing by individual musicians. Imagined in its long arc, invented dances vividly illustrate how popular embodiment through dancing shaped Nigerian public culture at critical historical junctures.

The litany of dances sampled above makes possible two related claims. First, the ways in which invented dances dominate social life and inevitably fizzle authorizes us to think about popular dance history as “regimes of movement.” When taken in the context of Nigeria's long history with authoritarianism, as well as its impositions on social life, we might begin to appreciate the subversive potential of creative actors like musicians, who vie with state actors for control of the body politic. These actors forge alternative sites of affective surrender, creatively underscoring the futile fantasies of totalitarian control by state actors.Footnote ¹⁵ Second, if dance regimes also describe slices of historical time, then critical attention to dance regimes might equally facilitate new and innovative readings of the political economy of colonial and postcolonial Nigeria. I am suggesting that regimes of invented dances do not merely signal lifecycles; but they also betray the grip that specific forms of popular embodiment have had over public culture in the recent past. The commonplace description of dance fads as reigning dances therefore lends itself to new analyses of political economy through popular embodiment.

Hegemonic Masculinity: Swaying the Body Politic

Invented dances reproduce a powerful set of gender discourses. The action of calling forth the listener to a state of dance and the assumption that they might surrender their bodies are inscribed with gendered meaning. As such, examining music's role in constructing normative gender ideas should consistently account for the ways in which popular and collectivized dancing might also consolidate or authorize the subversion of gender norms. At a most basic level, the example of Fela Kuti, Lil Kesh, and Olamide signify a broader reality in which male musicians reveal themselves to be more likely to marshal lyrics and sound to elicit specific danced responses from their listeners. When these masculine-identifying musicians invite the listener to dance, they simultaneously issue a familiar code that powerfully reinforces already-circulating ideologies around masculinity as dominant control of others.

The pleasures of collectivized dancing conceal how invented dances conduce to a problematic conflation of masculinity with domination. But what does this conflation look like in practice? For one, male musicians publish invented dances by deploying musical and extramusical resources to feminize the imagined listener. Activating polarized gender discourses to bolster their masculine personas, these artists construct the public into the figure of a woman as a strategy of assuming control of their imagined bodies.Footnote ¹⁶ In music videos and in album art, male musicians might cast scantily dressed female models as metaphors for their listening publics. In constructing the listener as a young woman, these popular musicians invoke a problematic association of femininity with vulnerability and subservience (Biddle and Jarman-Ivens Reference Biddle, Jarman-Ivens and Jarman-Ivens2007, 2). In casting this figurative woman in varying states of undress, they performatively construct her as defenseless. Taken together, the video vixen and the serenaded lover then act as powerful stand-ins for a body politic that is imagined as pliable and receptive to musical command. Casting the listening public as a woman or serenading to her as “baby” (complete with its allusions to infantility) reveals how dancing might become weaponized to reproduce a skewed gender order.

Gendered control of the dancing body mimics the elaboration of masculine hegemony in other cultural domains as well. One survey of Nigerian youth, for example, showed a common association of maleness and masculinity with physical strength, fearlessness, and assertiveness. The surveyed youth went a step further, associating masculinity with public enactments of “violence, bloodshed, aggressive individualism, and control over the physically, socially, and politically weak groups comprising women, children,” and other men (Uchendu Reference Uchendu2007, 283–291). By fixating fixating upon nude, infantilized and hypersexualized women, the musicians that traffic in invented dances express confidence in enacting male fantasies of female submission upon their imagined public. This gives credence to a widespread conflation of maleness, authority, and officiousness in Nigeria, while proliferating images of female objectification in popular culture more broadly. The point here is: the script of invented dances relies on cultural assumptions about who issues the instructions and who yields. When we attend to how masculinity aspires toward constructing itself as naturalized, we make its scriptive properties and performative dimensions transparent and contestable (Biddle and Jarman-Ivens Reference Biddle, Jarman-Ivens and Jarman-Ivens2007, 5).

This said, the gendered politics of sculpting the body politic through dance holds the potential to project positively feminine representations, expanding interdisciplinary scholarship on women, gender, and popular culture. Female and feminine-identifying musicians do not instrumentalize dance in a fashion that fetishizes domination. The active sculpting of the body politic by male artists often contrasts vividly with the goals of women musicians such as Tiwa Savage or Niniola, for instance, who, although equally invested in eliciting a danced response to their songs, scarcely prescribe specific embodied responses for their listeners.Footnote ¹⁷ Their engagement with dance suggests that popular representations of femininity should include neither fantasies of control nor the aggressive appropriation of public space.

The density of men in the production and contestation of invented dances is complicated by a Nigerian fact: Kafayat Shafau-Ameh (a.k.a. Kaffy), a woman choreographer, has emerged as the veritable face of dance professionalism in Nigerian popular culture. Kaffy has worked as a choreographer or dancer in well-known dance-songs, including P-Square's “Personally” (2013) and Olamide's “Science Student” (2018). The extent to which the creation, if not the public contestation, of the dances are attributed to Kaffy's creative work remains to be known. Suffice to say that the operationalization of invented dances, and the misguided notion that they are secondary outcomes of popular music, implies that men, more than women, are likely to be credited with ownership of the dances attached to their songs. Male musicians are also more likely to enlist mass participation in invented dances at the outset of the dance's lifecycle, when ownership might still be in contest.