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Music as Dance and Dance as Music: Interdependence and Dialogue in Baganda Baakisimba Performance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2018

Sylvia Nannyonga-Tamusuza
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Extract

The integration of music and dance among African people is a well-articulated phenomenon both within and outside of ethnomusicology (e.g., Blacking 1973; Hanna 1973; Nketia 1974; Stone 1998; Mans 2002; Gilman 2009; Mason 2012:5). As Ruth Stone reports, “African performance is a highly wrapped bundle of arts that are sometimes difficult to separate, even for analysis. Singing, playing instruments, dancing, masquerading and dramatizing are part of a conceptual package that many Africans think of as one and the same” (1998:7). Despite the ubiquity of this conceptual packaging, African performance arts are realized in very particularized ways and contexts throughout the continent. In his study of the vimbuza healing ritual among the Tumbuka of Malawi, for example, Steven Friedson concludes that music and dance in vimbuza are not independent, but “multilayered and complexly interrelated” (1996: 131). In fact, “without drumming there would be no dancing, and without the dancing, the vimbuza [ancestral spirits] would be unable to ‘play with their children‘” (ibid.: 129). Friedson's observation goes beyond the basic acknowledgement that people who create and view dance experience it as sound too; as a practitioner, he found the very act of drumming to be “dancelike” (ibid.: 131–32). Similarly, in the specific cases of Ugandan kizino, kimandwa, maggunju, and gaze. Alfdaniels Mabingo argues that “to embody these dances is to personify the music that accompanies them. Music represents, frames and influences the corporeal bases, capabilities, performance and choreographic sensibilities of the dances” (2015: 13; see also Makubuya 1995). In both of these cases, music not only helps to define the choreographic movements, but also determines the speed and vigour of the dancers.

Abstract in luganda

Abstract in Luganda

Nga bwekiri mu by'obuwangwa bw'ennyimba n'amazina g'abaddugavu ag'ekinnansi, ennyimba, ebivuga, n'amazina mu baakisimba w’Abaganda, bikwanaganya era byogeraganya. Envuga y'engoma ebuulira omuzinyi ekisoko kyalina okuzina, ate era omuzinyi ng'awenya ku kubagoma n'amaaso ge, asobola okulaga abagoma ekisoko kyeyandyagadde okuzina. Mu lupapula luno, nga nkozesa amazina g'abaakisimba ndaga ng'ebivuga, ng'engoma, ensaasi, ngalabi ne nankasa bwe bikwatagana era ne bijjuliriza ebisoko by'amazina ga baakisimba, naddala okubiibya okwo mu Lubiri n'okwomukyalo. Mpunzika nga ngamba nti amazina ga baakisimba bivuga, era n'ebivuga mu baakisimba, nabyo mazina, elw'engerí buli byombiriri bwe bikwanaganya ku siteegi.

Type
Articles
Information
Yearbook for Traditional Music , Volume 47 , 2015 , pp. 82 - 96
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 by the International Council for Traditional Music

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