Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the dynamic and processual relationship between 'static' dance as it is recorded in popular music videos featured on TV and dance as performed in the public sphere of Dakar, Senegal.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the relationship between dance in music videos featured on TV and dance as performed in the public sphere of Dakar, Senegal. Every few months, music video clips of the pop genre Mbalkh introduce new choreographies to the Senegalese public. Depending on their popularity these choreographies are appropriated by lay as well as professional dancers and later performed in clubs, street events and other social domains. They are the ignition and at the same time the grounds for further improvisation. In this context, the recorded performance of dance becomes at the same time an artefact, in the sense of a record of the past as well as the fuel for creativity for the future. It thus stands in a dialectic relationship with the dancing witnessed in the streets and night clubs.

Once located in the street, learning Sabar dance has now moved indoors, in front of the Television set. This new means of learning dance however is not unproblematic. In fact, the quality of these dances is contested and valued differently, depending on the position of the dancer within the field of different dance genres. While for some this is evidence of modernity that challenges the old ways, for others it is the freedom to experiment with dancing by trespassing the 'traditional' social order. Rather than analysing dance in symbolic terms, I shall explore the dynamic and processual relationship between 'static', recorded dance and its more improvisational form when performed in the social sphere of Dakar as well as the local, multi-vocal understandings involved.