Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses social manifestations of the body and its ability to express cultural knowledge through dancing. It focuses on how dance anthropology as a school of thought and methodological approach reaches in-depth understanding of individual experiences in a Nigerian performative context.

Paper long abstract:

Among the Yoruba of South West Nigeria, dancers have the ability to relate not only to music and rhythms, but also to the Yoruba tonal language. This is due to the fact that instruments being played during a dance event, known as talking drums, can follow the Yoruba language's tonality and articulate poetic and proverbial language. The dancer facilitates the conveyance of meaning by interpretively embodying the content of what is being played. For example, drum language can derive from the Yoruba spoken language and is used by the dancer to share knowledge on Yoruba proverbial language with the drummers and audience. Another drum language consists of onomatopoeic rhythms, which are used by the social actors to verbally direct the dance for educational purposes or in situations of transmission. By exploring the experiences of individual dancers in Yorubaland, this paper aims at contributing to the extended, yet body-less, research on talking drums and tonal language. The dancer's perspective reveals a variety of cognitive layers which connect the drummer, the audience, and the language itself within this complex auditory space. The paper further highlights the significance of the methodological and research tools used in dance anthropology not only to analyse and explain these phenomena, but also to dwelve into the lived experiences of the dancers and their way of 'creating a special quality of being and of relatedness between individuals' (Grau, 2014:3).