Dancing Through Time and Space: African Dance and the Géwël Tradition of Senegal at Suffolk University

AbstractThis article explores the educational benefits of bringing African dance, specifically Sabar dance of Senegal, into the university curriculum. It presents two educational models - the Academic/Experiential Model and the Gewel Tradition Model - that are used in teaching this particular African dance class. The article integrates the words of students who have taken the class between 2005 and 2012 into the text to illustrate, represent, and explain the efficacy of the educational models and the impacts of the educational experience. Hence, the article is based on a class titled Sabar: The Music and Dance of Senegal taught at Suffolk University in Boston, MA during the spring semesters in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2011 and 2012, as well as during the fall semester in 2009. The class met twice a week with each class being one hour and twenty minutes in length. The class was developed by the Gewel Tradition Project to share knowledge of the Gewel tradition with interested university students (I come to dance as a historian and a drummer, but due to the close relationships between dance and music in African performance arts, learning about dance was necessary and thus allows me to introduce students to basic Sabar movements, taught by expert practitioners). 'This class wasn't just a dance class, but a step into the Senegalese world twice a week.' (Student paper, spring 2005)IntroductionBringing African dance into the university is much more than an exercise in multiculturalism. Learning about the body and how it moves involves a myriad of concepts and ideas including beauty, music, community and history. So to teach African dance in the university is to expose students to an African worldview and an African aesthetic sensibility. These are, at the very least, a challenge to the worldview and sensibilities that are found in the western epistemology that the university curriculum is built upon.In West Africa, music and dance are inseparable (Green, 2011). And, most traditional dance, even in its modem manifestations, is danced to live music. There is a strong relationship between dance and music because they are bom in a particular social context where they develop together and instantly shape and inform each other (Monroe, 2011). The Sabar dance tradition of Senegal, which is under consideration here, is a perfect example of the interrelationship between music and dance found in West Africa. The word Sabar has multiple meanings. It refers to the family of drums that play the traditional rhythms; it refers to the dances that are performed in conjunction with those rhythms; and it refers to the event in which the drums are played and the dances performed. (Bellinger, 2013, pp,65-66). The drums and the dance are mutually interdependent and the event cannot exist without the presence of both drum and dance. It is this close interrelationship that has caused African music to be referred to as "the language of the dance" (Green, 2011). In West Africa, sound and movement are parts of the whole and to have one without the other is incomplete. To teach in an America university therefore requires a class structure, and instructors, that are capable of making the connections between the dance movements, the drum music, and the cultural setting in which they are seated. This creates a holistic learning environment that gives students an opportunity to learn much more than the mechanics of this dance form.To provide a clear understanding of what is involved in bringing African dance into traditional American (western) educational spaces, it is best to look at it in the framework of "critical postcolonial dance theory and practice," (Banks, 2010, p. 26) developed by dance educator Ojeya Cruz Banks (2010). For Banks (2010), African dance involves not only a set of steps or movements, but it is also a "repository of knowledge, history and philosophy" (p. 26). It is important to understand "the way music and dance house not just physical information in the human body but also theoretical, emotional, aesthetic, and spiritual information in a dance mode" (Banks, 2010, p. …