Embodiology: A New Branch of Knowledge with Indigenous African Foundations

• In Event: Narratives and indigenous ways of being across the African diaspora

Proposal

Embodiology is the study of improvisation (performance that includes extemporaneous content), as a form of human communication in generative, real-time contexts. This neologism arose as a result of autoethnographic action research in Ghana, within Anlo-Ewe communities, then applied to generate contemporary practice in European and US contexts. Embodiology aims to cultivate a field of knowledge that is interdisciplinary and organic, in the ways that indigenous matter is often found at its source of origin. Embodiology investigates improvisation dynamically across cultural and geographic territories. West African performance practices such as music, dance, song and storytelling are frequently intertwined in situ but typically studied independently, resulting in loss of knowledge. In the Anlo-Ewe case, dance and music are more often combined within their societal settings but are routinely divorced from one another in academic dance analysis. This separation distorts and miscommunicates performers’ realities. Instead, this study opens the way toward holistic integration of emic materialities, such that the normative hierarchical order, supported by an entrenched mandate of ‘modern’ over ‘traditional’, scholar over practitioner, or formal over informal, is suspended.

In my presentation I will outline embodiology’s active apparatus, represented by a 6-component model (Dynamic Rhythm; Fractal Code; Seselelame; Collaborative Competition; Play and Decision Making and Audience Proxemics). Deep structures within Ewe, Yoruba, Mande and many other African dance-drumming performance traditions substantiate the existence of these creative technologies. Together they interact to engender boundless creativity. Applied as theory, embodiology can be deployed to analyze performance improvisations, and a wide range of other human activity that involves spontaneity, collaboration and empathy. Like other branches of knowledge, embodiology has cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural latitude. Applied as a methodological practice it enables a sensory-cognitive alliance that yields and unending source of novelty. The study of embodiology renders action as a mode of thinking and its full potential will be realized through continued action and practice-as-research, transdisciplinary application and decolonial discourse.

In western contexts, the subject of improvisation is beginning to have a presence across a wide-range of fields, spaces where communication is a central cord, including music, dance, theatre, business leadership, medicine, ethnography and science. Until now there has been a singular Euro-American theoretical and pedagogical narrative on the subject of improvisation. By contrast, in actuality people of the African Diaspora have rich and dynamic practices that deploy improvisation innovatively and with particularity. Across the Diaspora, African influenced music and dance forms have a ubiquitous societal presence. Examples include Jazz, Salsa, Hip Hop, Capoeira, Calypso, Tango, Lindy Hop, Soul, Reggae, Gospel, Blues, Merengue and Samba, to name but a few. Paramount to the genesis of these and as yet unknowable forms in the future is improvisation. The principles I have identified, which have largely been hidden to the outside eye, generate fascinating, autopoietic artistic practices that powerfully communicate. Embodiology articulates the inner workings of these generative forces, opening the way to this new field of knowledge.

The technologies of embodiology are abundantly present within African dance-drumming and storytelling contexts; these performance modes are woven into educational, spiritual, civic, agrarian, coastal, urban or secular spaces. Moreover, understanding improvisation as a creative force and source of knowledge shaped by African ontologies leads us toward decolonized, holistic and interdisciplinary enterprises. Shaped by particular articulations of rhythm, improvisation in Africa’s global dances demonstrate specificity in their sound-movement relationships. In many cases, overarching rhythmic sensibilities are the result of direct connections between language, music and motion. At its core embodiology explores the dynamism of rhythm and its coordination with gradated representation of breath, speech and other bodily systems that aggregate time, register sensation, meaning and emotion.

An approach through embodiology observes multisensory listening as the first requirement in the creative process. In this case it means that dancers and musicians pay attention to sensations within their body-minds’ while being in concert with others and the environment at large. Observing mind-body signaling is crucial to performing with presence, attending to the conjugation of sensations, reading the body and environment congruently. This construct is similarly seen within Ewe’s “seselelame” sensibility (Geurts, 2002), which foregrounds cognitive and sensory activity, it shows comparable features to those posited within theories of embodied cognition (Iyer, 2004). Demonstrably embodying time shapes the active sensing mechanism that make the communicative aspect of improvised performance meaningful. Embodiology processes the following: 1, it deploys skills of embodied cognition; 2, it recognizes performers’ interdependence, and 3, cross-attentional rhythmic skills equip practitioners to navigate through jeopardy.

Author

• S. Ama Wray, UC Irvine