Dodo Dance: A Gendered Discourse Strategy for Communicating Social Ideals

• In Event: Indigenous Knowledge of Social Justice Education: Lessons on Decolonization From Luo Language and Literature

Abstract

Traditional Dodo dance is a dance performed by Luo women in Nyanza Province, Kenya. It is a slow, elegant, dignified performance involving graceful movements of body parts such as arms, shoulders, head, hips and legs. Traditionally, the middle-aged married women perform the dance dressed in sisal skirts (Owala) and head gears (Ligisa). The music moves in a gentle pace that lends dignity and pride (Nyadhi) to the movements of the dancers. The dance prescribes precise rules and encodes embodied texts in codified movements and gestures that are universally understood by the culture owners and practitioners of the dance. Through Performance of this dance, women get a space to voice their gendered concerns and social ideals which can only be fully understood in relation to specific cultural contexts. As this dance recontextualised for performance in other spaces in contemporary society to a multiethnic audience, certain elements are modified, changed, or discarded while others are retained and new ones layered as the performing artists yield to the demands of the new contexts, technologies, global ideologies and the idea of universal social ideals which underpins notions such as “world music”. The purpose of this chapter is to establish the process of recontextualisation of the dance to other spaces and how this is negotiated, contracted and contested. The study is premised on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) which is a form of reflective inspection of how discourses shape and influence us and the theory of Music Change and Continuity by Meki Nzewi. The objectives of the study are to establish the effect of “layering”/recreation on Dodo dance performed outside its original socio-cultural context; establish the effect and effect of recontextualisation on the specific cultural knowledge, meaning, messaging and gendered discourse; establish the effect of recontextualization on learners and teachers.

Author

• Rose Anyango Omolo-Ongati, Maseno University
  Presenting Author