Dance with intent

I stumbled upon an African dance form called Zaouli while watching Sinners.

It is a dance form from Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa that originated in the mid-20th century. It’s said to be inspired by a girl named Djela Lou Zaouli.

It involves a man wearing a mask that depicts a female spirit making rapid, intricate footwork with his upper body held still. Accompanied by drumming ensemble, with rhythmic complexity designed to induce trance in both dancer and audience.

It operates not on merely artistic but it has several levels of culture in it.

I was intrigued by the mask. It had an eery look. The mask represents the spirit, the dancer becomes the medium. It is performed at funerals, festivals, rites of passage to unify community, invoke ancestral strength.

It pulled me in because of how different it looked.

I had not seen something like that in my life. I had to delve further into what it stood for, and I was surprised by its depth and what the culture represented. The dance form of Zaouli, amongst other African forms, embraces asymmetry.

The mask disturbed me. And that is the point of it.

While many cultures value symmetry, beauty, stillness, harmony–African rituals embrace distortion, frenzy. They dissolve the self and the ego and tap into something meaningful.

What disturbed me was actually a civilizational ritual. It wasn’t dance as entertainment but a representation of ancestral strength, memory, death, and God coded into the movement.

It revealed to me that Western modern aesthetics fear the distortion.

It fears and denies what’s meant to be sacred.

Traditional African dance and Hindu spiritual movement both channel transcendence through the body.

In these dance forms, the masks disassemble the ego. The dancers become the function and operate in the realm of the spirit, the village, the dead. It’s not a performance for you.