The Corporeal Dynamics of Choreomusical Interactions in sabar Dance Events

The sabar dancing and drumming in Senegal takes several forms, but in most performance contexts improvisatory dancing and the interaction of dance and music are central. Both dancers and musicians refer to the knowledge about the tradition, the dance rhythms in particular, as the common ground for dance-music interactions. However, what appears to be central is also a certain kind of tension, or "intensity" to use Nketia's (1988) term, which enables and motivates this connection, in addition to the shared knowledge of dance movements, their accompanying rhythms and the habitual relations between certain movement patterns and musical solo phrases. This article thus explores the use of energy, the dynamics of tension and release, as a possible factor that connects sabar dancing and drumming. For this purpose, the analysis here focuses on the corporeal dynamics of individual dance solos, their points of connection to the dynamics of the music, as well as the dynamics of the whole dance event.