CAN DANCE HELP FIX A DIVIDED WORLD?

Dance lecturer Alfdaniels Mivule Basiibye Mabingo talks to about the power of dance in a divided world

Can Dance Help Fix A Divided World?

University of Auckland dance lecturer Alfdaniels Mivule Basiibye Mabingo. groups and classes in the United States closed down to allow participants to focus on the protests. An African American friend of his wrote that his community had decided not to stop their dance classes, writing: “That is where we go to heal.”

Learning dance, Mabingo says, is like learning a language. When people come across a new language, they step back in an attempt to process and interpret it, they enter the world being created and try to understand what’s going on. It’s easy to see how the encouragement of listening and understanding might be useful and necessary in a world that increasingly seems to prefer shouting.

He grew up in Uganda, attended Makerere University there, then spent four years at New York University, then moved to Auckland, where he got his PHD in dance and became a lecturer at the University of Auckland. When I spoke to him, he was on the couch at home, in the West Auckland living room where he had just spent lockdown teaching dance via Zoom.

Through most of the 20th century, if dance was taught in universities at all, it was in physical education departments, but he has built his life around the idea that dance is more than just movement, more than just aesthetics, more than just the pleasure of seeing or being a body in motion. He has studied and taught dance at university for nearly two decades, has two masters degrees along with his PHD and his recent publications include Intercultural Dance Education in the Era of Neo-state Nationalism and African dances are valid knowledge: Dance teachers’ de/construction of meanings from cultural heritage dances in Uganda. Dance, for him, is an act of the mind — but it’s also more than that.

He says: “You find dance in activism, you find dance in cultural expression, bringing out stories and also preserving some of those stories. You find dance can be part of human identity, you find dances being applied in physiotherapy, you find dances being applied in tourism, you find dancing talking about history and anthropology: How do you understand a society by looking at their dances and how do you do you look at society to understand the dances they perform?”

When we spoke, via Zoom, the world was simultaneously losing control of Covid-19 and rising in protest, first against the killing of George Floyd, then against the global issues of systemic racism, prejudice and hatred. Had the world ever been so unified while being so divided?

Once we get past the protests that have dominated the past few weeks, he says — if we get past them — if we are to build bridges, dance has a powerful part to play in that, by allowing and encouraging people to engage in what he calls “embodied connections”, to foster what he calls “respectful co-existence”.

“Dancers are global in their thinking,” he says. “You really find a very, very few dancers that are protectionist. We survive on that flow of knowledge and the mobility of our colleagues. That kind of environment prepares us to engage.”

He says: “If we take that example that people are willing to enter that space and work together and co-exist in dance, then it can be that small seed you take to the world and show them that here is the seed which each one of us can plant. Because it has been planted in these dance studios. And it has germinated. And it is bearing fruits.”