Dance in West Africa: Analysis and Description in Relation to Aspects of Communication Theory by Ulrike Groß (review)

Dance in West Africa: Analysis and Description in Relation to Aspects of Communication Theory seeks to “make a narrative of dance and derive a context of movement and movement sequences” (10) through an analysis of the Adzogbo dance from the Ewe people of southern Ghana. Grounding her research within a genealogy of dance scholarship and communication theories, Ulrike Groß contributes to the growing literature on how dance is a mechanism for nonverbal communication. While she does an excellent job showing how dance is “a unique form of communication and of equal purpose [to spoken language]” (44), her reliance on structural communication theories and pictographic notations of an individual body does not allow for investigating how Adzogbo communicates to participants in the dance event (see Royce 1977). Reducing each section of the dance to a series of still frames and singular textual summary sentences, Groß reinforces a Saussurean interpretation, wherein collective meaning is seen to derive from individual steps that are made into larger sequences following structural rules (Saussure [1915] 1966). What is therefore lost in Groß’s analysis is the holistic bodily experience of dance, including “senses of balance, kinaesthesia,¹ and affects such as pleasure, pain, and other generalized ‘feelings in the body’” (Potter 2008, 445), which many scholars have shown to be crucial elements of the communicative power of dance for dancers and audiences alike.

One of Groß’s strengths is her ability to trace the parallel developments of the study of dance and the study of language in relation to the concept of nonverbal communication. She does so through a careful layout of sections that, while focusing on theories of dance and communication, provide succinct summaries of relevant theoretical work, revealing ways in which both fields have sought to address questions of nonverbal versus verbal forms of communication. It may have been more beneficial to place the corresponding chapters—chapter 3 and chapters 7–8—in closer proximity to each other, but Groß demonstrates the ways in which various research trajectories in dance and communication have been investigating similar questions and should be studied together. The ability to demonstrate the commonalities between theories of dance and communication studies supports Groß’s integrative approach. Similarly, after detailing the definitions of dance present within dance scholarship in chapter 2, Groß arrives at a compelling one: while acknowledging the impossibility of fully defining dance, she says it “is a special form of corporal ‘doing,’ a universal, and yet culturally-specific expression, and a predominantly social act” (15). The idea of dance as “corporal doing” is particularly intriguing as a point of departure for future inquiry. All this theoretical work is complemented by three sections (chaps. 4–6) that provide a general ethnographic overview of the Ewe people of Ghana. Particular attention is paid to the role of religion in Ewe society and the ways in which missionary activity has affected Ewe dance. By coupling detailed ethnographic and historical detail with theories of dance and communication, Groß avoids the common tendency to essentialize African peoples and dance forms—which tends to reduce traditional African dance to a static cultural artifact that can be observed and commodified (Bizas 2014, 77), instead of a dynamic communicative practice. The latter view can contribute to better understandings of individual and collective forms of nonverbal communication.

Groß presents a strong theoretical background in dance scholarship and communication theory, but her work does not acknowledge the current shift toward examining the intangible and affective aspects of communication that occur through dance (Biehl and Volkmann 2019; Bunker, Pakes, and Rowell 2013; Hanna 2015; LaMothe 2015; Reed 1998; Sheets-Johnstone 1999, 2011, 2012, 2018). This is reflected in her bibliographic sources, which almost exclusively draw on dance scholarship conducted before the mid-1990s. She acknowledges that “dance motion and motion in general are ephemeral,” but this does not carry over into her analysis. Part of her inability...