A Theoretical Understanding of the Rhetorical Power of Taita (African) Dance

Herrick (2001) suggested that when we express emotions and thoughts to other people with the goal of influencing them, we are engaging in rhetoric. Therefore, through the use of traditional dance and music to influence members within their group, the Taita have for a longtime been engaged in rhetorical discourse for the well being of the community. Taita traditional dance as rhetorical discourse is usually intended to influence an audience to accept an idea in a manner consistent with that idea. The Mangoni, who are the choreographers of Taita traditional dances, seem to have aimed at fully exploiting everyday language in a highly visual and artistic way to tame their audiences.

Douglas (1982) posits that culture is the fecundity of the past communicative interaction and the dynamic resources for ongoing and future communicative activities. This analysis by Douglas can be used to explain the significance of the dancer in a cultural performance within the Taita. Through rhythmic movement and song, the dancer translates past experiences into motion and tries to connect them to the contemporary everyday situations. Every movement of the dancer is coded to represent an emotion or event either in the past or the present and can only be understood with reference to a particular context. Douglas (1982) elaborates well on this in her analysis of cultural performances when she says meanings are both “deeply embedded” in history, “context bound” and also as being “generated, caught and transformed” in the moment (p.189).

Taita traditional dances can be compared to what Brummett (1999) says about Burke's representative anecdote. Brummett writes that a representative anecdote is “one component of discourse that equips for living because its dramatic form allows people to express their hopes and fears in familiar thus manageable patterns” (p.482). Every event in the life of the Taita can be traced in the various traditional dances, which visually depict activities from courtship, marriage, giving birth to death and life after death. In preparation of the young for adult roles, the Taita usually make use of their traditional dances (which usually containing a mosaic of information and survival skills) to better equip these young ones to survive and cope with future life crisis or experiences.

Brummet (1999) states that throughout Burke's writing, the theme about articulation of a situation in discourse “vicariously” helps the audience to understand and act through their own similar situations. This can be traced for example in the Taita dance called Njala, which visually articulates a previous hunger situation and provides tips on how to cope and survive in the future. The dancers in their songs and motions try to vividly capture and project to the audience the struggles; pains, fears, joys etc. experienced during the hunger period and in the process provide “solutions” in case it occurs in future. Such articulation not only helps capture a difficult experience but it also suggests helpful motives for the people to embrace in confronting their trials. Similarly the dance naturally invites participation in its rhythms thus enabling the people to intelligibly process the situation and make the necessary adjustments (Brummet, 1999).

Therefore Njala dance, by posing a problem such as hunger to the community through powerful rhetoric, discourse activates or addresses their “appetites” or concerns. When discourse satisfactorily shows a “solution” on how to cope with hunger, following the traditional dance as a narrative form accepted in the culture, the formal completion of the discourse is satisfying to the audience and thus provides them with the motives, hope and symbolic resources to face their real situation (Brummet, 1999). The Taita traditional dances do not merely tell about previous problems that faced the community, but they suggest ways and means to resolve the problems as well since they follow discursively a pattern that people might follow in reality.

For the critical ethnographer to link the discourse embodying the dance to the community's problems/issues, to show how the particular dance equips a culture for living in that situation, he/she needs to open space for performance. The critical ethnographer will have to get inside to understand the rhetoric of any particular Taita dance. This linkage can only be satisfactorily done by examining also the context of the dance, which includes items like what is the choreography (drama, songs, moves, dialogue) of the dance, who make the audience, the venue, the time, etc. For example a funeral dance is marked by a different rhetoric as compared to a dance for a wedding ceremony.

It is therefore important to consider the environmental context in which the dance takes place to understand the rhetoric. I agree with McGhee (1999) who says discourse ceases to be what it is whenever parts of it are taken out of context. Failing to account for context or reducing context to one or two of its parts means quite simply that one is no longer dealing with discourse as it appears in the Taita world. In Taita society, since traditional dance is used to give meaning and significance to the stages of life, enacting and communicating status transformation in all occasion, the context is essential.

For the Taita, traditional dance is the rhetorical practices where culture gets made and re-made. The dancer is largely devoted to building the culture by piecing it here and cutting it there according to the constraints of the day. Dancing is not simply a reflection or expression of the Taita culture but by itself an active agency of change, representing the image by which people see themselves and adjust according to the best plan for livelihood. It is a process where the performer dialogues with the audience.

The Taita dancer, in his/her performance actually tries to capture the struggle, passion and praxis of village life translating it into motion then powerfully transmits it to the spectators evoking strong emotions that are difficult to ignore. Thus, while influencing each villager individually he is also reiterating the current norms and values that shape and integrate the group. By reasserting the values associated with community living as a Taita, the dance functions to perpetuate primal Taita myths through acquiescence and quiescence (Gronbeck, 1999).

To effectively capture the rhetoric of Taita (African) dances, the communication discipline needs to shift towards what Conquergood (1991) calls the performance paradigm. The performance paradigm, according to Conquergood is important since it privileges particular, participatory, dynamic, intimate, precarious embodied experience grounded in historical process and contingency which are vital in extracting meanings in rhetorical performances such as Taita dance. Researchers need to be alive to the limitation of written work when it comes to the dances of the Taita people. Literacy freezes the performance and with it all the meanings of the multiple codes and signs embedded.

According to Jackson (1989), the performance paradigm can assist in recognizing the limitations of literacy and critique the “textualism” of western civilization. I am heavily inclined towards Jackson's theory and in agreement that “textualism” can be very limited in decoding specific Taita dance movements as rhetoric that captures and lively expresses the everyday life experiences of a group of individuals at a particular time and space. I also see “textualism” as being incapable of depicting the flux of human relationships, inadequate in showing how meanings are created and embodied in motion, gestures, songs as well as in words and their connection to the political, moral, physical or aesthetic well being of the group.