Emerging Traditions: Dance Performances of the Sudanese DiDinga in Syracuse

Volume 28
Fall-Winter
2002

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During adolescence, a son is given a bull calf to raise, for which he alone is responsible. This includes composing a song to his animal—the song that will soothe the bull throughout its lifetime, the song that the man will use to call his bull to follow him home after grazing.

LITERATURE CITED

Deng, Francis M. 1973. The Dinka and Their Songs. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Driberg, Jack H. 1922. A Preliminary Account of the DiDinga. Sudan Notes and Records, vol. V.

Echerou, Michael J.C. 1994. Redefining the Ludic: Mimesis, Expression, and the Festival Mode. In The Play of the Self, edited by Ronald Bogue and Mihal I. Spariosu, pp. 137-56. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Fetterman, Marilyn Harer. 1992. Drought, Cattle Disease, Colonialism and Lokembe: One Hundred Years of Change among the Pastorialist DiDinga, Eastern Equatoria Province, Sudan. Ph.D. dissertation. Providence: Brown University Department of Anthropology.

Foley, John Miles. 1995. The Singer of Tales in Performance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Kronenberg, Andreas. 1972. Logik und Leben: Kulturelle Relevanz der DiDinga und Longarim, Sudan. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag GMBH.

McMahon, Felicia Faye. 1993. Regional Sports: "Playing" with Politics in the Adirondacks. New York Folklore XIX(3-4): 59-73.

Meeker, Michael E. 1989. The Pastoral Son and the Spirit of Patriarchy: Religion. Society, and Person among East African Stock Keepers. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Rosenberg, Bruce A. 1990. The Message of the American Folk Sermon. In Oral-Formulaic Theory, edited by John Miles Foley, pp. 137-68. New York: Garland.

Thompson, Robert Farris. 1974. Art in Motion. University of California Press.

Tucker, A.N. 1933. Tribal Music and Dancing in the Southern Sudan [Africa] at Social and Ceremonial Gatherings. London: New Temple Press.

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Headline - Emerging Traditions: Dance Performances of the Sudanese DiDinga in Syracuse

Young male Sudanese refugees in Syracuse constantly improvise during their performances of danced songs. An initial study of their recontextualized traditions seeks to elucidate how group members draw on traditions in new situations, how the emerging traditions change in form, and when form remains the same, what these traditions now mean for the young men who perform for an American audience unfamiliar with the richness of DiDinga culture.

Photo of the DiDinga Lost Boys performing ngothi

The DiDinga "Lost Boys" performing ngothi, the jumping step during the nyakorot (DiDinga for the dance proper). Photo courtesy of Faye McMahon with permission of Charles Lino (group leader).

. . . As a folklorist, I wanted to honor the living traditions of the newest residents in the neighborhood surrounding the university by inviting traditional artists from Bosnia, Burma, and the Sudan to be a part of the symposium. After meeting a group of nine young DiDinga men between the ages of fifteen and twenty-two who were part of the larger Sudanese group known as "the Lost Boys," I recognized the importance of honoring their group’s traditions, which are evolving in a new context—a new country. Part of my purpose has been to understand the process by which a group comes to consensus about appropriate and meaningful traditions performed outside their original cultural context. How is the negotiation process related to aesthetics and identity, as the DiDinga men select, discard, and recombine traditions learned as children in their tribal villages, as refugees in camps in Kenya, as students in missionary schools in Nairobi, and as residents of Syracuse? It is the kind of question with which I have been grappling for many years, since I first began ethnographic work as a folklorist (McMahon 1992).

Joseph Lemong and Dominic Luka, Didinga dancers

Joseph Lomong (left) and Dominic Luka open the nyakorot at the Thompson Memorial AME Zion Church in Auburn, New York. Photo courtesy of Faye McMahon with permission of Charles Lino (group leader).

... I began by focusing on improvisation in the emerging traditions of the dance songs of these young DiDinga men, who had lived together for a decade in refugee camps in Africa before arriving in Syracuse in 2001. Capturing the danced songs in text form is not easy. The group’s lively and highly repetitive antiphonal music, based on the pentatonic scale, is composed spontaneously and possesses unique musical characteristics, such as a frequently changing time signature. The songs in their original village context are tied to specific incidents or specific people and always in flux. . .

... I learned that songs such as this are not usually performed separately from dance. One young man explained, "Our songs are like proverbs." I interpret this to mean "danced proverbs"—that is, a few words, each pregnant with meaning in a kind of shorthand. Applying Lord’s concept of a universal oral formula in Western tradition to fit a non-Western performance was inadequate, so I looked to Robert Farris Thompson (1974) and, more recently, Michael C. J. Echerou (1994), who suggest that the concept of aesthetics, which originated in the West, be expanded so that it is applicable for non-Western cultures.

From this perspective, aesthetics is understood as processual, with the focus on expression or performance of the arts, which Thompson calls art in motion. Both theorists note that unlike premodern Western art, which is representational, African art is performed, nonmimetic, and nonrepresentational: "The term expressionism, commonplace enough in Western art history and theory, may be used here in the sense of a nonmimetic, nonrepresentational fictional statement" (Echerou 1994: 139). In addition, evaluative responses from perceiving events performed in space or time become an important part of the aesthetic process.

Performing the danced proverbs in an American context suggests a new approach for understanding traditions as emerging. That is, we can validate the dance songs as they emerge and are performed in an expressive manner outside their original context. To do so, we need to discard the view that old and new traditions are definitively opposed...

But who decides which traditions are tied to this community, since issues of identity are at stake here? To recontextualize DiDinga dance, it is necessary to understand how the dance songs relate to these young men’s cultural values and the tribal identity that they share with DiDinga in the Sudan. Understanding the relationship is important so that anachronisms are not produced...

The photos and excerpts above are from the article, "Emerging Traditions: Dance Performances of the Sudanese DiDinga in Syracuse," which was published in Voices Vol. 28, Fall-Winter, 2002. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society now.