Search Submit. Full bio Close. Dance may be a form of stress relief, a pastime or as an exercise routine for some. Nevertheless, in Africa, dancing takes on a form of art, ritual or as a way to induce a particular outcome. Dance in Africa can also take on the form of social recreation, prayer, and devotion or sometimes has no clear indication of a particular purpose other than entertainment and merriment.
In Ethiopia, the Eskista, which is one of its most iconic dances, is not only a popular form of entertainment but also tells different stories while teaching various life lessons. And for imitating the movements made by a snake, Eskista has come to be known by many as the snake dance. It is performed by men, women and children usually in a group. Push both shoulders forward and then backwards — together.
Keep the rest of your body quite still. Gradually increase the speed. You will look like the rapids of the Blue Nile River or a small bird drying her chest feathers — shaking them all at once. Now, you are master of Amhara enkitkit. There is nothing abandoned or out-of-control in Ethiopian dance. Isolations are the most sophisticated of dance moves. To perform eskista , isolate the shoulder joints. A mobile spine is healthiest. Enkitkit began during the building of the pyramid and tunnels at Lake Zuay, more than 3, years BCE.
Click or tap here , to read our post on Ethiopian pyramids. Workers felt stiff after carrying sedimentary rock. Enkitkit relieved this.
It is healing. I have never met a dancer injured while performing any eskista movement. This photo shows me learning Guraginya moves involving strength and coordination.
I am hilariously danced-off by an expert. I have attempted various international dance genres. Never have I seen enkitkit outside Ethiopia. Ethiopian footwork—especially the 3-step triple-time step —has made it to Europe, but not her tricky shoulder and head movements.
Those are too challenging. Eskista makes you happy. Listen to current news report. You will be sad. Shake your shoulders—mostly together—and try some Tigray head gestures as in resource [9]. It will be impossible to remain blue. Welayita in resource [10] is sassy and joyous. Moving any part of the torso is liberating: we cannot exist without our heart and other organs and they register our emotions.
Dance movements that are propelled from the chest must be good for our hearts. Gurage people perform a miracle of dance: Guraginya, as in resource [6].
When the men are aloft, it is as though they are suspended mid-air. I used to dream of dancing in the air, descending leisurely to touch the ground for fun before levitating. Those dancers remind me of that exhilarating sensation. The earth buoys them. It is similar with all African jumps and leaps. Masai men jump, straight and light. Oromo men jump repeatedly, knees lifted as though leaping onto a bare horseback. Guraginya dancers make asymmetrical, off-centre shapes while transferring aerially from 1 foot to the other.
Their bodies form a strong angle to the ground. You could try this in a swimming pool! Ethiopian shoe design is ingenious, but many people wear ill-fitting slides or simple shoes that are broken or unfastened, not by choice.
They still dance fast. None trip because their foot muscles are toned. Gurage is home to the jelly shoe or sandal, made from old tyres. They were from Ethiopia, which made more money from exports of the sandals than from coffee. Recycled shoes were melted to repair cracked water containers. Classical ballet dancers are trained to use all 20 muscles of the underside of their feet.
This enables them to power the leading foot along the floor for lift-off into leaps that pierce space — like missiles. They have a different relationship with mother earth and move the torso very little.
African dancers master foreign art forms. She refers to original dance passages using contemporary dance style. Then she develops them with the torso-centred moves of Botswana dance — banned by colonisers. Read about it in this review. In the National Theatre of Ethiopia, there is a bas-relief wall panel that shows a girl dancing on the tips of her toes like a ballet dancer. The dance is called Ye Jimma. Shoes are stitched from grass. Feet are padded with rabbit fur.
Dances can last 5 hours. Ethiopians from all over perform a dance originating in Shewa, home to Menelik II: minjar. High step-hops and 3-steps precede 6 gallops in a squat. Women do 3-steps on the spot, arms crossed over the chest with hands to armpits; they pretend to hide Yehuda tattoos. This is a comment upon anti-Semitism. At a workshop given by Danza Viva in Perth, Western Australia, I had learned this as a dance of northern Spain — to the rattle of castanets.
How much dance has Ethiopia given the world? In Gojjam, I went home at 1 am, falling asleep to music from a tej bet honey-wine bar. Dancers there were warming up. One had just performed a solo. She spun cotton while shaking her shoulders and smoothly travelling anti-clockwise in a deep squat.
This combination did not make it abroad, nor did the following. Oromo women perform the head spin resource 8. The move is not to be tried by most people. It requires the strongest of centres, or cores, with no tension in the neck muscles. The other Oromo dance video with men resource 7 shows their subtle head movement combined with foot prances. The headdress is hair from gelada baboons that have died.
Eskista dances may or may not be choreographed. That is, they do not always have set moves in a sequence. African music supports improvisation. Ezgif now supports one more animated image format - MNG. GIF repair tool for fixing corrupt or incomplete files and undoing optimizations some other software may not fully support. Sep 27, We added a quick and easy barcode image generator with support for various formats and batch processing.
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