Doris Green: African Dance Historian

Doris Green: African Dance Historian
Submitted By Doris Green - April 9, 2012

I invite you to view my new web site which is a work in progress.

Use this link:

http://www.tntworldculture.com/toa2/

Pay particular attention to the article entitled  Why is it Difficult to Earn a Doctoral Degree In an Oral Tradition?

The sound track to the dance Tokoe has been supplied so you can hear and read the integrated score simultaneously. This is what I propose for all the music and dance of Africa to create an archive of written music and dance scores. The music you hear is the original recording of field work in Ghana in the early seventies.  I believe I was on my second CUNY (City University of New York) Faculty Research Award. 

The concept is to preserve those music and dances that were performed with great frequency in the sixties and seventies that are not being performed as frequently today.  I would like to add a film of a couple of the students who danced this dance on Ghana National Television at the time, so people can see the Africans how they perform the dance. 

I love this technology because at 59-100 of the tape, he gives the signal for the group to form a single line across the stage facing the audience. At point 1:38 he gives the signal for the first turn of the dance. The drummer G. Agbeli, the one I brought from Africa to teach at NYU, played the sounds "To,  de, dzi, de, dzi, de, To."  The language of the drum is fantastic, as you can actually hear the closed stick stroke, open stick and open hand strokes. I know every sound and every movement of this dance. 

The photo is of some of the students who studied how to write the dance on the computer with me at the University of Ghana when I was a US State Department Cultural Specialist. It is more studies like this that needs to be effected until all the music and dance are archived.