Abstract
Ludic dances are the topic of Chap. 5; its central focus is on how mimicry of animals, the dances’ principal theme, enacted at times with dramatic histrionics and complex and realistic choreography, that includes animal vocalizations and the use of animal paraphernalia, especially animal skins, that heighten the realism, may evoke ontological identity stirrings in the dancer, akin to transformation. Because of the elaborate employment of animal mimicry by story tellers, by both voice and bodily gestures, storytelling, especially its performative aspect, is also dealt with in the chapter.
It is a circular dance in which they use their bodies to mimic the cumbersome movements of the galloping gnu, while with one hand sketching the length of the beard-like head hair of the wildebeest. Suddenly the circle opens. One of the participants plays the role of the wildebeest as it defends itself, lunging about with its horns. Others, barking loudly, enact dogs that follow and bring to bay the game animal and try to bite and hold on to the thigh of its hind leg – all of it a performance that at times is in no way lacking in realism. The rest of the people play the hunters, who throw their spears at the animal, which finally collapses and is delivered the coup de grâce by jubilant hunters, to the shrill singing of hand-clapping women.
Gentz 1904: 157, my translation
The /gae-ǂnab or gemsbuck [sic] dance represents a gemsbuck bull, cow and calf being chased by two men with three or four dogs. The bull and cow carry horns but the calf does not. The gemsbuck lead and are followed by the men and dogs, who dance to and fro on the flanks until the animals are brought to bay. Then the men pretend to shoot and one of the buck goes down wounded while the others make off pursued by some of the dogs. The wounded animal fights in realistic fashion, sweeping at both man and dogs with its horns. The dance is continued until all of the animals have been accounted for. Bows and arrows are represented by sticks in this dance.
Fourie (1925/26 61)
This is a very exciting drama. The girls act as springboks with little children as the kids. Two or three men act as lions. The girls fold up and secure their skin petticoats [karosses ] till they look like “shorts”, the better to imitate animals. Then they imitate in cries and actions the graceful springboks with wonderful skill. They prance along plucking at the grass with their hands and pretending to feed; every now and then uttering whistles of alarm, they bunch together with the kids between them; then run off again bounding over imaginary tracks and obstacles. The lions stalk with consummate skill and crouch at strategic spots. Every now and then, one of them makes a rush and a bound, catching a kid and pretending to rend and devour it. Soon all the kids are lying about dead, and the real fun commences when the lions catch the plump springboks, which they do with much tantalizing on the part of the girls … In one depiction of this play, which I witnessed, the end came dramatically. One springbok had long evaded two lions till eventually both sprang at once from opposite sides, but instead of catching the girl, they caught one another and then was depicted a wonderful imitating of a lion fight with mighty roaring, snarling, and contortion of faces. One lion eventually emerged with nose bleeding furiously.
Doke (1937: 90)
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Notes
- 1.
Apart from specialist studies on child development and socialization, or socio-biology (e.g. Sbrzesny 1976), recent and contemporary general San ethnographies hardly ever include discussions of recreational dance and play (except for a Ju/’hoansi competitive “traditional dance” troupe described by Richard Lee [2003: 201–5]; see also Hermans 1998). Early ethnographic accounts included this information (viz. Stow 1905: 97–102; Fourie 1925/26: 30–3; Bleek 1928: 18–23, 1927: 119–22; Gentz 1904 156–7; Wilhelm 2005: 172–4; Kaufmann 2005: 72–4; Doke 1937). I note as well that, with the exception of Vinnicombe’s section on “Dance, Mime and Music” in her People of the Eland (2001: 299–310) and some of the German socio-biological work on the !Kõ, San dancing is almost exclusively viewed in religious rather than expressive terms in more recent San ethnography, as an element of the “trance hypothesis”.
- 2.
This is a corollary to what my book Tricksters and Trancers is about: an examination of an open, ambiguous, fluid, resilient and tolerant religion in which myth and belief feature a trickster divinity who, as “Urshaman”, has a presence also in ritual. This sort of ambiguity and fluidity would allow for dances that combine playful, diversionary ease (even, at moments, irreverence) with earnest ritual intent. It would also obviate moot speculation about “hidden meanings” on the “ritual character” of San ludic dancing, which, so it is reasoned, might, in the past, have been ritual dancing (Schapera 1930: 204). Antje Krog sees this conjoining of play and ritual as part of the Khoisan “interconnected world view”: “an all-encompassing philosophy … with ‘the wholeness of life’ – religious and secular, spiritual and material – which can never be compartmentalized or understood in isolation from one another” (2009: 184, quoted in Wessels 2012: 187).
- 3.
See Rusch (2017) for an examination of the use of the bullroarer in the context of the ethological and subsistence, as well as mystical and mythical aspects of honey-gathering and bee imagery and symbolism. He also deals with the vibroacoustic dimension of bullroarer sounding and its connection to bee buzzing, linking this feature of San ritual and ludic culture to San music-making. This linkage is evident in Bushmen, when hearing an organ at a church service to which they were taken in Cape Town by the missionary Johannes Kicherer, “mistak[ing] the sound of the organ with the swarming of bees” (Jolly 2015: 78).
- 4.
- 5.
Metzger reports that =Au//ei dancers actually attached gemsbok tails to their loincloths (1990: 34).
- 6.
William Burchell observed such rattles in use by a Bushman dancer near Klaarwater in the Northern Cape in 1812: “four ears of spring-buck, sewed up and containing a quantity of small pieces of ostrich eggshell, which at every motion of the foot produced a sound that was not unpleasant or harsh, but greatly aided the general effect of the performance” (1824: 65; page 45 of his Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa, vol. II depicts his drawing of one of the rattles). Moreover, among the same group of Bushmen he found that a number of people carried around jackal tails which they “frequently drew across their eyes, for the purpose, as I was told, of improving their sight, agreeably to their belief that it possesses a virtue of that kind” (ibid.: 57). Stow, in his description of these springbok rattles, mentions other variants of this musical device (which he refers to as “Bushman bells”), worn not only on the dancers’ feet but also on their shoulders and upper arms and as belts around the waist (1905: 10–1).
- 7.
Thea Skaanes reports much the same about the nocturnal epeme dances of the Hadza of Tanzania, which may include the use of animal skins “The cape or cloak enlarges the dancer’s body and obscures the human form. When animal hide was used, the human shape was substituted with an animal presence” (2017: 172).
- 8.
All this information on ostrich behaviour I just found out on YouTube through fascinating video footage after googling “cock ostriches fighting”.
- 9.
The dance-game I observed is similar to D. Bleek describes as “the war game” in her account of Naro children’s games. She surmises this ludic dance “may originally have been the imitation of some animal fighting” (1928: 21).
- 10.
As well as on its earthy, Rabelaisian flavour, in the context of traditional storytelling, as opposed to the clinical, restrained, puritanical context of the Bleek/Lloyd household in which the /Xam storytellers narrated, or dictated, their tales to their two interlocutors (Wittenberg 2012: 677–8; see also Guenther 1996).
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Guenther, M. (2020). Animals in San Dance and Play: Between Mimesis and Metamorphosis. In: Human-Animal Relationships in San and Hunter-Gatherer Cosmology, Volume I. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21182-0_6
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