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Dance with the Wodaabes. 2010. Directed by Sandrine Loncke. 90 minutes. Colour, DVD. Distributed by Berkeley Media (www.berkeleymedia.com).
Sandrine Loncke's Dance with the Wodaabes is a seminal research film that provides profound holistic insight into the defining homologies of the nomadic Wodaabes who sporadically inhabit the Sahel subregion of West Africa. Specifically, this film focuses on the Daddo ceremony, a ritual "war," during which selected young women from an "attacked" lineage choose the most handsome from among beautified young men of the attacker's lineage. The Wodaabes use the ceremony to re-enact their shared myths of a common cosmogony, and revitalize their cherished values including community, beauty, sexuality, sensuality of the body, love and marriage, competition, individuality in creativity or personhood, societal order and respect, gendered roles and behaviour, and indigenous knowledge, culminating in the reinforcement of their bloodline identities.
Privileging an understudied African ethnic culture, the documentary updates, corrects, and contests certain misrepresentations and overgeneralizations in discourses on African music cultures, but undeniably reaffirms certain phenomenological truths about Africa's performing arts-high functionality, integrated nexus, and their diversity. Loncke foregrounds the indigenous voice of consultant Ouba Bi-Hassane and his wife Kedi in the methodology, and achieves a fair and...