Moderated by literary scholar Ibou Coulibaly Diop, this panel discussion invites dance historian Aïssatou Bangoura-Sow, Professor of Literature and African civilizations Ibrahima Wane, and choreographer, dancer, and pedagogue Germaine Acogny to address the analysis of Sabar’s analytical weight in its artistic and cultural aspects.

Sabar is primarily known as a traditional dance practice and has recently gained increasing attention from scholars and practitioners with various backgrounds worldwide. The necessity and potential of experiencing, discussing, and contextualizing traditional dance practices becomes evident with the growing visibility and audibility of Sabar in pop-cultural music, as well as in artistic practices oscillating between dance and music performance. 

Sabar could be read as a form of placemaking that echoes the space and time it creates and shares through bodies in motion. Considering movement practices as technologies requires a wider understanding of rhythm, tradition, modernization, contemporaneity, and its transmission. Sabar as language is placed in relation to the rhythmic patterns of the dancers’ and drummers’ movement qualities. 

By taking the linguistic relation of body, space, and spectatorship into account, the act of speaking of, with, and in Sabar reveals a technology of movement analysis that allows to alter the relation between bodies of participation and bodies of spectatorship. The speakers on the panel invite the audience to follow a discussion on Sabar from multiple perspectives as a social, artistic, cultural, and global practice of a polyrhythmic presence in thinking and being that influences academic thinking.

The discussion round is part of the HKW workshop programme Sabar—Polyrhythm, and the Politics of Body Movement and is co-hosted  by the Senegalese Griot Nago Gueye Koité and Saf Sap collective. Furthermore, the event is organized in collaboration with the practitioners Wadane and Bouya Coumba Ndiaye Rose, sons of the renowned Sabar master Doudou Ndiaye Coumba Rose who also performed at HKW in 2004 as part of the project Black Atlantic.