Doing the dooplé: with a straight back, knees bent and each foot planted firmly
on the ground, rise and bend…
…as if pounding a mortar and pestle to the beat of the music.
Dance is a coded
language that creates a dialogue between dancers and spectators familiar with its
underlying symbolism |
In Africa, dance and the
economy are intrinsically connected: the origins of the dooplé, the first
of ten basic movements in African dance, lie in the motion of using the pestle
 The great poet and president of Senegal,
Léopold Sédar Senghor, said that by using the word “step,” the Europeans
had turned dance into an abstract game “to take man off the earth and project him
into the sky.” Africans prefer the expression “basic movement,” because it implies
a connection between the dancer and the earth. A famous verse by the same poet perfectly
expresses this symbiotic relationship between human beings and the earth beneath
them: “We are dancing people whose feet are revitalized by stamping them on the hard
ground.”
The first of the ten basic movements, which I have observed in all the regions and
among all the peoples of Africa, is the dooplé. This is a composite term borrowed
from Oueoulou, the secret language of the glaé, a community of mask bearers
belonging to the Wêon people, who live in western Côte d’Ivoire. Gla
(the singular of glaé) means mask in the African sense of the term, in other
words the costume, the accessories and those who wear them. I have chosen the language
of this community of wisdom masks (in Africa, the mask is considered a living entity)
because it is sacred, spiritual, divine and, as a result, belongs to no single group
of people. Furthermore, the Wêon (also known as the Guéré) are
the guardians of the only glaé prayer, whose content clearly expresses the
combined spiritual, technical and structural aspects of dance.
In Oueoulou, doo means mortar and plé, pestle. These are cooking utensils
common to every part of Africa and occupy a central place in everyday life. The movement
of a person using a pestle is the basis of African dance. On the one hand, the pestle
pounding the mortar produces sounds, percussion, a beat—in short, music. On the other
hand, the up-and-down movement of the plé beating against the doo makes it
shake, tremble, move—in other words, dance. So the doo becomes a musical instrument,
the plé a dancing object and the person doing the pounding, a composer.
Dance conveys our vision of the world and conditions our entire existence. Its basic
movements are all symbolically charged. They express a person’s relationship to the
Earth, to God, to the community of the living and that of the dead. Each movement
also has a specific meaning: dancing in a bent-over position with arms folded over
the chest is a symbol of initiation; stamping feet on the ground is a show of extreme
joy; tapping foreheads against each other is an act of communion. Dance is thus a
coded language that creates a dialogue between dancers and spectators familiar with
its underlying symbolism, signifying that it cannot be measured against Western standards
despite frequent attempts to do exactly that. In African dance, for example, showing
two open hands is a sign of honesty, clear conscience and hospitality. In contemporary
dance, the same gesture symbolizes the density of the air that the artist embraces
or pushes away. Joining the palms of two hands together is a gesture of prayer in
the Christian world. For Africans, however, it is a way of concentrating all the
body’s energy, the right hand having a negative polarity and the left, a positive
polarity. The symbolism of these movements is rooted in an ethical, aesthetic and
social context that cannot be ignored if one wants to grasp the full meaning of African
dance. And even less so if one wants to judge it.
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