Music As Dance and Dance as Music: Kizino Dance Training, a Dance Moment in the Diasporic Transmission Context

International audienceKizino dance originates from the South-Western region of Uganda among the Bakiga ethnic group. It is characterized by music, vigorous strength, stamina, and agility for both female and male members of the community. The transmission process of this dance has been conducted mostly by experienced dancers trained either from folk-dance groups or through the local ways of transmitting dance (community events of practice) such as weddings, birthdays, and other celebratory events. Most traditional dance groups in the diaspora are majorly situated in cosmopolitan areas and are for-profit, which influences the methods of transmission. These methods however bear colonial legacies and therefore sometimes misrepresent the core essences of the dance, through de-contextualization of the enaction process. What are the practical ways of mitigating these colonial markers in the process of transmitting Kizino dance in a diasporic context? With practice as research (PaR) methodology, I practically used embodied dance skills as a vehicle to elicit reflections from the trainees. Decolonizing Kizino dance transmission in the diaspora would call for the application of Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) embedded in the Bakiga ethnic group. The knowledge derived from practices such as clapping, ululation, stomping, modulation as well as masquerading transcends the anecdotes of Kizino which are the fundamentals of this dance. This paper presents the discourse of colonial methodologies by applying IKS in the transmission of Kizino dance in a diasporic context. The inconclusive research results in this paper demonstrate that decolonization of Kizino dance transmission in the diaspora promotes indigenous knowledge systems ingrained in the Bakiga ethnic group