Sometimes the best way to know oneself is to play it—through dancing, singing and acting, says dancer and researcher Edward Sembatya. His upcoming doctoral performance Echoes of Manyatta (April 26, Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre, 149 West Hastings St.) explores the dance traditions of Uganda’s Karamojong community, highlighting an understanding of dance as more than just moving the body.

“Dance is not just movement, but dance is the knowledge and the information that is communicated through the movement,” he says.

Choreographed by Sembatya, the performance features local dancers—including Safiyah Brito and Ellen Harris—and music composition from Keith Mugenyi.

Embodying movements

A doctoral student at Simon Fraser University (SFU), Sembatya travelled to Uganda last year to research the Karamojong community. The Karamojong are cattle-keepers who live in the north-eastern part of Uganda; they have also been nomadic.

“Everything about their life rotates around their animals,” Sembatya explains. “Their animals inform the music, their animals inform the dance, their animals inform even the social and cultural events.”

While Sembatya is also from Uganda, he is an outsider to this community due to the country’s system of tribes. The researcher describes his methodology as “semi-ethnographic”: he was only able to stay with the community for less than six months. During his stay, he experienced their blending of music and dance.

“In their music and dance, they don’t have instruments,” he shares. “They whistle, they yodel, they stomp, they move and they sing and clap.”

A recording of this music, including the Karamojong’s singing, paired with contemporary, studio-produced tracks will accompany dancers in this upcoming performance. Part of Sembatya’s research examines how the audience receives these traditional movements when they are embodied by those of a different background, including dancers from Asian or Black diasporas.

“For example, when you come and watch the performance, what [do] you go away with?” he reflects. “How does it inform you…in the perspective of understanding who these people are?”

The library of dance

Sembatya’s love for movement arose from a childhood where play was a daily activity. His early education in the Ugandan school system also fostered a passion for performing—one that inspired him to teach. The performer’s academic studies eventually took him to Europe, where he specialized in jazz and trained in modern dance.

“I was trying to understand the difference between practitioner and researcher,” he recalls. “It seemed like so many great practitioners, whenever they cross the line from being practitioners to academia or researchers, they dropped the practice perspective.”

The dancer’s desire to maintain his practice alongside rigorous research led him to SFU’s doctoral program in Contemporary Arts. He sees dance as not just the “shaking of the body”—it is also a practice incorporating music, play and other qualities.

“We don’t have a single word for ‘dance’; these are disciplines that are created,” the researcher shares. “They are just small elements within this bigger thing that I might call ‘dance,’ or I might call ‘music,’ because when you sing, you dance, when you dance, you sing.”

For Sembatya, dance is social, cultural, political and even a form of governance. All these qualities are observed in the Karamojong’s dance practices. The researcher shares how the group’s movements are designed to show their strength.

“Most of their movements are these higher jump movements,” Sembatya explains, adding these practices are common during marriage proposals. “Why did they create that? Because most of their movements are movements of resilience and resistance.”

Dance, and by extension, the body is a container of knowledge. More than just a tool to convey aesthetically pleasing movements, the researcher sees the human body as “a living library,” capable of producing and transferring information.

“Many students don’t focus on meaning; they just focus on the aesthetic, the aesthetic values of movement,” Sembatya says. “So, we don’t get to understand the depth of the movements, especially when it comes to Indigenous or traditional movements.”

For more information, see https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/echoes-of-manyatta-edward-sembatyas-phd-performance-tickets-1274682964059?aff=ebdssbdestsearch.

The performance features dancers Daniel Steele, Safiyah Brito, Ellen Harris, Claire Whitelaw, Liam Hurley, Ashley Sankaran-Wee, and Soleil Mousseau