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DRJ Articles Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 46.4.80.155, on 21 Oct 2021 at 22:08:23, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0149767721000048
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Dance Studies Association
doi:10.1017/S0149767721000048
Invented Dances, Or, How Nigerian Musicians Sculpt the
Body Politic
Dotun Ayobade
The body is always simultaneously . . . a domain of pleasure and power/domination.
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture
Introduction
P
opular social dances such as Open & Close (Fela Kuti 1971), Shoki (Lil Kesh 2014), and
Shaku Shaku (Olamide 2017) exemplify how collectivized movement convenes real and
virtual communities with an intensity that animates Nigerian youth culture. Often con-
strued simplistically as fads or short-lived crazes, popular dances in fact shape the textures
of the everyday in West Africa. Nigerians perform these moves in an astounding array of contexts,
from concerts and nightclubs to funerals and weddings; from music videos and how-to dance
tutorials, on YouTube, to hashtagged dance challenges; from formal corporate events to everyday
practices of leisure. Musicians and disc jockeys craft songs or sync their beats with the newest
dance fads. Politicians perform reigning dances to signal affinity with an increasingly young and
tech-savvy electorate, betraying an awkward attempt awkward attempt at softening blatant divides,
notably across age, class, and generation. Disaffected Nigerian youth, more recently, have playfully
self-identified as “Marlians” (named for musician Naira Marley) to signal a sense of exclusion,
beatifying themselves from the social and political margins to which they feel pushed. Marlians
have notably expressed themselves as a collective through now-viral dance moves that range from
the masturbatory gestures of Soapy dance, to the Christian symbolic Tèṣùmó̩lè̩ (“step on the
enemy”), two moves whose virality and complementary enactment threaten, for some, hegemonic
moral norms. Taken together, these so-called dance fads underscore popular culture as a terrain
of struggle (Hall 1998, 447), a field in which artists and their listeners shuffle around and within
normative structures to contest or concede, via embodied means, the very scope and meaning of
culture.
A stubborn hierarchy continues to relegate dance to the sidelines of musicology (Stokes 2007, 14),
despite the effort by generations of dance scholars to uncover the productive entanglement between
African-derived movement, music, and identity (Nketia 1964; Ajayi 1998; Gottschild 2001;
DeFrantz 2004; Daniel 2011). Studies in African popular music routinely neglect how popular
Dotun Ayobade (dotunayobade@gmail.com) is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies/Rites and
Reason Theatre at Brown University. He writes about late twentieth century dance, performance
and popular music in West Africa, with an emphasis on the enigmatic life of Fela Kuti. He is con-
cluding his first book provisionally entitled The Afrobeat Queens: Gender, Play, and the Making of
Fela Kuti’s Music Subculture. This work examines how the women that shaped Fela’s Afrobeat fash-
ioned a plethora of artistic and performative strategies to negotiate agency and visibility in the face
of state violence and social rebuke.
DRJ 53/1 • APRIL 2021 5
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https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0149767721000048dancing animates African youth culture and how this practice of embodiment seizes upon the pub-
lic, loosens its grip, and lies dormant in cultural memory until fertile conditions prompt resurgence,
if ever. The elision of popular social dancing obscures its potency as a practice of public and
collectivized embodiment.
This essay reads social dances in general, and dance fads in particular, as embodied practices of
sociality, innovation, and reciprocity that dialectically constitute Nigerian and African popular
culture. My particular interest lies in a subgenre of popular social dancing: invented dances.
These are dance fads that enter into the field of popular culture with four formal properties:
1. They issue instructions to the listener. Often pedagogic in tone, invented dances demand
an unambiguous, embodied response. The requirement of being specifically summoned
by the artist differentiates invented dances from the infinite array of improvised, person-
alized, emotional, psychological, and somatic responses at the listener’s avail.
2. They are self-celebratory of their newness, of their being “invented” by the publishing
artist. Such claims to originality should, however, not be misconstrued as unassailable
historical truths because popular culture is refreshed by riffing, recycling, poaching,
and misattribution (Navas 2018; Yeku 2017). Musicians who publish invented dances
are also likely to marshal lyrics that amplify claims to innovation, obscuring their cita-
tional debt to other cultural contexts and to precedent or grassroots dance practices.
While an emergent dance move might have features that formally distinguish it from
existing dances, the method of imbuing dance with textual and performative codes as
a strategy to ensure repeatability and reembodiment is nothing new in African pop.1
3. Invented dances are often named for specific songs but they go on, when successful, to
shape Nigerian popular culture’s sonic zeitgeist for a notable period.
4. Men are more inclined to operationalize this form of dance in the promotion of their
craft. This form of public, collectivized dancing, as such, holds gendered implications
for our reading of public culture.
Musicians leverage these formal properties to bid for access to the body politic. The dances that
emerge from this technique of elicitation conjure and convene otherwise latent musical publics,
facilitate urban sociality, and shape the look and feel of what is contained in the popular.
The musicians that traffic in these movements illuminate popular youth culture as a domain of con-
testation not only over dance innovation per se, but I would offer, also over the body politic itself.
The musical beat softens the bodies of the listening public. These bodies become, in what ensues,
moldable sculpture over which musicians, usually men, jostle for access. Here, musical creativity
reaches beyond abstracted metrics of value—such as music charts and view counts—and embroils
itself in a lived domain of culture in which musicians strive for influence over the bodies of their
listening publics, in quite a literal sense. This negotiation complicates the portrayal of popular danc-
ing as purely “exuberant” (Onanuga and Akingbe 2020, 1). Take, for instance, when Fela Kuti ren-
ders these lyrics: “Put your leg and arm together / Throw your leg and arm away” (“Open &
Close”). His explicit intention is for the listener to follow the precise instructions of actually moving
their limbs in accordance with the script. In the same vein, Lil Kesh’s lyrical call “k’éjìká máa lo̩
s’ó̩tùn-ún s’ósì” (let the shoulders sway from right to left) (“Shoki”) summons the listener to ani-
mate the shoulders in a recognizable fashion and in delineated instances throughout the song.
These musical instructions aspire to elicit an unmissable dance response that transforms listening
bodies into dancing ones on a mass, even transnational, scale.
If, for example, this form of popular dancing recalls familiar imageries of gendered control, it is
precisely because the overwhelming majority of dance inventors are men who construct their artis-
tic selves as hypermasculine or whose songs contain fantasies of domination over a feminized pub-
lic. And because sculpting the body politic also implies the assertion of aesthetic authority,
6 DRJ 53/1 • APRIL 2021
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https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0149767721000048collectivized dancing becomes a cultural domain in which which hegemonic masculinity might flex
unchallenged. Male artists who mobilize invented dances aspire to transform the bodily states of
their listeners en masse, and they do so to signify their artistic reputations. A well-composed groove
or a potent baseline might induce pleasure for the listener at the same time as it manufactures
surrender to seductions of sound and script. This field of negotiation reveals the dancing body
to be the raw material of the dialectic between pleasure and domination, to invoke Homi
Bhabha’s poignant description in the epigraph (Bhabha 1994, 96). It is in this sense that collectiv-
ized dancing incorporates a density of social and political meanings.
Musicians’ figurative contestations over the invention and ownership of popular dances signify the
invocatory power of dance as embodied text for Nigerian and West African artists and their publics,
many of whom find themselves negotiating multiple, intersecting cultural stimuli and political pro-
jects at once. Fully appreciating how music scaffolds public embodiment requires understanding
invented dances as the textual, sonic, and embodied materialization of a more familiar concept:
call-and-response. Through lyrics, song titling, and the manipulation of sound properties (e.g.,
rhythm, melody, and tempo), musicians choreograph or repurpose invented dances with the
aim of generating a coherent script that prompts their publics to move in specific, recognizable,
and repeatable ways. Invented dances then become embodied texts because they possess the quality
of being “given a recognizable existence as a form” (Barber 2007, 1). These dances disseminate a
recognizable gestural and choreographic code that can be read, deciphered, and repeated with
some consistency. The musical script rides upon the infrastructure of words, melody, and rhythm,
seeking to penetrate listeners’ bodies. Yet, rather than being firm dictations, scripts encourage revi-
sion, resistance, and variation in live performance (Bernstein 2011, 71). The listener retains agency
over how they respond, all the while being amenable to being seduced into movement, as in a part-
ner in a duet. A key goal of this mode of textuality lies in making the specific dance accessible to a
large swath of the listening public while retaining its distinguishing features.2 These embodiable
texts, in turn, transform imagined worlds into digital and social realities, permitting Nigerian
youths to express individual and shared aspirations that are pregnant with a largely unrealized
potential for radical politics.3 My analysis focuses on Nigeria, but the claims being made hold pos-
sibilities for rethinking the nexus between popular music, dance, and youth sociality across contem-
porary Africa, as others have done from Ghana to Kinshasa (for example, Mbembe 2005; Shipley
2013; Kringelbach and Plancke 2019). When taken in the context of digital culture, contemporary
Africans mobilize dance as localized expressions that creatively respond to and mirror “complex
and manifold inter- and transcultural exchanges” (Kringelbach and Plancke 2019, 2). In what fol-
lows, I theorize invented dances as a permutation of call-and-response, a philosophy of collectivized
being that undergirds an abundance of indigenous African musicality. Call-and-response shapes the
compositional impulse of Nigerian musicians, despite massive transformations occasioned by
modernity in African tastes, publics, and aesthetics (Barber 2000, 5). Surveying three such
dances—Open & Close, Shoki, and Shaku Shaku—serves to exemplify the profusion of this critical
but undertheorized practice.
Call-and-Response: Teacherly Texts, Dancing Publics
Invented dances seek to elicit from their listeners a historically situated, embodied form of partic-
ipation rooted in call-and-response. Evident in much of African-derived musical production,
call-and-response is a theory and configuration of performance in which the body yields to and
generates vocalized and rhythmic frequencies.4 To call and to respond, or to be called upon and
respond, is to reproduce culture through embodiment and to express decipherment and a capacity
for complementary creative action (Jones, Moore, and Bridgforth 2010, 154–258). The practice
manifests a philosophy of relationality, the actuation of completeness. It is consistent with this
thinking that African-derived social dance constitutes itself as “communicative collaboration”
with rhythm (DeFrantz 2004, 66), and not simply as its derivative. One approach to Nigerian
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https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0149767721000048popular music might prioritize the sociohistorical context of particular music genres, or artists’ aes-
thetic and political intentions (Waterman 1990; Veal 2000; Olaniyan 2004). Another approach
complements these efforts by proposing the popular as a terrain of beckoning. Confronted with
increasingly dispersed and heterogenous publics, African musicians have resorted to multiple strat-
egies for calling forth their publics or outreaching to existing and potential fans. The gesture of
weaving dance scripts into songs offers but one dimension of this outreach effort. Artists compose
songs to act as probing scripts capable of eliciting a targeted danced response. Should enough
listeners yield to produce a critical mass of dancing bodies, a single tune might conjure an imagined
community of listeners and dancers that shape the material world and, ultimately, produce subtle
revisions in culture (Noland 2009).
Dancing grants consistency to a receptive but discerning public, whereas the act of performing
together makes legible a shared moral project (Brennan 2018). The cycle of scripting and dancing,
of calling and responding, authorizes the political projects of the listening publics as well. Denied
access to formal instruments of agency and subjectivity, such as through political power, work, lei-
sure, and education, African youth have continually constructed new spaces of sociability that dem-
onstrate their difference either at society’s margins or at its heart (Diouf 2003, 5). In this way,
communities of real and imagined dancers animate a body politic of the dispossessed that counters
dominant and negative imagery of youth as socially unfit or as a threat to order. This reveals one of
the ways that collectivized dancing invites youth to mark themselves legible and to assert their
“somebodiness,” in a fashion that echoes the othering of racialized subjects as being of no appre-
ciable value (West 1989, 96).
Musicians, like their listeners, position themselves as moral agents in this circuit of sonic and
embodied exchange. Harry Garuba’s exploration of “teacherly texts” describes the efforts of
scholars-activists who utilize public art in the spirit of outreach and education. Teacherly texts,
Garuba offers, are literary works produced during the period of decolonization with the goal of
educating Africans on their history, culture, and on citizenship. The authors about whom
Garuba writes imagined themselves as teachers, part of whose mission was to attune Africans to
full participation in the field of cultural and political modernity (Garuba 2017, 15–16). Garuba
delimits his conception of teacherly texts to written literature, but extending the teacherly from
the literary text to the embodied, and specifically to dance, has the potential to expand the study
of African popular culture. When musicians invent dances, as many do or claim to do, they actively
train their publics on emergent bodily and cultural idioms. They also teach their publics how to
orient their bodies in public spaces. Whether this pedagogy occurs as part of a youth outreach pro-
ject or a dance challenge that utilizes online mediums, these practices have a serious impact on
youth behavior and on the body politic writ large.
Dance as teacherly text has kinship with another tradition: the artist as sculptor, which is an idea that
has elsewhere been deployed to achieve explicitly political goals. Joseph Beuys, a postwar German
sculptor and performance artist, used the idea of “social sculpture” to describe art that requires pub-
lic participation for its completion. Beuys believed that citizens could transform society through pop-
ular creativity fueled by socially engaged public art (Moore 2009). In much the same way, applied
theater practitioners imagine the human body as moldable clay. Participants in applied theater work-
shops might manipulate volunteers’ limbs, torsos, and facial expressions to express abstract concepts
or stimulate otherwise difficult topics.5 These examples illustrate how artists guide audiences toward
empowering ends, and, in turn, shape the body politic in literal and figurative ways.
As vernacular, grassroots creative action that lies beyond state control, invented dances embroil
themselves in decadent enjoyment (Mbembe 2005). They shun the lofty political goals implied
in the foregoing examples. Mass incorporation, reproduction, and disuse are the rules that govern
the market of invented dances. When in vogue, West African youth ferociously enact these dances,
facilitate their virality through mobile technologies, and discard the dances when they fall out of
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https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0149767721000048fashion. Some musicians and their youth audience capitalize on already reigning dances in ways that
minimize risk. In this sense, invented dances might be best understood as “African” to the extent
that they reveal the market logic that oils the machinery of contemporary popular culture. These
dances are quickly produced, widely consumed, hotly contested, and then ditched in the wake of
digital fatigue or as soon as they yield no further value for artist or public (Shipley 2013).
Musicians might also use popular dancing to enlist youth support for the agendas of powerful polit-
ical actors who readily coopt emergent youth culture to undercut its radical potential.6 Music entre-
preneurs endowed with an acute sensitivity to the moves of the moment adapt emergent music
technology or tailor song compilations to specific dance fads.7 The vitality of these exchanges
underscore a fraught dynamic of invented dances: musicians seeking to mold youth bodies into cul-
tural products while inevitably revealing those bodies as elusive, untamable substrates in the matrix
of African cultural production.
Sketches: Open & Close, Shoki, and Shaku Shaku
Three examples reveal the power of invented dances to instantiate vital exchanges among a network
of creative actors. When Fela Kuti, famed Afrobeat musician and activist, released Open & Close in
1971, the album also ushered in the birth of a new, eponymous dance style. Centered on the lower
body, the signature song, “Open & Close,” asks the listener to flex the knees inward and outward,
repeating a sequence of tension and release of the thighs. The dancer might place the hands on the
knees or stretch them out; what is essential is that the hands facilitate or mirror the contraction and
release of the knees. The body’s weight rests on the balls of the feet, as the dancer continues the
movement in a mild squat. Despite their releases sixteen years apart, the original album artwork
(1971) and the reissued edition (1987) read like pictorial dance manuals. Both editions conveyed
the essential message that dancing of a particular kind was a critical aspect to enjoying the song.
The reissued album art (Figure 1), like the original, represents women frozen in midmovement.
The women on the left splay their arms and spread their legs; the women on the right contract
their bodies, with arms crisscrossed and legs close together. In either sequence, the arms hang
just above waist level, while the torso contorts forward or falls slightly sideways. The song’s lyrics
detail the execution of the dance, amplifying the album’s not-so-subtle discursive and visual cues:
Fela: Put your leg and arm together
Chorus: Open and Close
Fela: Throw your leg and arm away
Chorus: Open and Close
Fela: Bend your nyash like Black Man (2ce)8
Chorus: Open and Close
The album’s artwork combined with the song to convey the unmistakable message that “Open &
Close” requires a particular danced response. Together, these elements suggest that a rounded
musical experience is predicated on collaborative decoding of its integrated danced aspects.
The four women featured in the album artwork register the prompt on a somatic-affective level, at
the level of a mirror sensory awareness, inviting whoever held the album to mirror the contraction
or extension of their bodies whenever they get around to listening. The title “Open and Close,” nei-
ther simply a description nor a command, provokes the listener’s curiosity: What is being opened or
closed? To whom is this command/description addressed? The lyrics, artwork, and embodied
response render explicitly that what is required of the listener is to listen and, subsequently, to per-
form a particular sequence of moves. The various aesthetic components of “Open & Close” com-
bine to make clear the song’s stated intent: to elicit dancing. What is more, answering this call
signaled belonging to an emergent community of urban, innovative, and socially aware Nigerians
of the early 1970s. In a fashion consistent with the circum-Atlantic travel of African-derived cultural
idioms, Fela adapted the release and contraction technique required to perform Open & Close from
DRJ 53/1 • APRIL 2021 9
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the Caribbean butterfly dance (Olorunyomi 2005). The butterfly dance itself expressed the growing
influence of Caribbean popular culture in the United States and on global pop from the 1960s
onward. The Caribbean influence was also expressed in the spread of the boogaloo, a dance that
shaped the musical and performative textures of Black musical forms like soul and funk (Veal
2000; Allam 2020). Through “Open & Close,” Fela Kuti revealed himself as especially alert to the
ways in which music and dance of the United States were transforming the taste of Nigerian and
West African youth, who were taken by the American and Black popular culture of the 1960s and
early 1970s. Fela would become known for his savvy adaptation of key elements of soul, funk,
and jazz to local musical sensibilities and, later, to addressing political concerns of the day.9 The
musical cross-fertilization is readily evident in Fela’s work, but the danced adaptations were just
as crucial.
The timing of Fela’s release of Open & Close in 1971 was significant in Nigeria’s postcolonial his-
tory. Preceding his rise to global fame, the album was published by Fela as part of a larger exper-
iment in adapting his Afrobeat music to reflect the cosmopolitan sensitivities of young, urban,
working-class Nigerian audiences, many of whom hungered for new musical idioms in the wake
of a brutal civil war, economic mismanagement, and a cultural scene dominated by highlife and
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https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0149767721000048James Brown’s soul music. Harboring little interest in antiestablishment politics, Fela published
“Open & Close” alongside its eponymous dance while solely preoccupied with gaining traction
in the music industry. As the dance became the ubiquitous move in nightclubs, at parties and social
gatherings, and in schools, it also announced Fela’s as a musical force to be reckoned with.
The commercial success and widespread embrace of Open & Close enabled Fela to accrue social and
economic capital for a lifelong challenge of a set of Nigeria’s moral and political orders. The album
and its accompanying dance script joined a litany of hits that declared Fela as the definitive voice of
Nigeria’s restive young. But Fela also registered his rising stature by seizing aesthetic control of the
bodies of Nigeria’s dancing youth publics, a fact that gave credence to his claims to musical supe-
riority. Fela deployed Open & Close dance in a fashion reminiscent of James Brown’s electric boo-
galoo in the 1960s, but the move prefigured Fela’s fierce opposition to state repression and
entrenched inequities later in the decade. The boogaloo illustrates that Fela had not pioneered
the perennial desire by musicians to deploy dance scripts as tools of elicitation. Fela, however, offers
a prominent example of Nigerian musicians’ enchantment with the promise of seizing aesthetic
hold of the bodies of their listeners. Few artists follow this trajectory of deploying a dance to
advance visibility in a fashion that accrues into a mass political project.
The practice of inventing dances has continued to structure more contemporary examples.
Forty-three years after Open & Close a comparatively obscure Nigerian pop singer, Keshinro
Ololade (a.k.a. Lil Kesh), declared the birth of Shoki dance. Lil Kesh couched “Shoki” within
the familiar scriptive and pedagogic form of Open & Close. The song issued an instruction to
the listener, offering lyrical signposts about how they should deploy their body according to the
beat:
Let me teach you how to Shoki
Na o̩wọ ́ s’íwájú
K’éjìká máa lo̩ s’ótùn-ún s’ósì
Máa fò s’ókè díẹ ̀ díẹ̀
O ṣé, óyá f’ako̩ si
(Let me teach you how to Shoki
Stretch your hands forward
Let your shoulders go left and right
Jump, little by little
Thanks, now put some style into it.)
Well-executed, Shoki resembles a sideways scooping motion that begins from a half-squat and ends
in an upright position. Alternately flexing each knee inward at each pulse of the beat, the dancer
makes a gradual and rhythmic rise. The palms turn skyward in a scoop as the dancer gradually
rises; the palms capsize to coincide with the body’s erect stance. The dancer repeats the scooping,
rising, and capsizing motion with varying degrees of flair. The left arm sits across the body through-
out the dance, while the right arm extends away so that the right elbow stays around waist level.
Repeat the sequence to your level of comfort; now put style into it. Completing the dance requires
urging, and Lil Kesh obliges with the prompt. There is no notable change in the rhythm or melody
as Lil Kesh seamlessly glides between gentle imploring (“Let me” and “Let your”) and brazen
prescription (“Na o̩wọ ́ s’íwájú” [Stretch your hands forward]). The goal of this shift in tone, it
appears, is to prompt the listener to surrender their bodies and elicit as little resistance as possible.
The listeners’ attention to the dance script becomes crucial not just to completing the movement,
but to gaining admission into a community of listeners/dancers who, although dispersed by time
and space, are imagined to be rehearsing and performing the same dance. The participatory
ethos of the Shoki enabled its quick spread, along with Lil Kesh’s rising profile within and beyond
Nigeria.
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https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0149767721000048The eponymous hit song, “Shoki,” announced Lil Kesh’s arrival on the music scene, so much so
that the notion that he did not create the dance likely astonished many. The dance’s journey to pop-
ularity was in fact not a straightforward one. Lil Kesh had poached the movement from another
artist, Esegine Allen (a.k.a. Orezi), who himself simply published a dance already resonating with
young dancers on Lagos streets. By poaching Shoki for monetary gain and social status, Lil Kesh
and Orezi completed a familiar circle of dominant popular culture in Nigeria. Previously emergent
and underground, Shoki transitioned to the mainstream in commodified form, becoming accessible
to consumers, all the while wrestling to reclaim its ties to the grassroots. Both artists merely amplified
and recycled an existing movement vocabulary, each motioning to the street-level creativity that
inflects Nigerian pop music, while also appropriating said creativity for self-promotion. Lil Kesh’s
efforts with “Shoki” eclipsed Orezi’s, a fact underlined by his equally successful remix, which featured
two A-list Nigerian artists: Davido and Olamide. Invented dances such as Shoki almost certainly tran-
scend their nations and communities of origin, fielding new transnational contestations over owner-
ship. For instance, Lil Kesh’s strategic claims to authorship of Shoki gained traction when the move
appeared fleetingly in the single “Where They From” (2015) by renowned African American song-
writer, rapper, and emcee, Missy Elliot. Online commentators promptly read Missy’s work not sim-
ply as a recognition of African popular music, which it was, but also as a powerful validation for Lil
Kesh, an artist who sought to consolidate himself on the Nigerian and African pop scene.10 Riding on
the infrastructure of dancing bodies, cellphone cameras, and the Internet, these dances powerfully
underscore how dance fads might foster feelings of national belonging, even as the digital channels
necessary for their transnational circulation also render those dances boundaryless (Shipley 2013).
Shoki ushered Lil Kesh and Orezi into and, inevitably, out of the limelight in the pattern of embrace
and disuse that defines the lifecycles of invented dances. Shoki, like dances in this subgenre of pop-
ular dancing, might define the artistic lifespans of artists who tether their careers too closely to spe-
cific dance fads. It should come as no surprise that neither Lil Kesh nor Orezi could sustain the
musical momentum created by the once-dominant Shoki dance.
When Nigerian rapper Olamide Adedeji made an appearance on the remix of Lil Kesh’s “Shoki,” he
registered an alertness to the persuasive power of dance scripts. Investing his songs with dance
scripts is a practice that has come to define Olamide’s own musical trajectory. From the cool,
inward pull of the arms that materializes Shakiti Bobo dance (“Bobo” [2015]) to the instructions
issued to the listener in “Position Yourself” (2018)—to support “your waist with your left hand or
your right hand,” suspending the other “like a linesman”—Olamide has long established himself
within a genealogy of male musicians for whom dancing operates as a textual and performative
strategy for conjuring their publics. Few contemporary Nigerian musicians have consistently suc-
ceeded at deploying dance scripts and “inventing” dances as has Olamide. Born in Lagos’s working-
class coastal suburb of Bariga, Olamide rose to fame on an artful blend of Yoruba lore and lyricism
with the cadence and ethos of commercial rap music. His songs mobilize street lingo to advance
controversial views on topics such as conspicuous consumption, sex, and drug abuse. To appeal
to a largely religious Nigerian public, Olamide often skirts direct meaning and responsibility by acti-
vating the Yoruba penchant for ambiguity and indirection. What often goes unspoken, however, is
that Olamide’s success derives from his tried ability to script dances for his listeners. Shaku Shaku
became one of many dances attributable to Olamide’s discography. Performed in a half-squat posi-
tion, Shaku Shaku features two complementary moves, both of which might be combined and
sequenced based on the listener’s skill level and improvisational instincts. The first move might be
described as a dynamic base stance, which is characterized by exaggerated backward lifts of the
lower legs. The pronounced lift is punctuated by the rebound of the legs. The dancer lands each
foot at an angle that alternately opens up the body before the next lift. Both arms extend in front
of the body to create an X at the wrists (Figure 2), but the dancer might manipulate the knot
with an inward roll without disentangling the X. The second movement is underscored by variation.
Here, the dancer pulls back the right arm, opening up the body to simulate the tension of tugging at
an invisible object, or of exaggerating a phone call. The right foot rhythmically stamps the ground in
a half-squat as the trailing left leg pulsates at the knees. With the body’s weight largely on the right
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foot, the ball of the left foot barely lifts off the ground. When Shaku Shaku (#shakushaku) became
hashtagged in dance videos on YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter, it digitally indexed widespread
embodied response to Olamide’s call. The hashtag prompted a flurry of self-directed, user-generated
cell phone videos as well as how-to dance tutorials, all of which represented Nigerians and Africans
forging a sense of national, continental, and diasporic community as they performed the dance.
Everyone, from ordinary Nigerians and celebrities to politicians and athletes, have had a go at Shaku
Shaku. But when Shaku Shaku first emerged in Olamide’s music video “Wo!,” it lacked a name and
was barely sketched out as a coherent movement. To complicate matters, Shaku Shaku, the name by
which it would later be known, had no obvious etymological links in Nigerian Pidgin English or
Yoruba, further marking its improvised origins in the popular imagination. Instead, Shaku Shaku
debuted in the music video “Wo!” as a series of disjointed moves to be refined over time by popular
participation. Other artists picked up the dance and incorporated it into their own songs, entrenching
the culture of poaching while helping the dance’s refinement process. Lil Kesh, for instance, sensed a
critical opportunity when he composed and released “Rora” (2017), a lesser-known song in which he
and a male co-dancer performed a more cohesive version of what was destined to become Shaku
Shaku. Soon after, Olamide released an Instagram video of himself enacting a more effortless version
of the dance, a tacit counterstrike aimed partly at reminding his followers about the dance’s creative
debt to his song “Wo!.” Accelerated by social events as much as by online shares and hashtags, Shaku
Shaku dominated much of West Africa’s blogosphere for roughly three years.
The release of Olamide’s song “Science Student” (2018) also helped to announce Shaku Shaku as a
distinctly Nigerian dance style, delineated, for instance, from contagious dances like Ghana’s
Azonto and South Africa’s Gwara Gwara. “Science Student” (Figure 2) also named Olamide as
its most likely choreographer. Design choices in the music video helped advance both of these
claims. The set features a makeshift laboratory with bottles bearing ominous substances.
Olamide makes a break from the laboratory scene, emerging in an abandoned storage complex.
Visibly stoned dancers slump in awkward postures, and suspicious-looking scientists litter the
first half of the video’s overall aesthetic, punctuating the song’s controversial treatment of willful
drug mixing. The striking colors of the set and costumes, upbeat tempo, and witty lyrics overwhelm
Olamide’s attempt at rectitude. One scene features the warning “Say No 2 Drugs” scribbled on a
wall, but Olamide’s treatment of drug mixing is a playful, even mischievous one. For instance,
one of the most notable lines in the song is “wọń ti po chemical pọ̀ / ojú ti dirty / wó̩n ti p’omi gutter
pọ,̀ àwo̩n science students” (they have mixed all sorts of chemicals / the eyes have become blurry /
they have mixed in gutter water, the science students). The humorous phrase “science students”
promptly entered Nigerian public discourse, indicating that indulgence had trumped the song’s
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https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0149767721000048oblique moral project. The climax of Olamide’s video showcased Shaku Shaku as a delineated
sequence of movements by invoking the aesthetic of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” Olamide’s cho-
reography comes complete with the jerking movement of the shoulders that defined Jackson’s time-
less work. The music video, and the widespread dancing of Shaku Shaku it spurred, might be read
superficially as evidence of the erosion of morals among Nigerian youth. But when the expression
“science student” entered into public discourse, it contained at least one important critique of the
state of affairs: it called attention to the critical underfunding of Nigeria’s public education. The
figure of the science student became a synecdoche for youth who, finding no outlet in formal lab-
oratories or studios, pour their creative talents into risky, even self-destructive, experiments. The
catchy tune traveled from nightclubs to music apps, from social media to Lagos parties, consolidat-
ing Shaku Shaku as a dominant bodily idiom that also materialized a potent critique of society.
Whereas the music video’s culminating choreography draws from a wide array of movement
sources, including South Africa’s Gwara Gwara dance, Shaku Shaku was the song’s signature move-
ment, the sequence that defined the choreographic routine and the song itself. Everyday Nigerians
vied to showcase mastery of a previously inchoate bodily idiom. The movement established itself as
a choreographic and stylistic precursor to emergent dances, such as Zanku (legwork), but its ambiv-
alent moral critique more closely resembled Tèṣùmó̩lè̩ (“step on the enemy”)—the latter being per-
formed by Marlians, the fans of artist Naira Marley that self-celebrate their unruliness. Both of the
latter moves became mainstream during the course of this writing.
The examples of Open & Close, Shoki, and Shaku Shaku exemplify how invented dances might derive
as much from the creativity of individual musicians as they derive from quotidian cultures of play, lei-
sure, humor, and community. These dances animate the body politic, lure real and imagined publics
into choreographic surrender, and expand musicians’ social capital (pejoratively known as street cred-
ibility). For their part, the youth who respond to this form of dancing do so to render themselves visible
members of a national, transnational, and global collective. Whether as individuals or as collectives,
Nigerians and West Africans perform these dances to register their belonging local, national, continen-
tal and diasporic communities. They perform these movements in contexts that range from casual to
highly symbolic pursuits, from political events to online challenges or pedagogic how-to videos. What
emerges within this circuit of collectivized embodiment is a complex practice of call-and-response that
crisscrosses Nigerian and African communities as they negotiate self, belonging, and identity across
expanses of time and space. The hashtagged response to Olamide’s “call,” for instance, became crucial
to completing a circuit of embodied dialogue between artist and the listening-dancing publics for
whom participation represented the civic act of making themselves legible as part of a public. But
the movement also entered into a regional, continental, and global circuit of Africanness constructed
through dance. Like the unfettered global appropriation of Black social dance, invented dances are
trailed by a neoliberal discourse of freedom that threatens to unmoor culturally-situated movements
from the particularities of place and community (DeFrantz 2012). For this reason, invented dances
constitute part of an ever-evolving nomenclature of Nigerianness understood within, and in excess
of, nation. Shaku Shaku might have evinced Olamide’s stature in a fiercely contested fan culture,
but it also authorized public enjoyment and, with it, a politics of visibility for many youth.
Choreographing the body politic in such a decipherable fashion validates the musician’s claims to a
slice of power. When contextualized within histories of dispossession, the act of conjuring a coherent
public imbues dancing en masse with political meaning, especially given how collectivized dancing
contains within itself the specter of subversive mass action.
Regimes of Movement
Invented dances challenge the idea that collectivized dancing is simply a fortunate accident of well-
crafted music. Open & Close, Shoki, and Shaku Shaku reveal a high degree of intentionality in how
musicians orchestrate public embodiment through their songs. The strategic use of dance scripts by
Nigerian musicians and the sometimes-dramatic tussle that attends ownership of dance moves
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https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0149767721000048powerfully to illuminate the political stakes around popular embodiment. These musicians clarify
that popular dancing does not idly proceed in the wake of musical creativity. Instead, the promise of
collectivized dancing animates the musical imagination itself.11 It should be clear that the conver-
gence of music making and public embodiment proliferates well beyond the three examples that I
have so far surveyed. Indeed, there is an overabundance of invented dances that have emerged in
Nigerian popular music culture between the 1970s and the first decade of the twenty-first century.
A longer historical treatment from the 1970s is both possible and enticing, but instead, I will offer
brief sketches of more contemporary examples.
The last two decades alone have been defined by patterns of boom-and-bust in this form of popular
embodiment. The late 1990s ushered in an explosion of dances whose proponents resided at the
margins of Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital. Galala and Suwo were two dances that dominated
the national imagination at the turn of the millennium. Both movements captured the ethos of the
ethnically diverse Ajegunle ghetto, an urban margin populated by migrants from Nigeria’s hinter-
lands. Daddy Showkey and Mad Melon, both of whom performed dancehall-style music, are gen-
erally credited with popularizing these dances and for ushering Ajegunle into public consciousness.
Both artists migrated from the oil-rich but economically sidelined South South region of Nigeria.12
When Galala and Suwo dominated the popular music scene, the dances fomented a renewed
national appreciation for life, creativity, and humanity at the urban margins. Yahoozee came on
the heels of these two dances to coincide with the proliferation of Internet fraud, a phenomenon
by which Nigeria would earn international disrepute from the early 2000s onward. Yahoozee
embodied an unabashed celebration of conspicuous consumption and ill-earned wealth. The
cool, self-indulgent style of the Yahoozee dancer celebrates the guile of the subaltern in a globalized
world that, at the time, became increasingly marked by the abstraction of wealth from the processes
of production.13 Yahoozee’s assertion of belonging was one punctuated by urban poverty and exclu-
sion from the Nigerian commonwealth as well as from the concentration of economic wealth in the
Global North. “Yahoo Yahoo,” the infamous epithet for Internet fraud, presented itself as an option
for large swaths of disgruntled youths to both insert themselves, via the Internet, into the global
circuit while celebrating said arrival.14
These dominant popular dances of the 1990s and early 2000s paled in comparison to the prolifer-
ation that marked the mid-2000s onward. It is hardly coincidental that subsequent dances and the
public participation that they helped to galvanize would see a progressive boom in the wake of
Nigeria’s transition to democratic rule in 1999. A hallmark of the early 2000s was the liberalization
of the national economy in favor of private capital by Olusegun Obasanjo, the leader of Nigeria’s
first democracy after two decades of military rule. The democracy turn spurred a nearly unbroken
chain of dances such as Alanta dance by Art Quake; Shoki by Lil Kesh/Orezi; Shakiti Bobo and
Shaku Shaku by Olamide; Skelewu by Davido; Konko Below by Lagbaja; Etighi by Iyanya; Gaga
Shuffle by 2Face; Azonto by Fuse ODG and Tiffany in Ghana, which was later popularized in
Nigeria by Wizkid; and Alkayida by Guru, also in Ghana. The point being made here is that,
taken together, post-1999 pop dances both signaled and secured renewed access to the public
and civic spaces. This access would, at the same time, underscore relentless, albeit elusive, attempts
at the commodification of dancing by individual musicians. Imagined in its long arc, invented
dances vividly illustrate how popular embodiment through dancing shaped Nigerian public culture
at critical historical junctures.
The litany of dances sampled above makes possible two related claims. First, the ways in which
invented dances dominate social life and inevitably fizzle authorizes us to think about popular
dance history as “regimes of movement.” When taken in the context of Nigeria’s long history with
authoritarianism, as well as its impositions on social life, we might begin to appreciate the subversive
potential of creative actors like musicians, who vie with state actors for control of the body politic.
These actors forge alternative sites of affective surrender, creatively underscoring the futile fantasies
of totalitarian control by state actors.15 Second, if dance regimes also describe slices of historical
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https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0149767721000048time, then critical attention to dance regimes might equally facilitate new and innovative readings of
the political economy of colonial and postcolonial Nigeria. I am suggesting that regimes of invented
dances do not merely signal lifecycles; but they also betray the grip that specific forms of popular
embodiment have had over public culture in the recent past. The commonplace description of
dance fads as reigning dances therefore lends itself to new analyses of political economy through pop-
ular embodiment.
Hegemonic Masculinity: Swaying the Body Politic
Invented dances reproduce a powerful set of gender discourses. The action of calling forth the
listener to a state of dance and the assumption that they might surrender their bodies are inscribed
with gendered meaning. As such, examining music’s role in constructing normative gender ideas
should consistently account for the ways in which popular and collectivized dancing might also
consolidate or authorize the subversion of gender norms. At a most basic level, the example of
Fela Kuti, Lil Kesh, and Olamide signify a broader reality in which male musicians reveal themselves
to be more likely to marshal lyrics and sound to elicit specific danced responses from their listeners.
When these masculine-identifying musicians invite the listener to dance, they simultaneously issue
a familiar code that powerfully reinforces already-circulating ideologies around masculinity as dom-
inant control of others.
The pleasures of collectivized dancing conceal how invented dances conduce to a problematic con-
flation of masculinity with domination. But what does this conflation look like in practice? For one,
male musicians publish invented dances by deploying musical and extramusical resources to fem-
inize the imagined listener. Activating polarized gender discourses to bolster their masculine per-
sonas, these artists construct the public into the figure of a woman as a strategy of assuming
control of their imagined bodies.16 In music videos and in album art, male musicians might cast
scantily dressed female models as metaphors for their listening publics. In constructing the listener
as a young woman, these popular musicians invoke a problematic association of femininity with
vulnerability and subservience (Biddle and Jarman-Ivens 2007, 2). In casting this figurative
woman in varying states of undress, they performatively construct her as defenseless. Taken
together, the video vixen and the serenaded lover then act as powerful stand-ins for a body politic
that is imagined as pliable and receptive to musical command. Casting the listening public as a
woman or serenading to her as “baby” (complete with its allusions to infantility) reveals how danc-
ing might become weaponized to reproduce a skewed gender order.
Gendered control of the dancing body mimics the elaboration of masculine hegemony in other cul-
tural domains as well. One survey of Nigerian youth, for example, showed a common association of
maleness and masculinity with physical strength, fearlessness, and assertiveness. The surveyed youth
went a step further, associating masculinity with public enactments of “violence, bloodshed, aggres-
sive individualism, and control over the physically, socially, and politically weak groups comprising
women, children,” and other men (Uchendu 2007, 283–291). By fixating fixating upon nude, infan-
tilized and hypersexualized women, the musicians that traffic in invented dances express confidence
in enacting male fantasies of female submission upon their imagined public. This gives credence to
a widespread conflation of maleness, authority, and officiousness in Nigeria, while proliferating
images of female objectification in popular culture more broadly. The point here is: the script of
invented dances relies on cultural assumptions about who issues the instructions and who yields.
When we attend to how masculinity aspires toward constructing itself as naturalized, we make
its scriptive properties and performative dimensions transparent and contestable (Biddle and
Jarman-Ivens 2007, 5).
This said, the gendered politics of sculpting the body politic through dance holds the potential to
project positively feminine representations, expanding interdisciplinary scholarship on women,
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https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0149767721000048gender, and popular culture. Female and feminine-identifying musicians do not instrumentalize
dance in a fashion that fetishizes domination. The active sculpting of the body politic by male artists
often contrasts vividly with the goals of women musicians such as Tiwa Savage or Niniola, for
instance, who, although equally invested in eliciting a danced response to their songs, scarcely pre-
scribe specific embodied responses for their listeners.17 Their engagement with dance suggests that
popular representations of femininity should include neither fantasies of control nor the aggressive
appropriation of public space.
The density of men in the production and contestation of invented dances is complicated by a
Nigerian fact: Kafayat Shafau-Ameh (a.k.a. Kaffy), a woman choreographer, has emerged as the ver-
itable face of dance professionalism in Nigerian popular culture. Kaffy has worked as a choreogra-
pher or dancer in well-known dance-songs, including P-Square’s “Personally” (2013) and
Olamide’s “Science Student” (2018). The extent to which the creation, if not the public contesta-
tion, of the dances are attributed to Kaffy’s creative work remains to be known. Suffice to say that
the operationalization of invented dances, and the misguided notion that they are secondary out-
comes of popular music, implies that men, more than women, are likely to be credited with own-
ership of the dances attached to their songs. Male musicians are also more likely to enlist mass
participation in invented dances at the outset of the dance’s lifecycle, when ownership might still
be in contest.
Conclusion
This article takes up the question of why some of Nigeria’s most well-known musicians have, at
different points in their professional careers, also fashioned themselves as dance innovators. Part
of the answer, I have offered, is evident in the forms of social and economic capital that accrues
to musicians who succeed in eliciting widespread response to dance scripts woven into songs.
When Nigerian musicians publish novel dances to accompany their songs, they urge a critical atten-
tion to embodiment as a dynamic part of West African urban youth culture, as a space of cultural
struggle rich with implications for reading popular music. The invented dances that emerge from
this practice differs from other forms of movement in that they require a specific set of embodied
actions for their completion, and are unabashed in the celebration of their newness, sometimes to
the point of exaggeration. The authors of these moves, mostly men, lace their songs with easily
decodable scripts (the call) whose explicit intention is to elicit a specific danced reaction (the
response). The scriptive transaction between sound, script, and public embodiment has yet to
fully translate into how we study and theorize gender in African popular music.
Delinking popular music from the dancing bodies that it often conjures produces a limiting view of
the robust and lively exchange that transpires between musicians and their publics. An interdisci-
plinary lens foregrounds the not-so-marginal that invented dances occupy in forging embodiment,
community, reciprocity, and citizenship, as well as authorizing convenient access for many
Nigerians to the public domain. This article has argued that invented dances often function as
space-clearing endeavors through which musicians stake claim to cultural power, while their publics
stake claim to visibility. By interrogating dance fads such as Shoki, Open & Close, and Shaku Shaku,
I have underlined the generative possibilities of popular dancing in West African youth culture.
Paired with an aesthetic of consumerist excess, invented dances map out the contours and possi-
bilities of a politics of collectivized embodiment for otherwise marginalized constituents. The trans-
action between musicians and listeners goes on to inflect how Nigerians and West Africans deploy
their bodies in public avenues, suggesting that the body politic takes its shape as much from nor-
mative institutions of religion and politics, for example, as from the creative tension stoked between
music makers and their publics. The study of dance and popular culture in Nigeria and West Africa
would benefit further from valuable interdisciplinary scholarly cross-pollinations that permit new
readings of the popular, the embodied, and the political.
DRJ 53/1 • APRIL 2021 17
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