Andrew Ssebulime is a second year Ph.D. student in Critical Dance Studies at the University of California, Riverside, where he works as a teaching assistant in the Dance Department. He specializes in East African dances, including popular Ugandan forms, which he has taught, choreographed and performed extensively for over 10 years across Uganda, China, Norway and beyond. His research interests focus on dance pedagogy, diaspora and nostalgia. He currently teaches courses unpacking two foundational yet threatened Ugandan folk dances — Kizino and Owaro — guiding students to viscerally reconnect with these dances’ essence on Californian soil. By spotlighting such traditions through mindful ethical mediation into new locales, his mission persists in sustaining continuity amidst disruption.
Author Contact Information:
(951)-538-3385 (day)
asseb001@ucr.edu or ssendru@live.com
As an international student from Uganda pursuing my Ph.D. in Critical Dance Studies at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), I aim to ensure the continuity of my homeland’s treasured dance traditions in the face of rapid globalization. I do this by guiding students to embody the cultural knowledge encoded in folk dances like the playful Owaro and lively Kizino.
Owaro bonds youths in Ugandan villages through distinctive African aesthetics with curvilinear movements, percussive footwork and call-and-response patterns. As children mimic and syncopate steps together, Owaro allows their movement intelligence to bloom while strengthening social ties. For the Bakiga people in South Western Uganda, energetic dances like Kizino enable suitors to display vitality in competitive high jumps, integrating vibrant movements with courtship.
But can such dances endure if uprooted from their native soil and performance contexts? Will they still hold their values or essence if emplaced in different localities? This concerns me as a Ugandan dance scholar, teacher, performer with deep connections to these and other folk dance traditions. Through teaching and performance, I aim to sustain their essence by helping diverse students in my classes discover meanings beyond the gestures.
In my Introduction to Dance course, also known as DNCE 05 at the University of California, Riverside, students explore Owaro and Kizino dances through literature and in-class demonstrations. At first, they enroll mainly for unit fulfillment, but they become fascinated as they immerse themselves in the historical backgrounds, embedded knowledge and performance techniques of the dances. By embodying the movements, students transform from being passive spectators to active practitioners, gaining a deeper understanding. This immersion allows profound connections with the cultural knowledge encoded in these dances.
Moreover, by practicing sequences together, these folk dances come alive in a new context. Students glimpse the power to connect across distances. A Latina student remarked how Owaro’s driving beats evoked her family’s complex migration. Another Asian male student realized that these dances maintained centuries of continuity against disruption woven in each step.
Such moments display dance’s diversity as a human art form. Through embodied exploration together, we organically resonate with the vitality channeled through these dances despite our divergent ancestries. Their motions convey shared human experiences, which compels my commitment to preserving folk dance practices, underscoring their embedded wisdom that can nurture us and more generations to come.
Here, I choreograph continuity for folk dances with the hope that our moving or dancing bodies sequence spirit, allowing essence to evolve respectfully towards new purposes. In other words, dance communicates through a range of embodied or disembodied movement vocabularies, which channel knowledge, awareness, and, for some, an awakening of cultural memories. By elevating these overlooked East African folk dance traditions at the University of California, Riverside, their essence shines anew.
I hope to write living melodies of cultural diversity into our collective destiny. If we honor the world’s dance languages, our shared humanity dances on. Through my teaching at UCR, I aim to foster the embodiment of such cultural knowledge, reviving dances and rituals in an inspired classroom setting. This reveals how folk practices’ continuity sparks deep human connections across borders when we choreograph understanding through joyful, resonant motions.
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