CHAPTER THIRTEEN: ADOPTING SELECTED DANCE STEPS IN OWIPHA TRADITIONAL DANCE GROUP FOR FIELD TRIP TEACHING/LEARNING OF DANCE

Abstract

Dance has remained a means of expressing the innate feelings of humans towards sounds produced from various musical instruments irrespective of the genre of the music. The innate feelings are expressed through several dance steps which make up dance movements. This is because the rhythms used for dance is usually very captivating and the entirety of the dance reflects the cultural practices of the indigenous owners of the dance and is best understood by them. Owhipa traditional dance group of Rivers State is used for this study. This group is made up of men and women from Owhipa community of the Ikwere speaking tribe. Over time, the teaching/learning of traditional dance in a classroom setting in the University of Port Harcourt portray the pedagogical approach which applies various teaching methods to creative dance steps, basically for examination and entertainment.This has to an extent, limited the expression of the human body through dance and downplayed promoting culture. This study seeks to adopt selected dance steps of Owhipa traditional group into classroom teaching/learning by deploying the field trip teaching of dance. Through interviews, participant observations and library research, data was gathered and it revealed that deploying the indigenous dance steps and the field trip teaching/learning of Owhipa traditional dance group into the classroom makes the teaching worthwhile and interesting thus variegating the performances through several dance steps with a stress-free teaching mode which in turn will help sustain dance steps from Owhipa community and promote their culture.

Keywords: Indigenous, Dance, Steps, Adopt and Classroom