TOWARDS A SYNERGY BETWEEN DANCE PEDAGOGY AND PRAXIS FOR NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

The initial objective of dance education was to development the art form and harness it’s potentials for societal development. That dance education in Nigeria’s tertiary institutions of learning is largely seen as an isolated and purely academic exercise with little or no relevance to the real sector is hardly in contention as several studies attest to that reality. What is of concern is how to make it more relevant to the present milieu. Against universal trends, major developments in dance in Nigeria are driven by forces independent of academic influences. Various reasons have been advanced by scholars (Ikideh, 1987; Adeyemi, 2010; Onyemuchara, 2017; etc.) Onyemuchara, for instance, contends that the paucity of practice-based curriculum is the bane. Drawing from related disciplinary paradigms, this paper explores the possibility of synergizing the efforts of both the academic and professional/industry dance practitioners to make dance more relevant to national development.

Introduction

Since the Industrial Revolution, we have experienced tremendous growth in population, production, and consumption. We are on an unsustainable track considering today’s environmental degradation, poverty, climate challenges, overconsumption, and more. In this first chapter, I present key issues related to societal development over the course of the last decade and pinpoint what needs attention. The background, relevance, and purpose of this book’s 12 chapters are introduced.

The Stalagmite Record of Southern Arabia: Climatic Extremes, Human Evolution and Societal Development

The fluctuating climatic conditions of the Saharo-Arabian deserts are increasingly linked to human evolutionary events and societal developments. On orbital timescales, the African and Indian Summer Monsoons were displaced northward and increased precipitation to the Arabian Peninsula which led to favorable periods for human occupation in the now arid interior. At least four periods of climatic optima occurred within the last 130,000 years, related to Marine Isotope Stages (MIS) 5e (128–121 ka BP), 5c (104–97 ka BP), 5a (81–74 ka BP) and 1 (10.5–6.2 ka BP), and potentially early MIS 3 (60–50 ka BP). Stalagmites from Southern Arabia have been key to understanding climatic fluctuations and human-environmental interactions; their precise and high-resolution chronologies can be linked to evidence for changes in human distribution and climate/environment induced societal developments. Here, we review the most recent advances in the Southern Arabian Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene stalagmite records. We compare and contrast MIS 5e and Early Holocene climates to understand how these differed, benchmark the extremes of climatic variability and summarize the impacts on human societal development. We suggest that, while the extreme of MIS 5e was important for H. sapeins dispersal, subsequent, less intense, wet phases mitigate against a simplistic narrative. We highlight that while climate can be a limiting and important factor, there is also the potential of human adaptability and resilience. Further studies will be needed to understand spatio-temporal difference in human-environment interactions in a climatically variable region.

Neo-populist Fables: The Other World of A.V. Chayanov

The political importance of Chayanov transcends his own time and space, influencing as it has done – and continues to do – both the debate about rural development in Third World countries and – more broadly – resurgent agrarian populist interpretations in academia and elsewhere. Less well known, but epistemologically as revealing of his politics, are his non-economic writings, particularly his contributions to the Gothic literary genre. Examined here, therefore, are three stories written pseudonymously by Chayanov, each of which is structured by the same discourse. All were composed over a short period just after the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, and reveal as a sub-text the political divergence and concomitant struggle between neo-populist and Bolshevik versions of societal development.

Arabic Literature of Travelogue in Nigeria: A Case Study of Ishaq Ayyub Baba-Oye’s Poems

The art of travelogue is one of the Arabic literary trends in Nigeria, as scholars admired it since the twentieth century by writing poetry or prose, due to its aim at imparting the knowledge of geographical descriptions, historic facts and societal development in the readers and documenting the scholars’ experiences from various travels which could be for the acquisition of ascetic, cultural, diplomatic and socio-economic values, The main objectives of the study were to determine the extent at which the selected literary works of Is-haq Ayyub Baba-Oye, as a case study, met the requirements of the art of travelogue with contents analysis. The selected poet, is considered as one of the admirers of the art of travelogue, as proven by his two literary works on travels to Ngala-Maiduguri of Nigeria and Cairo of Egypt Republic. The methodology adopted is both historical and descriptive. It is historical by presenting the background of the art of travelogue in the Nigerian Arabic literature, then identification of scholars involved, followed by the biography of the poet. It is descriptive, as contents of selected works were unveiled while discourse analysis of the artistic and critical features was handled with formative and thematic measures. It was noticed that the author did the justice to the genre to his best capability, therefore, the work is recommended for readers for the benefits of the contents and embellishments.

Social narcissism – how society pushes us to overestimate our capacities, leaving many behind

The following introduces the concept of overlife, not claiming that it is an entirely new idea, however suggesting that it is a suitable term to bring different problems of contemporary societal development together. Broadly speaking, overload is defined as simultaneously condensing patterns of life and the actual living, i.e. intensifying living by establishing patterns of multitasking; however, doing so occurs for the price of a shallowed concept of life by a differentiated system of standardization. Simplification of cognition and education, not least in the context of digitization, are important factors: The apparently increasing control, everybody experiences, goes hand-in-hand with increasing difficulties of understanding – and enjoying – the complexity with which we are confronted. Still, although this seems to be a secular process concerning humanity and humans in general, control and power remains in the hands of a few who, as individuals and corporations, design life and society. Paradoxically, the theoretically gained possibility to answer complex questions and develop long-term perspectives, turns, at least under capitalist conditions, into narcissistic idiosyncrasies, and wasting huge amounts of monies for the thrill of egos instead of strategically developing socio-economic strategies addressing major challenges as poverty, environmental threats, digitisation and new forms of stupidification