In the past decade, a growing discourse has developed among choreographers, dance artists, and their collaborators, who are eager to articulate their processes, practices, and working methods through different types of writing and publication. Artists’ books, objects, and online platforms—from Thomas Lehmen's Schreibstück (2002) and FUNKTIONEN tool box (2004), to BADco's Whatever Dance Toolbox (2011) in collaboration with Daniel Turing, and the Forsythe Company's project Motionbank (2010–2013)—have contributed to what we may describe today as the “publishing of choreographic ideas,” as proposed by Scott deLahunta (2015). Jeroen Peeters, editor of Are We Here Yet? (2010), which focuses on the work of Meg Stuart, emphasizes the discourse intrinsic to dance making, while Mårten Spångberg invites artists to “write their own history,” with projects such as The Swedish Dance History (2009–today), to give but one example. Alongside these developments, practice-as-research, which involves dance making and writing, is becoming more established within university settings; and presentations of/on artistic research are now common in conferences, symposia, and other sites of knowledge exchange. We could argue then that the development of an artist's theory of knowledge, which scholars such as Susan Melrose (2007) have been encouraging since the early 2000s, is now well under way both within and without the academy.

The Irigwe, numbering around 17,000, are the third largest of several dozen so-called “plateau pagan” tribes on the Jos Plateau in Benue-Plateau State, Nigeria. Situated on the western edge of the Plateau around 20 miles west of the towns of Jos and Bukuru, the Irigwe have their own language and social traditions which clearly distinguish them from the other plateau tribes. They are currently reknowned all over the Plateau, indeed all over Nigeria, as skilled dancers. The focus of this paper will be to describe and analyze briefly the importance of Irigwe dance groups as emissary delegations, traditionally between various Irigwe sub-groups, and nowdays also between Irigwe as a whole and the rest of Nigeria. The maintenance of boundaries between socio-cultural groupings which regularly interact often involves agents of one sort of another who serve (on a de facto if not on an explicit basis) as bridges between the groupings. Dance group members in effect form such bridging agents in Irigwe.

Irigwe is a segmentary society lacking any traditional political chieftaincy. Twenty-five semi-autonomous agnatically based tribal “sections” are bound together on the one hand by each section's having exclusive responsibility for performing one or another ritual felt to be necessary for the tribe, and on the other hand by cross-cuting affinal and cognatic bonds mediated by both primary and “secondary” intersection marriages (Sangree 1972). The Irigwe divide their 25 sections into two geographically discrete clusters: Rigwe, the “parent” division, south of the swiftly flowing Ngell River with 10 sections, and Nyango, the “child” division, north of the river, with 15 sections.

In the West, the categories of music and dance are generally thought of as related, but distinct performing arts. Those of us who devote our time to studying and performing music often forget that no sound is produced without physical movement and that in most (if not all) cases performers have learned to move in certain ways in order to produce a desired pattern of sounds. Yet when we attend a piano recital we may very well enjoy the performance without actually seeing the pianist's fingers in motion on the keyboard. The movements of western “classical” musicians are, for the most part, aimed at producing sounds, and it is these sounds that the audience is expected to apprehend and appreciate aesthetically. In Okinawan “classical” music (koten ongaku), however, the “musical aesthetic” relies on a combination of formalized patterns of movement and sound, particularly in the playing of the two drums, collectively called tēku. The movements of the Okinawan drummer are thus more than a means to correct sound production they have aesthetic significance in their own right. Some of these movements, in fact, produce no sound at all. Others, though highly contrastive visually, may produce sounds which are acoustically the same.

Interplay of the visual and the aural is found in performance traditions around the globe. In East Asia alone there are numerous genres in which dancers sound drums – Japanese and Okinawan Ancestor Festival dances (bon-odori in Japan, eisā in Okinawa), the Korean “monk's drum” dances (puk-chum) and hourglass drum dances (sol-changgo), to name a few. In these dances, however, the “drummer” is more readily identifiable as a “dancer.” He or she moves through space; the striking of the drum is but one of the activities which the audience beholds and may not be the primary one. Usually these dances are accompanied by music performed by “non-dancing” musicians, whose ensemble may include drums other than those played by the dancing drummer.

Many creative people have produced films using dance as the main or secondary subject matter. The past decade has brought such major studio productions as The Turning Point (Ross, 1977), Nijinsky (Ross, 1980), Saturday Night Fever (Badham, 1977), Flash Dance (Lyne, 1983), Staying Alive (Stallone, 1983), Breakin' I & II (Silberg 1984), and Dirty Dancing (Ardolino, 1987), and independent films like In a Rehearsal Room (Hahn, 1975), Dune Dance (Brown, 1981), and Space City (Brentano and Horn, 1980), as well as much of the rock-video genre. The directors and/or choreographers of these films have produced dances for the camera that often could not, or at least did not, exist except on the television or movie screen. Angles chosen to frame shots and the rhythm of editing used to determine pace were selected for the cinematic value they produced. They expressed either the creative impulses of the filmmaker, those of the choreographer interpreted by the filmmaker through an active collaboration, or (only rarely) those of the choreographer as filmmaker. In these cases the techniques unique to film and video have been used to create dance events for the screen.

But what of dance works that have been choreographed to be seen on the proscenium stage? It is, perhaps, even more challenging, if not as apparently creative, to try to preserve on film or tape the composition and pattern and inherent rhythm of such choreography; that is, to bring a faithful translation of the choreographer's vision to the audience in front of the screen. Dance film that strives to provide the same aesthetic result as that of the staged choreography is a demanding art form in its own right; it draws upon all our understanding of the principles of documentary film and of visual perception. What makes this such a difficult task? Why is it so hard to maintain the energy, the excitement, and the aesthetic values of the performance when presenting the content of the prescribed space and the specific time of the real world, on the screen? The reason may be that we do not yet fully understand the interactions that occur between that objectively limited space of the world and the subjectively defined space produced by the camera.