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Robert Farris Thompson - On Challenging gravity
Identifier
003016
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Robert Farris Thompson – African Art in Motion
From African Dance – edited by Kariamu Weish Asante
If spirits challenge gravity by moving on stilts twelve feet in the air to dance rhythms in the forest villages of Liberia; if athletes in Nigeria can carry nearly a hundred pounds of carved wood and shoulder this burden for a quarter of an hour while dancing before their king; if Dahomean initiates into a society honouring the collective ancestral dead can spin and spin and spin and spin and spin and spin … until the very concept of human dizziness begins to lose its force – then anything is possible