This article could be seen as an indepth review of Asadata Dafora's stage work. With much time spent describing the plot of his opera and body movement with in the piece, the reader is able to vividly picture the performance. Needham writes describing a dancer that he is "poised on the balls of his feet, arms bent and raised to the sides, in line with his shoulders, which are so pulled up that his neck appears to be shortened. His fingers are rigidly extended at right angles to his wrists...his muscular torso is bent forward and twisted slightly to the left." This is a clear description of African dance movements like what we have been learning in class and reading about each week.
One thing that I found really interesting from the article was that when Dafora opera was shown, it was not appreciated as an opera. This was probably because of extreme ethnocentricity and because of a difference in artistic aesthetic between two cultures. The critics tried to explain their rebuttal saying the "solo arias (the high point of European opera) was modest compared to the focus on dance". Still, it should be regarded as an opera because that was the purpose for its creation. Dafora did not call it an European Opera, he called it an African Opera. Should critics have tried to compare it to western opera? At the same time this was happening, Kabuki theater in Japan was occurring. Kabuki is a Japanese theater form although it has more aspects of dance than theater. Still when it came to the United States it was still referred to as what its creator called it.
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