agbekor

Agbekor (agbekɔ) is a type of music and a style of dance by the West African peoples of Ewe and Fon. It is an ancient dance once known as Atamga, Ga meaning 'great', Atam meaning 'oath'. It is now performed by the people of Dzogadze, a farming community near Akatsi in the Southern part of the Volta Region of Ghana. It is characterized by multiple percussion instruments that engage in highly polyrhythmic interactions. Today, it is used for cultural presentations, but in the past, it was an actual war dance, and the oath in question was an oath taken by the ancestors before going into battle. The lead drummer 'calls' the dancers to perform a specific movement, preceded and followed by "the call to turn." There is a slow section and a fast section, with 'interlude songs' or "hatsiatsia" songs" sometimes performed in between.¶

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Agbekor”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.¶

agbekor is music genre and type of dance, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition.¹¶

The source record links this tradition to 3 external registers, which can be verified through the citation.¹¶