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Introduction
THIS ESSAY DRAWS ON THE FINDINGS of a pilot research project that I undertook in the Ghanzi District of Botswana concerning the Basarwa [San] musical-theatre traditions. Research activities for the pilot project included unstructured oral interviews of participants in dance groups, and observations of pre-school children's dance groups, youth dance groups, and adult dance theatres during the Kuru Dance Festival. The festival ran from 20 to 22 August 2010 at the cultural performance arena in Dqãe Qare, a game-farm ranch and campsite that operates on the Basarwa 'tribal' and customary land. Located in the western region of Botswana along the Kalahari Desert, the performance site at Dqãe Qare is in the small settlement of D'Kar, approximately 35 kilometers from the town of Ghanzi. The population in this area comprises the Basarwa ethnic and language groups of Naro, G/ui, and G//ana, the Bakgalagadi, and a small percentage of Tswana speakers and white expatriates. The festival performers are mainly Basarwa groups residing in the Ghanzi District, from D'Kar, Bere, the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, New Xade, and Kagcae, a few groups from the Ngamiland District near the town of Shakawe, and a few others from Namibia. The festival audience is made up of residents from these villages, local residents from other ethnic groups in the country, and a diversity of international tourists from other countries around the world. Although no exact figure is available to indicate audience numbers, people from various races, ethnicities, ages, and cultural backgrounds attend this two-day festival to partake in the presentations of San culture - music, song, dance ensembles, games, and theatrical enactments - in the Dqãe Qare theatre-in-the-round stage arena. The results obtained from the 2010 pilot study of the Kuru Music Festival elucidated the social functions of the music and dances; thereby elaborating what the social anthropologist Victor Turner terms communitas.1 The perspective of this article is that the Basarwa performance and musical-theatre traditions not only perform history, cultural memory, and identity but, most importantly, also reinforce therapeutic cultural landscapes.
The Kuru Dance Festival is an annual event organized by the Kuru Development Trust - a local San non-governmental organization that hosts the San music and dance festival, and facilitates economic self-reliance among the San. Popularly known as the...