Amapiano’s meteoric rise as a dance and music genre is fascinating. Lately we have seen a lot of documenting of the Amapiano movement. While many only focus on the music, a few like the BBC documentary “This is Amapiano” acknowledges that the popularity of Amapiano dance contributed to the rise of the music. Today, more than ever dance is the fuel that drives music popularity, and it is important that dance, and the dance creatives and influencers popularizing the music is recognized and acknowledged as part of the music eco-system. Without dance and dancers, would any of the popular African music genres be as popular as they are ?
Specific to Amapiano it is precisely the dance and the many challenges created for each song that helped to propel the music genre’s popularity. While dance has always been used to propel African music, Amapiano came to fame not by single dance moves per se, but by the popularity of short dance combinations created to the song.
The popularity of Amapiano means we will see more documentaries covering the genre. We hope that these documentaries recognize dance, and the dance artists creating the dances and the challenges as part of the music eco- system.
We compiled several reference covering the the rise of Amapiano:
The BBCafrica documentary “This is Amapiano” is the best we have seen to date on Amapiano music and dance.
Afropop worldwide podcast “Amapiano To The World” dives into the rise of sound. It also gives acknowledgement to Amapiano dance.
Our very own piece from 2020 when the genre was catching fire on our screens. We connected with local South African dancer and choreographer Percy Letuka to get a better understanding of how the dance came to be.
As more documenting of the music and dance is done. We will update this page with new references.