Alkayida

Alkayida (also spelt Akan: Alkaida) is an Ghanaian dance which invokes the name of an infamous terrorist organization (Al-Qaeda) emphasis on side to side moves, incorporating upper and body gestures, and encouraging group routines as well as individual competition. Alkayida dance is intensively relaxed, intensively free-form, intensively involves footwork, and incorporates vast arrays of hip-life dance moves. It involves the swaying of the body along with hand and shoulder movements in a certain pattern.

Choreography

The Al Qaeda dance, also spelled Alkayida, began as a slower dance with moves that seemed to be replicating the extremist group and more recently, the dance and rhythms have picked up pace and delivered colourful choreography and the “Alkayida”—often misspelled “Al Qaeda”—not only vies in unseating the azonto, but it inadvertently embeds the Ghanaian hip-life culture levity into the name of the terrorist group Al-Qaeda.

Orchestration

Asamoah Gyan of the Ghanaian national football team has spearheaded the "Alkayida" dance and the Alkayida dance craze has been associated with hip-life music icon, Guru, after Guru popularized the term in his hit song "Alkayida – boys abr3", to wit, boys are fed up. "Br3" in the Akan language means "tired". In Guru’s song titled Alkayida, the response to the word Alkayida is "boys abr3" and this catch phrase "boys abr3" has gradually crawled its way into the vocabulary of the Akan youth with everybody screaming boys are hustling everywhere.

Asamoah Gyan and the Ghanaian national football team squad are scheduled to showcase the "Alkayida" dance on the global stage at the 2014 World Cup.

External links

• Can you dance the ‘Al Qaeda’