Coffin Dance (Ghanaian Dancing Pallbearers)

experimentNo. 0077categoryFilm & mediarecordingpendingdataCC BY 4.0

The fly is the front-right of six fly pallbearers who dance a closed coffin through a roadside funeral in the manner of Ghana's dancing pallbearers: shoulder bounce, step and sway, a full coffin turn, an overhead lift, the dip and a final pose.

What the fly saw

Frames rendered from the fly’s eye camera at four points in the timeline, each with the 32-column retinal input the connectome model receives at that moment.

Timeline

9 steps, with their times in the experiment

1. 0:00
   Funeral morning by the road

   Mourners in black and in red-and-black cloth gather beneath the canopies of a roadside funeral; in Ghana a funeral celebrates a life. With the meme intro on, a passer-by first slips on a banana peel and lands, unhurt, in a vendor’s heap of cushions.

2. 0:12
   The pallbearers dance in

   Six pallbearers in black suits, white gloves, caps and dark glasses carry the closed coffin on their shoulders down the road, stepping in time.

3. 0:26
   Shoulder bounce

   In place, the bearers bend and rise on every beat, the coffin bouncing on their shoulders while their free forelegs swing together.

4. 0:42
   Step and sway

   The six step side to side in unison; the coffin rocks gently as they sway.

5. 0:58
   The coffin turn

   Keeping the coffin level on their shoulders, the bearers walk it through a full circle around its centre.

6. 1:12
   Overhead lift

   All six raise the coffin above their heads on outstretched forelegs, hold it, and bring it back to their shoulders.

7. 1:24
   The dip

   The bearers sink low together, the coffin dropping with them, and rise again on the beat.

8. 1:36
   Stop and pose

   A sudden stop: the six freeze, turn their heads toward the mourners and hold a pose before moving again.

9. 1:46
   On to the burial ground

   The pallbearers dance the coffin on down the road; mourners wave white handkerchiefs and follow.

Setup

• Nine stages over 120 s: funeral morning by the road, the pallbearers dance in, shoulder bounce, step and sway, the coffin turn, overhead lift, the dip, stop and pose, and on to the burial ground.
• The six pallbearers wear black suits, white gloves, caps and dark glasses and carry a glossy wine-red coffin with gold trim and a kente-pattern sash; their inner forelegs grip its underside by inverse kinematics.
• Up to 72 instanced mourners in black and red-and-black cloth sit under striped canopies or line a roadside modeled on a coastal Greater Accra town, not a survey of Prampram; a mourner with a white handkerchief and a master of ceremonies are further flies.
• In Ghana a funeral is a large public occasion that honours and celebrates a life, and dancing pallbearers are one option a family may choose; Benjamin Aidoo's Nana Otafrija Pallbearing and Waiting Service of Prampram, founded in 2003, became the worldwide "coffin dance" meme in 2020.
• Controls: routine (the full sequence, or one routine repeated in stages 3–8), dance tempo 80–140 bpm (default 118), and an optional meme intro, off by default, in which a passer-by slips on a banana peel into a vendor's heap of cushions, unhurt. No music or audio is played.
• Cameras include Director / auto, Street / wide, Pallbearers / follow, Coffin / low angle, Mourners' view, Pallbearer / POV, Cushion stall and Above / formation.

Measurement

• Retinal-only input: the eye camera looks along the fly's own heading with no roll, so the retina receives the real optic flow of its pre-programmed bouncing and turning.
• Each live window renders ten 20 ms frames; measured readouts are HS + H2 (rotation), VS (vertical motion) and EPG (heading).
• All dancing, walking, lifting and mourner movement are pre-programmed functions of scene time and the saved controls; nothing is closed-loop.
• In a test, turning changed the retinal columns far more than a frozen pose (about 0.43 versus 0.006 mean change per 20 ms).

Limitations

• The readouts are model responses to the retinal image only, not a model of rhythm, grief or celebration; weights are fixed and nothing is learned.
• The routines, roadside and coffin are approximations, not a copy of any recorded funeral; real troupes' uniforms vary.
• The meme's soundtrack and footage are not used, and the coffin is never dropped.

Sources

• BBC News (2017), Ghana's dancing pallbearers bring funeral joy
• Dancing Pallbearers (Wikipedia)
• VICE, The True Story Behind Ghana's Viral Coffin Dancers
• Cooper Hewitt, Adinkra: Message and Medium (funeral cloth colors)