Guro Mask

Masked dancers wearing chimpanzee masks, hook sticks and voluminous full-body costumes have turned up at the Dankeran Village Dance Festival to provoke and "heat" audiences with wild jumps and vulgar jokes. The chimpanzee mask offered here is made of light balsa wood and dyed black. It shows the typical form of these "Kagle masks": a protruding, semicircular and flat forehead with a diagonal line at the edge and deep-set slit eyes below (here each has three holes for the previous metal frame), a broad nose between prominent cheekbones on either side, a large, open mouth with wide, pouting lips. Distinguishing features of this particular object are the three holes below the eyes, which were used for an early metal profile (now lost), the original white embossed band on the bridge of the nose, the red tongue with the open mouth, and the embossed band on the inside of the thick lips . There are also embossed decorations on the outside of the cheeks.

Guro masks are dancing masks, and their masquerade is well known in West African villages. They are used for entertainment and to represent social roles. Male dancers don masks and dance competitions are held between neighboring villages.

Dan, also known as Gio or Yakuba, are an ethnolinguistic group inhabiting the mountains of western central Côte d'Ivoire and adjacent areas of Liberia. Dan belongs to the southern branch of the Mandish subgroup of the Niger-Congo language family. They originated somewhere in the western or northwestern part of the modern state, perhaps in Malink (Mandingo). Dan is closely related to the southern Gere (also spelled Ngere or Guere).

Sculpture of the female face of Monoxyle with a sculpted figurine depicting a person or dignitary king. He dances with the help of a man when the mask Gyela (daughter of Gu and Zamble) appears The assistant raised his cloak. Polished color. crack. bruises. Among the Mande groups from the south, in central Côte d'Ivoire, on the banks of the Bandama, Organized into bloodlines, Gouro forms the western neighbor of Baoulé Who Several features are borrowed from their work. They have been in use since the 1950s The masks associated with the Zaouli dance refer to the genius of nature and come in two animal forms After the mask is a third personification, believed to be the wife of the Zamblé mask, Gu. Gu or Lu represents a young woman with beauty standards specific to Guro Especially facial scars and files. According to the authors Fisher and Humberg in "Art's Côte d'Ivoire", which was abandoned once the mask appeared to no longer be of public interest new copy