The most recent DanceAfrica opening night event, held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM)’s Howard Gilman Opera House, provided several show-stopping performances. The full evening, emceed by Artistic Director Abdel Salaam, combined honoring ancestors with dance, drama, music, and song.
The collaborative, communal affair featured the DanceAfrica Council of Elders (including all living DanceAfrica dancers), DanceAfrica Spirit Walkers dance group, Women of the Calabash, the Billie’s Youth Arts Academy Dance Ensemble, and Siren Protectors of the Rainforest. They came together to deliver performances woven together by the vision of Salaam.
The theme of this year’s event was “The Origin of Communities/A Calabash of Cultures,” as Salaam said in his opening remarks: “We will bring the rainforest to Brooklyn Academy of Music. The Baka People. They are the beginnings, the genesis of what we know to be humanity, and everybody has come from these people.”
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Salaam and members of his company, the DanceAfrica Spirit Walkers, have been to Cameroon’s rainforest. He reported that six companies auditioned in Cameroon to perform at DanceAfrica this year. What Salaam and his company saw and learned became the core of this year’s opening night event and the theme of the overall festival this year.
The calabash is symbolically a mystical vessel as well as one that provides nourishment and is a featured element of culture in multiple ways.
Tony Turner photo
Apart from the dancing, the way the other elements came to the fore and transformed the night into one bigger than mere entertainment, and made it into a spectacular celebration, can’t be overstated. The set design, lighting, and audio elements transported the audience to the rainforest. Costumes rooted in African culture—grass skirts of various kinds, earth- and jewel-toned costumes, vibrantly colored and patterned bubas and gelees, toghus, traditional West African jewelry, masks (including an arresting antelope mask)—provided an air of authenticity and magic all at the same time, and conveyed the majesty and power of Cameroonian history, people, and culture honored at the event.
The other element was the audience. Part of what makes DanceAfrica so special is the emphasis on, and reality of, community. Enthusiastic audience response marked the performance to the point where the audience became part of it. From beginning to end, there was clapping, hooting, hollering, shouts of encouragement, and even some “skeeweeing” in response to the action on stage.
The element of community ran through the production itself. After a moving, almost ethereal procession by the Council of Elders, with participants dressed all in white, some with candles, from the back of the orchestra to the front of the theater, Salaam offered opening comments and made way for the first group, the Billie’s Youth Arts Academy Dance Ensemble. They executed an electrifying ballet that melded seamlessly into the next group, DanceAfrica Spirit Walkers, who performed to Natema and MOB’s “Desert Soul,” a hypnotic Electro House track that evoked some of the mystical elements associated with the calabash and the mystery, significance, and majesty of the rainforest, finally rising to a smashing crescendo.
The piece evolved into a sprawling, complex affair, part outright dance, part choreopoem, illustrating the meeting of the diasporic culture with traditional Cameroonian history, myth, and culture.
More ancestors were honored in the midst of the performance. Over the music, there was narration—a litany of names of well-known African Americans who died in the last year, such as Ron Cephas Jones and Andre Braugher. The ancestors were repeatedly invoked, their presence and participation taken as a given.
Later, the Women of the Calabash performed, using harmonic song; their hands and feet; and traditional African gourd musical instruments such as the shekere, caxixi, hoshos, and mbira. The overall mood was sacred, spiritual even, but there was also a hint of the throughline to the soulful sounds of the diaspora.
Three guest drummers then took center stage and segued into the piece de la resistance: a performance by Spirit Protectors of the Rainforest with New Orleans-based stilt walker Niya Zulu as their special guest. Zulu who performed some gravity-defying, awesome displays. She, or rather her character, was also a playful, mischievous, and at times imperious yet charming counterpoint to the humble joyfulness of Siren.
This part of the performance also suggested the throughline from traditional African culture adopted across the diaspora and even hinted at the universality of culture, with parts of their performance echoing that of regions as far-flung as Polynesia.
The evening ended with all the groups coming together, entertaining together, followed by an intimate introduction to all of the various dance groups by Salaam, further solidifying the feeling of community and a wonderful calabash of cultures indeed.