African dance: Black History Month in Dance, 2021
98 in this Black History Month in Dance series. One of the happiest projects I undertook while at the “New York Times” was an essay on the diversity of African dance, in particular as seen in New York. I wanted to research and write it because I had been annoyed recently to read another New York critic’s clichéd claim that “African dance” was characterised by its lively use of the pelvis, while assuring us that “African dance” was one of the glories of our culture. When I had mentioned this to Judith Jamison, then artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, she had made me laugh by saying she certainly didn’t know what constituted “African dance”: “Africa is a Con-Ti-Nent!”
So I spent days and weeks speaking to a wide range of enthusiastic, funny, knowledgeable, and communicative African American dance people: in particular, Mouminatou Camara (formerly a dancer with Les Ballets Africains, now a New York dance teacher, especially of Guinean dances); Chuck Davis (director of the Dance Africa festival); Doris Green (the veteran scholar of African dance forms); Reggie Wilson (the New York choreographer); and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (artistic director of Urban Bush Women). (It’s fun to remember how palpably nervous a number of white people at the “New York Times” were on my behalf. Well, y’all know how much more racially insensitive we colonialist Britons are than those more enlightened Americans.)
The conversations often stepped over into matters of racism past and present. Jawole Willa Jo Zollar told me of growing up in Kansas City, Missouri: “Our idea of how people moved in Africa came from Tarzan movies: I honestly grew up imagining that everyone there swung from the trees.” Doris Green remembered how, in 1959, the bare-breasted women of Les Ballets Africains (the national dance company of Guinea), after triumphing in Paris, had causes offence in America, where one reporter referred to them as “savages”.
Above all, these people began to teach me how much more diverse the dances of Africa are than I had even hoped or imagined. Reggie Wilson told me “When I first went to West Africa, my whole brain exploded. I’m still picking the pieces off the wall.” He had been particularly staggered by the contrast between the gestural Adowa of Anglophone Ghana (lively but contained, having begun as a dance for royal funerals, sometimes telling stories with the hands) and the ecstatic Sabar of Francophone Senegal (“It’s all limbs!” - and it’s been called the ancestor of street dance). What about the cliché that the pelvis plays a constant and central part in all African movement? Doris Green debunked that idea by pointing to YouTube clips of Adowa, in which the upper body leads, and Zaouli (from Ivory Coast), in which the feet pulsate as if on hot coals.
It’s wonderful to work on a piece where your starting-point is near-total ignorance: you meet new people, you learn new things on many levels, windows in your brain open in many new directions. Eleven years on, I wish I’d spent more time pursuing those new directions avenues. But here I am, still learning, and happily.
Thursday 18 February
