Janka Nabay, 54

Janka Nabay, 54, Dies; Carried an African Dance Music Worldwide
by Jon Pareles, The New York Times, April 3, 2018

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Idrissa Ouedraogo, 64

Idrissa Ouedraogo, Lauded African Filmmaker, Dies at 64
by Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, February 23, 2018

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Hugh Masekela, 78

Hugh Masekela, South African jazz trumpeter, dies
BBC News, January 23, 2018

Hugh Masekela, Trumpeter and Anti-Apartheid Activist, Dies at 78
by Giovanni Russonello, The New York Times, January 23, 2018


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What's Next? A solo for the great Germaine Acogny

Germaine Acogny is performing the New York premiere
of a work by Olivier Dubois of Ballet du Nord
at BAM Next Wave.

Sounds of a bassoon undulate like incense in the absolute dark of BAM Fisher's space. We're taking first, tentative steps into the mystery of Le Sacré du Printemps with choreographer Olivier Dubois of Ballet du Nord.

In this imagining of Stravinsky's rite, Mon élue noire (My Black Chosen One): Sacre #2, a 2014 solo for septuagenarian Germaine Acogny, Dubois first makes the audience wait in darkness through long stretches of music. We wait in the cloying aroma of tobacco from, as we later learn, a pipe gripped in the dancer's teeth. Intermittent flashes of light--a thin line vertical line--tease us. The music dials up uncertainty, tension, apprehension.

It's a while before we get a stable-enough look at Acogny and her setting--a platform in a black box that, over the course of the nearly 40-minute dance, confines her, sometimes elevating or partially obscuring her. She wears a black bra and slacks. One's immediate, disturbing thought: Dubois has turned her into a specimen for display.

Her close-shaved head emphasizes formidable features. She stomps the floor like a bull ready for battle. We continue to be stymied and tantalized by fugitive light and the afterimage that it leaves.

Talking to herself, laughing to herself, wrapping her head in black cloth and dragging it off, Acogny is a woman on the verge...of something. A woman to be admired at one moment and feared the next. One passage though, where she mimics the blare and clash of the music in voice and harsh movement, seems a weak offering, merely ordinary after the audacity of the work's initial staging. The regal and storied dancer looks merely petulant.

Were it not for the program's hair-raising quotes from writings by Aimé Césaire--one on the ravages of colonization, the other excoriating anyone who would stand apart, as a spectator, while the world burns--it might be tricky to figure out who Acogny might be, as dreamed up by Dubois, or read her actions said to be "drawn from the depths of her African soul."

In any event, any chance to see the influential Acogny perform here is a worthy occasion. Final performances are tonight and tomorrow, Saturday, at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

For more information on the 2017 BAM Next Wave festival, click here.

BAM Fisher
321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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Africa is contemporary: Tarpaga's night at Harlem Stage

Scene from Declassified Memory Fragment at Harlem Stage Gatehouse
(photos above and below: Marc Millman)

Director/choreographer Olivier Tarpaga (foreground)
performs in Declassified Memory Fragment

Only one night to see Baker & Tarpaga Dance Project at Harlem Stage Gatehouse? How is that acceptable?

If Olivier Tarpaga's Declassified Memory Fragment (2015) had a longer run, he and his all-male cast of notable dancers and musicians would be such an edifying, exhilarating treat for New York's contemporary dance fans--and everyone else. Tarpaga--whose company is based in both Burkino Faso and Philadephia--seems tired of being labeled "contemporary" as if dance made in and exported from Africa in recent years needed a special designation distinct from the folkloric, tribal work with which we, in the States, are much more familiar.

In a post-show Q&A with choreographer and filmmaker Gabri Christa, Tarpaga declared, "It's important to to know: Africa is contemporary." In other words, Get with it, New York! We're here! With Nora Chipaumire, Faustin Linyekula, Dorothée Munyaneza and the Senegalese Mother of It All, Germaine Acogny, gracing our stages and museums in recent weeks, we're getting a right schooling in this subject this season. As Christa noted, so much of this art is "based in African tradition but also free of it."

The hour-long Declassified Memory Fragment, presented in partnership between Harlem Stage and 651 Arts, has a real-world political context--intrigue and upheaval in Burkino Faso, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe--that Tarpaga began to relate during the Q&A. It's a knotty history, and I suspect I was not the only one finding it tricky to focus on and follow. But suffice to say, for now, the dance takes off from the idea that power grabs and secrecy destabilize both democracies and human relationships. Tarpaga's stagecraft does the better job of illustrating the latter--personal rifts and reconnections--through dazzling vocalization and prop work and, in particular, unusually intimate, symbolic duets. What two competitors sharing and tangling a single slim suit jacket can do and signify is amazing.

Mystery and laughable absurdity dance cheek to cheek in this work. A third dancing partner--beauty--is in the warm, twangy, bluesy music and the poetry of the work's visual graces. It's worth noting, too, that in its design and its masterful execution by dancers Ousséni Dabaré, Aziz Dermé, Jérôme Kaboré and Adonis Nébié, Declassified Memory Fragment broadens any notion of what it means to be masculine, to be African and masculine, and to dance as an African man. And it does so in a matter-of-fact way that we can't help but see, absorb and, if we will, admire.

Music: Olivier Tarpaga in collaboration with musicians Flatié Dembelé, Boubacar Djiga and Daouda Guindo

Declassified Memory Fragment has closed. For information on future events at Harlem Stage Gatehouse, click here.

Harlem Stage Gatehouse
150 Convent Avenue, Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Buchi Emecheta, 72

Buchi Emecheta, Nigerian Novelist, Dies at 72
by William Grimes, The New York Times, February 10, 2017

William Onyeabor, 70

William Onyeabor, Reclusive African Electro-Funk Pioneer, Dies at 70
by Jon Pareles, The New York Times, January 19, 2017

nora chipaumire delivers a MAN-ifesto at BAM Next Wave

nora chipaumire

in portrait of myself as my father

below: with Shamar Watt

(photos: Gennadi Novash)

What a scene at BAM Fisher's Fishman Space!  People excitedly grabbing each and every one of the general admission seats. Stragglers desperately searching for places to sit with companions. Harsh lights gleaming from the corners of a boxing ring. The crowd arranged along three sides of the ring and starting to fill the balconies. And as people enter, the evening's star--Zimbabwe-born dance artist nora chipaumire--giving each person gliding past her an appraising once-over, not always silently, although her imperial silence can and will burn anything to a crisp.

I watched chipaumire with amusement and trepidation, the latter brought on not only by the mystery of what might be going on inside her regal head but also by the look of her shoulders braced and armored in football pads, the way she thrust her Black body out beyond the ring's edge and right up into our faces, the amplified animalistic growls arising from some darkened corner of the ring. And, mostly, her restlessness as she examined each unknowing, distracted bypasser, the sense of her engines revving, revving, revving.

Lemme hear you say, Yeah, she says. (Someone bravely answers, Yeah.)

I've been waiting for you.

I'm ready. I'm ready.

Her moves are rhythmic, rolling, spongey, every well-oiled joint sure of itself, tilting forward, ever at the ready.

I been ready. In fact, I was born ready.

Come on,  Brooklyn. Let's do this!

Give me a green light. Now. Now.

The name of her extravagant trio--co-presented by BAM's Next Wave, 651 Arts and Théâtre de la Ville--is portrait of myself as my father. Except that the word "father" is struck out. Here, with thoughts of her father--estranged from his family since she was only five--chipaumire takes on masculinity, specifically Black African masculinity, and sets it down in the boxing ring of imagination and of daily life. Here, no matter what time it is, it is somehow always Round One for the Black man.

nora chipaumire
(photo: Julieta Cervantes)

One-part Muhammad Ali rumbling in the jungle. One-part James Brown rumbling at the Apollo. And quite a lot of Black men fighting for their very lives on the daily. This is chipaumire, our chin-thrusting, strutting champion, delivering her MAN-ifesto along with collaborating performers, Shamar Watt and Pape Ibrahima Ndiaye (aka Kaolack).

Pape Ibrahima Ndiaye (Kaolack) with chipaumire
(photo: Julieta Cervantes)

But I have not yet mentioned the visual element that, from first to last, most spoke to me--the elastic boxing ring ropes that tether chipaumire and Kaolack's bodies and which occasionally threaten to entangle all three players. You can see them as rough leashes restraining dangerous beasts or puppet strings controlling the range and articulation of their actions. They're worn by the dancers as a matter of course--like no biggie--but why? Like the ring itself, they define how far these characters can go but, within those limits, chipaumire and her mates do their most, infusing the space with energy, with aggression, with sexuality, all the while acknowledging the lingering distortions and damage wrought by colonialism and white dominance.

I think chipaumire hopes we will see those tethers as less restricting than we might first think them to be. She is invested in breaking open the way we see African men and Africa itself. And, in a time when Black male bodies, in popular awareness, are most associated with entertainment, incarceration or genocide, she wants to imagine how Black bodies might matter to Black bodies, how Black bodies might seize their own right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. She is seeking the life her father and his generation never had and striving to snap the tethers his generation accepted.

Pape Ibrahima Ndiaye (Kaolack) with umbrella
leads chipaumire and Watt.
(photo: Gennadi Novash)

Ladies and gentlemen, the question is: How do you become a Black man? A Black African man?

You slow down...you slow way down. Like you have the time, like you own time. In fact, you become time.

During the useful post-show Q&A, moderated by Simon Dove, one audience member admiringly referred to the show as "a dangerous work." I agree and admire, too. This production and its three performers are outstanding. Moreover, with this portrait, chipaumire has delivered her clearest and most commanding work to date.

With original music/soundscore by Philip White

portrait of myself as my father continues at BAM Fisher (Fishman Space) tonight and tomorrow with performances at 7:30. For information and tickets, click here.

BAM Fisher/Fishman Space
321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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Papa Wemba, 66

Papa Wemba, Known as the King of Congolese Rumba, Dies at 66
by The Associated Press, The New York Times, April 24, 2016

Malick Sidibé, 80

Malick Sidibé, Photographer Known for Social Reportage in Mali, Dies at 80
by William Grimes, The New York Times, April 15, 2016

Getatchew Mekurya, 81

Getatchew Mekurya, Ethiopian Jazz Saxophonist, Dies at 81
by Nate Chinen, The New York Times, April 11, 2016

South Africa's Mmakgosi Kgabi finds her light

Mmakgosi Kgabi, above and below,
in Shades of a Queen
(photos: Thomas Aurin)

For New York--a city that (thinks it) has seen it all and many times over--Johannesburg's Mmakgosi Kgabi is an startling original. Sad to say, her solo performance of Shades of a Queen--curated by Marýa Wethers for Queer New York International Arts Festival--ran only one evening. You really ought to catch this performance artist and, perhaps, some smart programmer will bring her back to New York.

Performed last night at Abrons Arts Center's Experimental Theater, Shades of a Queen imagines the complications of coming out queer while African. Or, at least, in Kgabi's uncommon mind, coming out queer when the name your Botswanan mother gave you implies a singular status. Mmakgosi translates to "The Mother of the Chief," and, for the purposes of this piece, Kgabi's dramatic persona rocks a pinched, high-pitched British accent with the Cockney tag innit lashed to the end of sentences like a subversive tic. Who is this creature? Well, she calls herself Her Majesty the Queen.

When we first meet Her Majesty, a mysterious figure dressed in black tights and a diaphanous black cape, she's singing softly to herself and drifting around the sparse furnishings of the darkened space. A white couch faces away from the audience, and occasionally Kgabi will take a moment to comfortably settle there, still singing. A matching armchair, at a short distance, is toppled onto its side and remains so. We have no idea why. An open notebook rests on a small white table with several e-devices lining its shelf. These will play an amusing role in the proceedings as Her Majesty carries on several improvised conversations with "callers"--some clear, some clueless, some creepy--each successive call detaining her from carrying out her stated intention to leave the apartment and go to the thee-AY-tah!

Her voice. A harsh, stringently pretentious one matched by precise, insistent, increasingly impatient physicality. A finely-trained Kgabi masters it all.

"We're going to the thee-AY-tah, darling!"

"You have to put your best foot forward."

"You have to relax, speak properly...."

"You bless them with the knowledge of who you are, darling!"

"Where's that spot? Where is my light?"

"You find your light, dear. You find your presence."

With the knowledge that Shades of a Queen is riffing on the idea of coming out as queer, we begin to hear Kgabi's dialogues and actions as internal exhortations, disturbances and, ultimately, diversions. The interfering shades are a Shadow Self not easily laid to rest. Her rumblings with the external world trigger rumbling within, upending the familiar comforts and confines of home. Luckily for us, they also bring about an entertaining evening and the introduction of a confident and fascinating artist. More, please!

Kgabi is a member of South Africa's multidisciplinary Stash the Suitcase Performance Arts Collective. Follow the collective's work here.

Queer New York International Arts Festival continues events at Abrons through September 26. For information and tickets for other QNYIAF events, click here.

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Doudou N’diaye Rose, 85

Doudou N’diaye Rose, Senegalese Drummer and ‘Human Treasure,’ Dies at 85
by Bruce Weber, The New York Times, August 23, 2015

Chenjerai Hove, 59

Chenjerai Hove, Chronicler of Zimbabwean Struggles, Dies at 59
by William Grimes, The New York Times, July 23, 2015

Despina Stamos: Dancing the immigrant experience

passTRESpass (2011)

directed by Jill Woodward

filmed in Athens, Greece 2009

20 minutes -- in English, French and Greek with English subtitles

Tens of thousands of immigrants and refugees make their way across the porous borders of Greece every year. Despina Stamos, a Greek American dancer, connects with a diverse group of immigrants in Athens and proposes a community dance performance. Their collaboration bridges communities from four continents and culminates in an experience that will touch their lives profoundly.

Support the work of Despina Stamos and the modern dance awareness society at their 2015 Benefit Gala (Monday, May 11, 6pm), including a "transcontinental live-stream dance performance" with Athen collaborators and silent auction.

Proceeds make possible a three-week movement workshop, performance and film project with refugees in Greece.

For complete information and tickets, click here.

Abdel R. Salaam to succeed Chuck Davis as head of DanceAfrica

Transition in Leadership for BAM’s DanceAfrica
by Felicia R. Lee, The New York Times, May 16, 2014

Remembering photojournalist Camille Lepage

Bearing Witness, Losing Her Life
by Nicholas Kulish, The New York Times, May 13, 2014

Congrats in order for novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wins US National Book Critics Circle award
by Allison Flood, The Guardian, March 14, 2014

Lupita Nyong'o discusses her 2009 documentary, "In Our Genes"

In this video, Lupita Nyong'o (2014 Academy Award winner, Best Supporting Actress, 12 Years A Slave) discusses In Our Genes, her 2009 documentary about the lives of albinos living in Kenya.

Click here for more information.

Chris Berry and Maija Garcia's "Legend of Yauna"

Chris Berry,
writer/composer, The Legend of Yauna
(photo by Jamie Soja)

Maija Garcia, 

director/choreographer, The Legend of Yauna 

(photo courtesy of the artist)

The Legend of Yauna, which ran for two nights this weekend at BAM Fisher, is a sprawling work of storytelling through theater, dance, music and visual art. Its collaborators--Grammy-winning world music artist Chris Berry and director/choreographer Maija Garcia, best known for her work with Bill T. Jones's FELA! on Broadway--aim to teach the kind of curiosity and unstoppable courage people need in order to heal their lives and communities. It's a noble mission that I wish I could fully support. Unfortunately, the work is undermined by uneven casting and overall quality as well as issues of cultural appropriation.

Produced by Berry's Banakuma organization, this work draws from the musician's attraction to an eclectic range of philosophies, symbols and ritual practices, primarily his experience of the ways of the Shona of Zimbabwe. A white American born in California, the musician believes that a vision and subsequent synchronicities led him to discover a profound spiritual connection to the mbira (thumb piano) and drums of southern Africa. Inspired by his exploration, he has devised an intricate metaphysical system related to the four elements of Air, Water, Fire and Earth. (Watch Berry's tutorial on Vimeo. See also World music artist Chris Berry goes digital, Quibian Salazar-Moreno, Boulder Weekly.)

Visualizing Chris Berry's Black Panther Queen (above)
and hero Yauna (below)
(artwork by Leif Wold)

Leif Wold's fantasy-style illustrations of Berry's mythic characters add visual gravitas and charm to Legend's production, but their intricate collaging of symbols from African, Hindu, Northwest indigenous and perhaps other traditions too strongly evokes a New Agey cherry-picking tendency. Everything--from traditional stories to ritual dance styles--gets tossed into Berry and Garcia's post-racial, colorblind blender. The appearance of Zap Mama herself--vocalist Marie Daulne portraying the Black Panther Queen dressed in Catwoman-style getup--is a missed opportunity. Daulne's much-heralded participation is what made me take a chance on Legend, but Daulne appears for one song (with poor sound quality) and a quick dispatch up a flight of stairs past the audience and out of sight.

Legend is a classic Hero's Journey, where the hero's disobedience to his wife ("Don't open the forbidden door!") leads to loss, disorientation, failure, tragedy and...well, you know. At two hours, including an intermission, it could stand judicious trimming, and elements of its staging--especially its frequent use of balcony scenes that are hard to see or properly hear--can be awkward and frustrating. But the live music often has warmth and, among the many cast members, Benjamin Sands (Yauna), Oscar Trujillo (Great White Eagle), Laurie M. Taylor (Sula and Gurthusula) and Naoko Arimura (Sah-i-Sah) bring distinction to their performances.