It’s hard to argue when you’re dancing — or singing or drumming, for that matter. You can express yourself, you can be in community with others, you can even be competitive or aggressive. But you can’t argue. Maybe if more people danced on Thanksgiving instead of falling into a turkey-induced coma, we’d all be better off.
I believe that was the message, more or less, of urban djalli (“historian”) Sekou Conde at Muntu Dance Theatre of Chicago’s one-night show Saturday at the North Shore Center for the Arts in Skokie. Conde gave a wide-ranging sermon to the audience as one of five pieces on the “As’e — The Power to Make Things Happen” program, which brought CNN into communion with traditional African wisdom, making the point that even though discourse is all well and good (not to mention addictive), the balance has shifted too far in that direction. It divides us, and nothing knits us back together.
The other pieces, blessedly, did that. One drum talk and three drum-and-dance works brought the most diverse audience I’ve seen for African arts into complete unity, all rising to cheer Muntu’s four drummers and 12 dancers at the end of a show that positively packed its hour and 45 minutes.
Yet it can be hard to grasp West African dance and drumming — Muntu’s focus — intellectually, which the needs of Western consumption invite audiences to do. These village forms have been modified and codified, even as the area’s colonial history makes a hash of ethnic and national divisions. Besides, dances of different origins with different names can look much the same to outsiders, and the drumming for them can sound the same.
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They are not the same. The movements and rhythms of each dance are well defined and carefully taught and performed. Consider the djembe alone: As Conde, an incredibly stirring drummer himself, explained, the instrument is capable of at least three notes — masters can produce many more — which can then be combined in different “songs” with different rhythms, especially in counterpoint with the dunun bass drum and higher-pitched kenkeni.
The Muntu dancers ripped through three works: “Initiates of Bagatae,” a Guinea-based sorsornet ritual, complete with masked stilt walker, devoted to the protection of children; “Doundoumba,” a dance of strength initiated by a man in a stiff-legged swagger but performed by men and women; and “Djalli Dong/Dongba,” a celebratory piece that brought audience members onstage in the biggest “big dance” (“dongba”) I’ve ever seen.
The commanding Amaniyea Payne, Muntu’s artistic director, organized this potentially disastrous campaign. She and her deputies cajoled perhaps 30 audience members of all colors and ages — from “babies to elders,” to quote Payne — into coming onstage, where dancer Koya Odum gave the women (and two very young girls) a quick dance lesson, and Amansu Eason instructed the guys. Then each group danced to the drums.
Muntu regularly invites audience members onstage, but generally only a few very well-prepared adult women answer the call. Most of these dancers were neophytes, and to watch them negotiate these unfamiliar moves was unbelievably entertaining, and very moving. When they were invited to express themselves one by one — a traditional structure in African dance, as individuals enter the center of the community circle — they became even more entertaining. The little girls came out of their shells, and the guys who were flubbing the taught moves proved absolutely terrific at doing their own thing.
Muntu is a company with a vast age range, from people in their 20s to their 60s. But everyone dances their hearts out in these forms that are in their bones, their intense physicality saying much more about the spirit than the body. Muntu’s improvised solos at the end, from a woman’s incredibly abandoned releases to a man’s surprisingly sinuous seduction, revealed the bravado and skills that have enabled this company to survive, and thrive, riding the pulse of the Muntu drums.
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Laura Molzahn is a freelance critic.
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