Where Western Dance Technique and African Wisdom Meet
In an ambitious project two years in the making, Mr. King
recently brought together 16 singers and dancers from one of the
world's last hunter-gatherer tribes in Africa with 11 of his angular
neo-Classical dancers from Lines Ballet in his first full-length
work, titled "People of the Forest." Mr. King, who danced with
Harkness Ballet and whose dances are in the repertories of companies
like Frankfurt Ballet and Dance Theater of Harlem, is noted for his
use of live and unusual music, but this is the first time he has
undertaken a project of such scale. The collaboration had a serendipitous beginning. Nancy Martino,
the dance curator of San Francisco Performances, saw Nzamba Lela, a
group of pygmy singers and dancers from the Ba'Aka clan in the
Central African Republic, perform at a festival in the Ivory Coast
in February 1999. "She thought of me when she saw them," Mr. King
said. She proposed that the two groups work together, and by April, he
was traveling under military escort along dirt roads in the Central
African Republic and canoeing down the Ubangi River, the largest
tributary of the Congo, to meet Nzamba Lela. While the countryside was placid, Mr. King found a depressing
jumble of Westernization, from McDonald's Mr. King had planned to return last year, but the war in the
neighboring Congo had spread north to the Ubangi and the forest
where the Ba'Aka live, making the trip impossible. But a meeting of
Nzamba Lela and Lines Ballet eventually took place in late September
at the Howard Gilman Foundation's 7,500-acre White Oak Plantation in
Florida, a former rice plantation that is now home to Mikhail
Baryshnikov's White Oak Project. When not on tour, Nzamba Lela, a group of men and women, many of
whom are related, spend part of the year in the village of Mougoumba
performing occasional wage labor and part of it in the Ituri
rainforest, where they hunt as well as practice song and dance
rituals that are believed to be more than 5,000 years old. For
"People of the Forest" they brought their mostly vocal music, with
its tales of forest life and rites of passage, ornamented by their
undulant, nearly stationary style of movement. "People of the Forest" begins with "Bokya," the story of pygmies
chasing animals into their hunting nets. At first, the stage is
empty and saturated in bright golden light, as though to suggest a
forest clearing. As the members of Nzamba Lela, dressed in raffia
skirts, appear, they cross to the front of the stage, gathering in a
corner. Slowly, their voices build into gentle yodeling and dreamy,
high-pitched melodies that form a web of irregular harmonies,
ornamented by rhythmic clapping. But rather than perform an African
dance about the hunt, three ballerinas from Lines cut across the
space. As the song continues, it seems as if the pygmies have called
forth the dancers. In the same instant the ballerinas appear to be
dreaming of the pygmies and their ancient melodies. Mr. King, a disciple of the yogi Paramahansa Yogananda, finds the
crux of the confrontation between Africa and the West in this
mirrorlike inversion of realities — one that reaches back beyond
recorded history, the other neo-Classical; one communal and natural,
the other individualistic and performance- based. "It is an encounter of opposites," he said. "Duality is
everything, and the attempt to fuse duality is at the heart of human
activity." In contrast, the choreographer Ron Brown, director of the
Brooklyn-based company Evidence, who lived in the Ivory Coast in the
mid-90's, strives for a synthesis in which patterns of African
movement are fused with modern dance forms. He said he was shocked
by the corruption in political life there, but at the same time
found "a culture of incredible openness that could accept me as a
long-lost family member." In the modest home where he stayed, "we
all ate out of one bowl," he said, and despite the meager
circumstances, "there was never any sense of ĀI'm going to get mine
and you're in the way.' " HIS dance "Grace" begins with a solitary figure in a church who
performs a modern dance solo full of searching and longing, followed
by a sudden explosion of dancers in red joyously crossing the stage
in waves that evoke a West African cleansing ritual. "In Africa," Mr. Brown said, "ritual is the link between
generations as well as epochs." He said that such rituals were
destroyed for American blacks through slavery and oppression, and as
a result he tries to use his dance to create new forms of ritual
within the theatrical limits of the West. The choreographer Ralph Lemon takes a more postmodern approach to
his melding of African and Western dance. In 1996, he disbanded his
company and made a soul-searching journey to Africa, where it
became, as he writes in his memoir, "the source of my finding a new
relationship to the stage." Unlike his colleagues, Mr. Lemon sees Africa and the West not as
opposites but as aspects of vast migrations and personal journeys
like his own. In "Tree," the second part of a three-part work called
"Geography," a dancer from Ghana transplanted to the United States
performs the same movements as an American-born dancer. The steps
are identical but the impulses they reflect are different. In Mr.
Lemon's view, difference is not only cultural but individual as
well. Mr. King is more concerned with bridging cultures. At a
performance of "People of the Forest" last month at the Yerba Buena
Theater in San Francisco, part of a just-ended national tour, Nzamba
Lela sang and beat their hollowed-out log drums, while the Lines
dancers performed their jagged ballet as if in another world. Then
in a segment called "Boyouwa," a lament about death, the separation
between Ba'Aka and Western realties vanished, as if the ballet
dancers and the hunter-gatherers had finally found their meeting
place. Ann Murphy is a dance critic in Berkeley,
Calif.
LONZO
KING is the latest among a small but growing number of dance makers
for whom the stage is a meeting place between African and Western
culture. In their work, performance styles mingle and sometimes fuse
to create subtly altered forms of ballet and modern dance.
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