sarma

I may be the only dance person in New York who had never seen Les Ballets Africains. Nobody had ever described the company to me, or I would have made the scene a lot sooner. It is not -as one might be forgiven for thinking- a ballet company working out of Guinea, but neither is it a cultural variety show of ethnic and folk dances. It's ... well, it's hard to describe; perhaps you could think of it as a terrific example of happy, popular theatre. Les Ballets Africains has certain things in common with Eastern forms of dance-drama, but is less tidy. Oh boy, is it less tidy. A packed stage is the general rule with everybody dancing and/or singing, speaking, making noises, playing instruments, and playing their parts to the hilt. Often your eye picks three girls out of the dazzling throng. They seem to be moving in a somewhat similar manner: by God, yes, it's a dance number.

Interesting to compare the company to the Moiseyev. With the Russians, the neat, cleanly punctuated line and circle dances lend themselves to stylized stage patterns. The choreography looks as if it were planned for Madison Square Garden -as if everything you needed to see could be seen from a block away. But the Africans have made tribal dancing an integral part of their story dances; the difference between dancers and singers or onlookers is looser. People fade in and out of a singing, arguing, drumming mob, catching your attention the way a brightly colored fish does when he swims to the front of the aquarium for a minute. The effect is both primitive and immensely subtle. The two artistic directors Hamidou Bangoura and Italo Zambo know their stuff: the comedy is really funny, the tragedy is really sad (or temporarily sad; nobody seems to want to be tragic for very long). The numbers are staged, often very theatrical, but they're not phony.

The stories are cheerful blends of history, legend, and current political feeling. One is about Soundiata Keita, "The Lion King" (c. 1200-1255), a cripple whose mother had exiled him and given the throne to her other son. When the brother abdicates out of fear of a powerful war lord who collects caravan routes, Soundiata with immense difficulty learns to walk, gathers an army, and saves his people. Another story concerns M'Balia Camara, a brave woman who organizes the women of the village of Tondon, and encourages the men to throw off the yoke of servitude (in this case, a cruel, if comical, native chief who is under the thumb of the ruling colonial power). In the middle of the fight, the bad guy kills the heroine, but the dance ends in triumphant festivities anyway.

Then, there's a sly little tale of the rivalry of a tall, elegant guitar player and a short, cocky flute player for a girl who, in the end, prefers to stay with her runty old protector because she likes to baby him. The action is accomplished by some adroit upstaging of each other and some beautifully explicit vocal noises -trilling, grunting, howling, wailing, laughing, etc.

The only non-story dance, "Night of the Cora", has a group of girls in colored turbans and silk robes (rectangles with holes for head and hands) who sing while bending and swaying like bright flowers around the strolling cora player. (The cora is a long-necked stringed instrument played standing with the bowl resting against the player's stomach.)

The most spectacular ballet concerns an initiation rite that is almost profaned by a hot-eyed young man and one of the girls. They are given a working-over in the forest by the Koma (the master of the ceremony) and his two henchmen, while the (supposedly) invisible gods dance in and out. Among these gods are Naadians, skipping on stilts the height of a man; Gnamou, a fellow with lots of horns on the back of his head and a snout like an alligator; a couple of little guys who look like walking heads of Simpson lettuce. In the dark forest, the guardians of morality fling the hapless couple around like rag dolls, but ultimately forgive them.

It's all vastly entertaining. Interesting how African dancers make you aware of the beauty of the body's joints. Rarely do they lift an arm, move a torso, as one unit. The elbows rise, the lower arms follow limply, the wrists snap back. Or, the body pulls back, and at the last moment the neck whips back and completes an arch. You notice knees too -lifting high to engineer that soft, flat slap of foot on floor. Sometimes, I think that primeval Africans must have been very impressed by wading birds.

The rhythmic relation of dancing to music is very subtle. So is the musical relation between the drums and the more melodic instruments like thumb pianos, pipes, and so on. Everything has "rhythm", but bodies and arms float and snap in delicate counter-rhythms to the slapping feet, the way those instruments weave around the drums (except that some of the African drums can play melodies too). Often quite long pauses and silences occur. The excellent dancer who portrays the Koma has a great way of making strong, terse movement statements and then freezing into fierce immobility.

What I think of as "African" movement is fleshed out, jazzed up with acrobatics, tumbling tricks, international favorites like barrel turns, funny crab walks, and individual virtuoso stunts. It all works because of the beautiful, unbelievable energy and strength and commitment of the performers. When the actor playing the crippled king takes his first steps, you believe. When M'Balia Camara grieves for her people, you believe. The way you believe, and don't believe, a puppet show or a fairy tale or a myth. Some of the performers are better singers or more powerful dancers than others, but everybody is tingling with life. I can't tell you any names. All are listed; none is singled out. You have to salute them as a company, to thank them as a company.