African Performers Do What Comes Naturally

The stage of a theater in Paris or Boston is not only thousands of miles, but cultural light-years, away from the rain forest of Zaire or the Niger desert. Sometimes the performers in Africa Oye! don’t make the transition completely.

At the beginning of the production’s current tour, which comes to UC San Diego on Sunday, a musician from the Pende tribe of Zaire came out on stage, sat down and began playing his instrument facing upstage, away from the audience, according to David Coffman, the New York-based general manager of the tour.

The musician soon realized his error and turned around. But it’s no wonder he got confused, to him music is an integral a part of the Pendes’ daily life and not normally confined to a theatrical or performance setting.

Africa Oye! is composed of a number of acts, with performers representing seven tribes from five countries. Each of the groups performs a combination of dance, music and song from their tribal traditions. The rave reviews collected on two previous world tours, which included many of the same performers, attest to the fact that Africa Oye! (Long Live Africa) also succeeds as sheer entertainment. However it is the cultural significance of these forms that makes Africa Oye! much more than just a exuberant stage show.

Although conceived by a Broadway producer, Mel Howard, the tour of Africa Oye! has built a reputation for authenticity. Howard recruited ethnomusicologist Michel Boudon to locate the finest performers, primarily from the French-speaking central and western regions of Africa.

Stage management is limited to getting the performers on and off stage and limiting the length of their performances for Western audiences, according to Coffman. At home, they might continue for as long as 15 hours at a time, with people joining in or the musicians stopping to eat and then resuming their play.

“There’s a hypnotic quality to the African rhythms,” says Coffman, who has been involved with Africa Oye! for four years. “Often it’s just a series of simple rhythms that have different accents. One guy goes dadat dadat dadat. Another goes bababum, bababum, bababum. You find yourself getting caught in it.”

“African dance always has an element of the sacred in it, that is why the dance is a mirror to the soul of Africans.” explains Komla Amoaku an ethnomusicologist who is program director for visual and performing arts at Cal State San Marcos. A native of Ghana, he comes from a family of traditional musicians.

Although Amoaku uses the word “dance,” he says African languages don’t have separate words for music, dance theater and visual art. “Music is dance and dance is music. We look at all of the art forms as inseparable.”

Take the Peul Acrobats of Guinea, who simultaneously play flutes and drums while performing back flips in their performances. Or the Pende, whose spectacular masks, called Manganji, do not hang on art gallery walls but are worn as part of the tribe’s ceremonies of initiation. In fact, for the Pende, music is so integral a part of daily life that the local court trials are sung like operatic recitatives.

“The dance is more than just something you do for exercise,” Amoaku says. “It is the embodiment of the world view of the societies the dances come from. It’s an integral part of a unified universe.”

The “Dance of the Panthers,” which will be performed by a group from the Ivory Coast, is part of a young man’s rites of passage among the Senoufo people, a tribe famous for its masks.

The Babunda, who come from central western Zaire, will perform sinuously danced prayers for fertility.

The arts of the Batwa Ekonda from northern Zaire reflect the historical relationship of the Batwa Pygmies and the Ekonda tribe, which conquered them 100 years years ago. Eventually there evolved a complex social structure in which each Batwa has an Ekonda “big brother.” The mixture also led to an artistic marriage between the Batwas’ musicianship and the Ekondas’ polyphony and expertise in celebrations.

The sacred nature of the performances even extends to the dressing rooms used on the tour, says Coffman. The different tribal groups in Africa Oye! must each prepare separately because the putting on of face and body paint, masks, etc. is considered part of the ceremonial activity.

Several of the performers, including Chetima Ganga and Kandia Kouyate are griots . The term translates loosely as “storyteller,” but a griot has a much richer, more significant role in a tribe.

“A griot is a living encyclopedia,” says Amoaku. “The griot is the repository of traditional values, of his people’s world view.”

Among the Kanouri tribe of Niger, for example, a griot such as Ganga historically accompanied the king on all journeys, even onto the battlefield. The griot would play the alghaita to strengthen the soldiers’ confidence (and to transmit coded messages).

A reed instrument that looks something like a small trumpet, the alghaita , is played by the musician using circular breathing, his cheeks always puffed out, says Coffman. Players like Ganga sometimes continue for 15 minutes without stopping.

Kandiya Kouyate, a griot from the Manding people of Mali, is the most westernized of the Africa Oye! performers. A popular artist in Europe, Kouyate comes on stage wearing high heels and modern jewelry. But, for all her Western appearance, Kouyate is a revered oral historian who can recite stories of Manding kings going back seven centuries.

Griots not only recount history, but also relate contemporary news and stories. Kouyate “may talk about what happened centuries ago or what happened on the bus last week,” Coffman says.

The magic of the griots’ storytelling seems to leap over language barriers. Nevertheless, Coffman says, an unusual moment occurred at a performance in New York City. Some of the extremely polyglot New York audience started laughing because they understood what Kouyate was saying.

Although the performers return home from the Africa Oye! tours with predictable armloads of electronics, tour manager Coffman says the exposure to Western life and entertainment has not contaminated their performances.

“Their dress off-stage has changed,” says Coffman, who recalls that on the first tour, it was necessary to buy shoes and clothing for the Batwa Ekonda. “But, on the stage, they do what they’ve done all their lives.”

* Africa Oye! can be seen at UCSD’s Mandeville Auditorium this Sunday in shows at 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. For ticket information, call 534-6467 or TicketMaster.