A Dance With Diversity

Man, those girls could moo-ooh-ove! They were shaking and jumping, prancing and strutting, just dancing. And with so much attitude nobody could tell them they didn’t have soul. Hands on hips, chins in the air, bare feet bouncing to African rhythms.

“Push, push, push,” said Omowale Awe, leading lines of the sweaty, panting students in her African dance class at the Lula Washington Dance Theatre one Wednesday night. Wearing a matching African printed lappa (wrap skirt), blouse and head wrap, she watched the women in sweatpants and T-shirts dance so beautifully it surprised her.

Who said white girls have no rhythm? In Awe’s African dance class--which is mixed with whites, blacks, Latinos and Asians from 8 years old to 62--held in the Mid-Wilshire district, they sure do.

In fact, finding people of various ethnicities is common in African dance classes throughout Los Angeles nowadays. The dance, which used to belong to an exclusive club of African teachers and African American students who treated it as a way of life rather than a recreational activity, is now open to anyone who can pay the $10 class fee and isn’t afraid to let go of inhibitions.

And they can’t be scared of the beat. Tiki tiki, boom, boom. Tiki tiki, boom, boom. Francis Awe pounded his dundun drum (boom boom) with a bent metal rod so hard (boom boom) you would think he was trying to (boom boom) break the darn thing. But his hard-hitting beats only made the other drummers tap their Nigerian talking drums faster and faster. And it led the dancers to protrude and retract their chests harder and harder. Hit it, man, hit it. Boom boom.

“They make you sweat,” said Nobuko Miyamoto, a 62-year-old Japanese American, after completing the 90-minute workout. But African dance is not simply a form of exercise, she said: “I just think the connection to the earth and spirit, it brings all different types of people together.”

The diversity of students in the class led by Omowale Awe, an African American, and Francis Awe, a Nigerian, shocked Patricia Hernandez, a Mexican American. She received a flier for the class at a drum festival a few years ago but was apprehensive about attending. “I didn’t know how to dress. But I just saw a mix of people,” she said. “That’s one thing I didn’t expect.”

The drums sometimes move unsuspecting people to dance, like Rebecca Blake, who removed the blazer from her business suit and started following the African movements while waiting for her daughter to finish class at Lula Washington’s. And one woman who wandered into the studio from the street and started dancing wildly for a few minutes, obviously moved by the pulsating drums, then walked out.

Traditionally, Africans use dance to commemorate different aspects of life, such as puberty or a good harvest. A dance and drum rhythm called Lamban (LAAM-ba) is used in several West African countries including Guinea, Mali and Senegal to celebrate births, marriages or deaths. The fast-paced, high-kicking dance is also used to honor griots, or oral historians.

“All the dances tell a story,” said Dadisi Sanyika, an African American who teaches an African dance class based around the djembe drum at the Homeland Cultural Center in Long Beach. Through dance, he said, “You actually learn about the social life and the values of traditional African people.”

That’s why he began teaching: “To reconnect African [American] people with their traditional culture,” he said.

African dance has existed in Los Angeles for at least 40 years. Iya Nifa Komode, a dancer and teacher from Los Angeles, said that after the Watts riots in 1965, more people became interested in African culture as talk of black pride and black power were all the rave.

Her godfather, Baba Jomo Kenyatta, began teaching children in housing projects what he learned from recent African immigrants about the history of the African movements, which many already secretly knew.

“There was a lot of shame connected with doing those dances,” Komode said. “It was considered low class.”

Because of this newfound pride, Komode said, African Americans not only did the dances publicly but wore African clothes and hairstyles, learned African languages and adopted African religions.

African dance gained popularity in Los Angeles in 1973 when a group of dancers, including Ibrahim “Papa” Camara, from Les Ballets Africains, the premier dance troupe of Guinea, came to town.

Nzingha Camara, a dancer and teacher at the Dance Collective in Leimert Park, remembers seeing the dance for the first time at an old Los Angeles bowling alley. “My mouth just fell open and I was mesmerized,” she said. “Something inside of me said, ‘This is it. You’re home.’”

Camara said the spirituality, freedom and contrasting discipline in the movements attracted her to African dance. And her former husband, Ibrahim Camara, encouraged her to teach.

When she looks around at the people taking her classes now, she is sometimes amazed. “It’s a real jambalaya,” she said.Learning how to sing in African languages, like Wolof, is also part of African dance. Each dance corresponds with a song, which is sung by teacher and students in call-and-response form before dancing begins.

Masha Vasilkovsky, who moved from Russia to Los Angeles in 1990, said African dance with its bouncing and kicking is similar to Russian dance. And recently, she said, she started taking classes at the Dance Collective religiously. “This is like a totally spiritual thing to me,” Vasilkovsky said. “There’s God talking through this music.”

At the end of most classes, the dancers form a circle and--if the spirit moves them--they can enter to perform a solo. After this, the dancers join hands and the teacher leads them in prayer.

“When I started coming, I felt very afraid,” said Natalia Riesgo from Spain. “But everybody respects me.” Now she takes Sanyika’s class every week.

African dance is also taught at several Los Angeles colleges including UCLA, Santa Monica College and Pasadena City College. While many say that African dance and its culture should be shared, a few believe that mainstreaming is leading to a diluted dance and a forgotten culture.

“A lot of people that are teaching just the steps don’t have any spirituality,” Komode said. “It accommodates a lot of people but I think it bastardizes [African dance].”

Ya-Yah Quarles teaches African drumming at the Homeland Center and said it’s better to teach everyone who wants to learn the right way, rather than having them pick it up the wrong way.

“Originally, my intention was to get this to [black] people. To me we’re the ones that need this the most,” Quarles said. “But, there’s something in it for everybody.”

Sanyika said learning about different cultures is definitely a good thing. “It helps eliminate hate. It helps humanize people,” he said.

Rosalie Marley from Pasadena may have trouble keeping up in some African dance classes, but she said her white skin never makes her feel out of place. “We all come from Africa, some more recently than others,” she said at Lula Washington’s. “So don’t get caught up in appearances.”