African Dance: Sand, Drum and Shostakovich
A documentary by Ken Glazebrook and Alla Kovgan, 2002.
Kinodance. VHS videocassette (NTSC only). 70 min.
Available from Documentary Educational Resources, 101 Morse Street, Watertown, MA02472, USA; 1-800-569-6621 or +1-617-926-0491; docued@der.org. US$49.95 for private home viewing, plus shipping.
For 10% DSCH Journal subscriber discount, contact Recordings Editor: .

This documentary presents eight modern African dance companies that participated in the 1999 Montreal Festival International de Nouvelle Danse. But for its intriguing title, it would have escaped the attention of the DSCH Journal. Indeed, given that any Shostakovich content is restricted to the eighth segment of the film, director Ken Glazebrook was asked why the composer's name features so prominently in the title.

"Sand and drum are obvious but Shostakovich adds an element of mystery maybe, the meaning of which only becomes apparent at the end. Some people have asked what Shostakovich has to do with it and I've said they will find out when they watch it."

Before the Shostakovich connection is revealed in the final dance, the viewer is treated to excerpts of seven widely divergent numbers that depart radically from traditional African dance. While one could argue that divorcing African dance from its social context and presenting it onstage is inauthentic, this criticism does not apply to the work of these avant-garde companies. As described in the accompanying interviews, their productions explore decidedly contemporary themes, such as feminism, the relationship between tradition and modernity, and alienation of the individual. The companies hail from Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Mali, Cape Verde, Congo, South Africa and Senegal, but they are permeable to global culture, and several of their dancers have trained and worked in Europe or North America. Nevertheless, their kinetic range and fluidity remain unmistakably African.

Shostakovich is not the only European to contribute to the dance production Le Coq Est Mort (The Cockerel is Dead). The dance is performed by Jant-Bi, a company that emerged from the International Centre for Traditional and Contemporary African Dances in Senegal. Jant-Bi's Senegalese artistic director, Germaine Acogny, founded the Centre to protect the roots of African dance while providing a place for choreographic training and exchanges between Africa, its Diaspora and the wider world. Acogny invited German choreographer Susanne Linke to create a piece for Jant-Bi, and with the collaboration of Israeli choreographer and dancer Avi Kaiser, Le Coq Est Mort is the result.

Without the interpolated interviews, it would be impossible to interpret the nine and a half minutes excerpted from Le Coq Est Mort, a 70-minute-long production. According to Kaiser, the piece echoes the influence of nature on everyday life in Africa, recreating the heat and dust of Senegal with bright lights and sand. Linke adds that the cock in the title of this piece signifies both masculine energy and the Gallic cock of France. Its death symbolises Africa's shaking off of colonialism.

Kaiser explains that music, particularly percussion, is part of daily activity in Africa, and as people who work in Europe, he and Linke thought that classical music could play a role in this piece, not for any intellectual meaning, but as sound to mate with the percussion.

"Maybe it sounds a little bit naïve, but we heard music of Shostakovich - a string quartet - and it fitted totally like Shostakovich somehow went quite naturally in the sand. And for the African people it was wonderful; they heard this music, they had no problem."

And indeed, Shostakovich does not seem at all out of place here. In the first excerpt, eight men in dark Western business suits swagger across a stage covered in sand, accompanied by raucous metallic percussion. One dancer leaves to return with a tray of wine glasses; his entry is heralded by the first 19 bars of the Allegretto of Shostakovich's Eighth String Quartet. A pregnant silence ensues, during which the men wordlessly toast each other, then the audience (evoking a wave of chuckles). In the next episode, the former waiter enacts a robotic dance in which he gleefully stacks suitcases, obviously laden with money. His jerky motions are mated to a frenetic soundtrack by ambient instrumental composer Etienne Schwarcz. After this, we see all eight men, now topless, alternately writhing in the sand and jumping, kicking up dust, to the bone-dry, dissonant opening strains of the Recitative of Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 11. The menacing Allegro molto of String Quartet No. 8 crashes in as the men continue to dance violently. Percussion and human cries interject as the music plays. Shostakovich does not appear in the final scene, in which the dancers, now devolved into apes (apparently to imply that the macho businessman is not far removed from chest-beating simians), are cut down by machine gun fire.

Without question, this is one of the most unusual uses to which Shostakovich's work has ever been adapted. Its appearance in the documentary is probably too brief to warrant acquiring the film if you do not also have a strong interest in modern dance or African culture. If you do, however, the documentary as a whole should be appealing, especially since the cinematography is of high quality.

W. Mark Roberts
Top

DSCH No. 21.
Copyright © 2004 DSCH Journal.
All Rights Reserved.