Come see, hear and FEEL Sankofa! African dance at its best

With color, rhythm and energy, the Sankofa African Dance and Drum Ensemble will be exploding onto the the stage at Hartwell Dance Theater in performances, beginning Thursday, April 24th through Saturday, April 25th at 7:30 pm. There is also a matinee performance on Sunday, April 27th at 2 pm. Hartwell Dance Theater is located in Hartwell Hall, Kenyon Street, on the campus of The College at Brockport, State University of New York.

This year, Sankofa has Habib Iddrisu as the guest artist. Iddrisu is currently completing his doctorate at Northwestern University. His contributions to the concert include:

•   “The Village of Batiti,” a choreographic vision of tribal celebrations and rituals in a West African village.
• “Gumboot Dance” strives to see the aesthetic qualities in what was once the only means of communication amongst those forced to toil in South African mines. Gumboots were the rubber overshoes worn by the miners, in which they would embed links of chain or discarded bottlecaps, with which they would tap out messages—or just their proximity to one another—in the stifling, pitch-black mines where they were forbidden to speak.
• “Fumè Fumè” recreates a religious celebration of life amongst the Ga sect, found in southern Ghana.

Iddrisu’s time on the Brockport campus, serving as an adjunct during the fall 2007 semester, exceeded his expectations. “I had heard of the Sankofa program, and knew it was one of very few programs of its type on a college campus, but when I got here, I felt lucky to be a part of it.” When he returned to the campus for additional rehearsals, he found that the “support and enthusiasm was even greater than when I was teaching in the fall.” Visiting professor/guest artist Bill Evans has choreographed “Nubia,” along with his dancers. Reflecting on the piece, Evans said that “as I began to work on this piece, I shared a rhythmic sound and movement language I had generated with the dancers, and asked each of them to participate in creating the dance. In handing these sounds over to them, I drew upon my knowledge of rhythm tap and my studies with the great African-American choreographer Donald McKayle, who was strongly influenced by the dances of Caribbean cultures. He fused these influences with mainstream modern dance techniques to create a fluid, grounded and rhythmic style of contemporary dance.”

The capstone of the concert is, as always, “Ijexa,” which brilliantly weaves the chanting, drumming and dancing that make a Sankofa concert what it is. The boisterous finale ensures that cultures that may be unfamiliar to Brockport audiences are honored. Clyde Alafiju Morgan, associate professor and artistic director of Sankofa, feels that “without ‘Ijexa,’ without ‘Sankofa’—which literally means that there is no going forward without looking past—without these things, we would have no idea how we got to where we are today, or how we can move on to tomorrow.”