Dancing the Roots

My first appearance in a musical theater piece was offered by African Holiday, produced courageously off-broadway in New York. Coming at a time when the ethnic African Ballet www.lesballetsafricains.com/  made a splash on Broadway, no doubt the show attempted to cash in on the popularity of supple, scantily clad, African dancers and singers doing their thing in public. Don't get me wrong, the African Ballet show was fabulous!

African Holiday gathered Manhattan's outstanding dancers of what came to be known as "primitive" dancing. Is that word a derivative of the dancer, Pearl Primus's en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Primus name or did it really suggest that it was primitive as in savage? Oh ho, Primus noted dance steps seen in Africa and then taught them to an elite group of dancers back in the States. Something got lost in the translation though, like women taking on the male stance, doing steps usually performed by males. None the less her gift became the foundation of a style of dancing we in the States knew nothing about at the time.

Fledgling dancer that I was, AH auditions left me behind. However, I wound up as part of the special group performing with Cuban percussionist, Mongo Santamaria www.discogs.com/artist/Mongo+Santamaria .

Dressing room tension peeked when the Cubans sat beside the back to Africa exponents who wore no makeup, dressed in Dashikis and sported Angela Davis type afros.

One day as I began dressing, the dancer next to me met my eyes in the mirror and said in a menacing tone, "Girl, I feel like snatching those rollers off of your nappy head!"
Luckily, she became distracted because ouch, those rollers were enormous. Enormous and pink. Pink with ridges, held in by a shorter version of chopsticks, also pink with one black rubber tip.

The show put forth life in an African village with rituals like the fire dance, fertility dance, and praying for a good harvest naming a few.

In the market scene, dancers entered onstage one by one, laughing and chatting happily. It's true that when laughter starts in a group, it becomes infectuous. More often than not, I found myself laughing hysterically once we got going and once, more seriously, I woke up rolling around the stage.Those drum beats hypnotized me. Possession adds to the drama but imagine getting possessed during every performance. A dancer's performing life is short enough without that added tension. At any rate, from then on I concentrated on the choreography and not the drums. So went my first venture in a musical show. There was no holiday like African Holiday.