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Sweating, our backs glued to cloth, necks rubbed red, and strands of hair plastered to our foreheads. Albeit, with the fortune of the group, the late afternoon’s sun sunk nearer its horizon, shading the courtyard of the National Museum in Lagos. We were in the Federal Republic of Nigeria seated on plastic chairs, our feet sponging the crabgrass as we rested—patient, content. We waited for the showcase to begin; a showcase for us, the delegates of Global Citizen Journey.<br />

Africa Moves

Camron Karsten
2006-02-18 20:20:23

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transformed into enriched ebony. Their arms and torsos crystallized with the solidification of their musical exertion; heaving, bleeding of power, man’s force and God’s presence radiant. We sunk with the sun; the works of obsidian after the fires of volcanic heat

One performance entitled The Rhythm of Myth seemed to mystify its audience with ineffable beauty. It was an ancient tribal tradition preserved and performed with brilliance. They swung and swirled in grass dress, men and women competing with their sex’s tantalizing, and from outside the tease we couldn’t help but stand as darkness overcame, calling for more, cheering with
The female body with its grace, its beauty, its flexible movement from hands to feet. Their movements were resounding with a feminine respectecstasy. The power, its meanings within the ingenuity, the foreign tongues of Africa’s people—each one felt within a location where consciousness supersedes beyond body and mind.

Six performances in all, each one more theatrical, more inspiring, more gallant. The showcase’s quest to enact meaning, tradition, and culture into its raw nature was superb, and each followed a different native ethnicity, serving the country’s many peoples like the Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Ijaw, and others. They pounded their hearts onto the dried skins, opening its pulsating beat to provide us with the great fortune at glimpsing into a world we know least.

The cymbals and shakers. The pounding eardrums. The magic and melody. And the men and women who moved licentiously, pumping limbs, thrusting hip and waist, curving a spine with the desirous smile. Each twist, each squat and bend, the leaps, and the rolls and strides by the Ivory Ambassadors, the Edijo Dance Company, or the Gong Beat Arts and Danzodey@z became erotic, hypnotically displacing sexual tendencies and replacing it instead with an eroticism which perceives the primitive model of the female energy suppressing its submissive counterpart. The show was Africa; raw, primitive, real in the face of its ancient rites
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to a rhythmic flow amidst the ebb of origin’s tide. Africa; raw, primitive, and it was real.