Diadié Bathily brings the movement, fabrics and music of Mali, the Ivory Coast and Guinea to the Loop
By Asa Pittman
For the St. Louis American
To experience the song and dance of West Africa this winter, you needn’t trek any farther than the University City Loop. This weekend, January 27 through 29, the Center of Creative Arts (COCA) will bring a taste of the Mother Continent to the Midwest through its new Dance Africa performance series.
Dance Africa is headed by the center’s West African dance guru-in-residence, Diadié Bathily (pronounced JAH-jay BAH-chee-LEE). The program is Bathily’s most recent effort to expose St. Louisans to the culture of his native land.
Born in Mali and raised in the Ivory Coast, Bathily relocated to St. Louis from Africa in 1999 to teach West African dance at the University of Missouri-Saint Louis. The position led to similar, temporary posts at Washington University, Jefferson Elementary and St. Louis Community College at Forest Park and Florissant Valley. Eventually he landed a full-time appointment at COCA.
There, Bathily teaches West African dance classes for adults, teens and children. Kids who have studied under Bathily for at least a year and have the skills may join Yélé, COCA’s African dance company for youth. Dancers ages five to eleven years old with one to four years of dance experience comprise Yélé’s current crop, Bathily said. Some of the 15 Yélé students are from Jefferson Elementary, where he still moonlights.
The poor, predominantly black school, he said, inspired him to create Yélé, which will perform at Dance Africa.
“Yélé means ‘sunshine,’” Bathily explained during a recent phone interview. The West African word and the idea to start a children’s dance troupe came to him, he said, while teaching an after school dance class at Jefferson three years ago.
“I looked at the children smiling and talking. You could feel that they were into the dance. It reminded me of Africa,” he said. “I said to myself, ‘This is light, this is beautiful.’”
A similar revelation inspired Bathily’s creation of Afriky Lolo, a West African dance company for adults, the same year. “I was teaching at [St. Louis Community College at] Florissant Valley,” said Bathily. “I had been teaching at COCA, where my students were mainly white, but at Florissant Valley, most of my students where black. They looked like the people from home.” To promote West African dance among African Americans and to encourage those already studying the art, Bathily founded Afriky Lolo, “black star.”
Afriky Lolo is not a part of COCA, said Bathily, although the company often uses the center for practices and rehearsals. The troupe’s members, ages 17 to 65 years old, have one to six years of dance training. Most are Bathily’s former students from STLCC, and one is a recruit from Chicago. All the students, however, auditioned for their position in the company.
The adult dance group is twice the size of Yélé, but while the children’s company boasts a nearly-equal male-to-female ratio, Afriky Lolo’s numbers are drastically skewed: two men to 28 women.
American culture, which considers dancing effeminate, said Bathily, is to blame for the imbalance. In his country, dancing is an essential social skill for both sexes. “In Africa, everybody dances,” said Bathily. Failure to cut a rug often conveys ill will in the Ivory Coast. “If you don’t dance at a wedding, for example, it’s like you’re saying you don’t approve of the marriage.”
Afriky Lolo rehearsals also reveal other cultural differences between the African-American pupils and their African tutor. While many of his students have familiar, African features, said Bathily, they sometimes find his teachings foreign: “Sometimes I don’t understand why they can’t get a step. I forget they didn’t grow up in the African culture.”
Months of biweekly practices, however, have overcome almost all cultural incongruities between himself and his adult company, Bathily said. He is confident that Dance Africa will feature traditional West African song and dance as authentic as anything performed in the motherland.
The program, choreographed by Bathily, will showcase music and movements from the countries of his origin: Mali, the Ivory Coast and Guinea. Yélé will perform the ‘Ngoron, a four-step dance that is a rite of passage for marriage-eligible girls in the Ivory Coast. Masked Afriky Lolo hoofers will high-step the Zaouli, a rapid-fire dance of welcome common in Mali. A sextet of percussionists pounding on quintessentially West African instruments – the bongo-like djembe and its bass-toned brother, the doundoun – will lay down the rhythms for both dance troupes.
While Bathily has no plans to don drums during Dance Africa, virtually every other aspect of the program will bear evidence of his influence, including the costumes. “It took me about a month to make the clothes,” said Bathily, who designed and sewed the ensembles for Yélé and Afriky Lolo. The colors of the Yélé uniform, he said, had special significance: “Brown represents black people, it’s the color of our skin. Yellow is the sun.”
Some of the fabric used to make the costumes was a gift from Bathily’s father, a textile vendor in an Ivory Coast marketplace. The brightly colored cloth is scarce in St. Louis but abundant where Bathily comes from, kind of like West African dance, he said: “Back home we don’t take classes to learn to dance, we just do it.” His hope, he said, is for St. Louisans, especially black folks, to come to Dance Africa, see how West Africans “do it” and become inspired to learn the dances of their ancestral home themselves.
Dance Africa will be performed at the Center of Creative Arts January 27 through 29. Tickets are $14 and $17 and available through Metrotix. For further information, contact COCA at (314) 725-6555 or visit www.cocastl.org.
