During African Arts Week we are learning how to dance, drum, play the Mbira, and learning about proverbs and journalism. The first day the drummers and dancers learned a lot about African music. When they danced, they learned a lot of simple African moves. When they put all the moves together, it was very energetic. We observed that everyone was enjoying it.  It looked and sounded amazing when the dancers danced with the drumming. The dancers learned the dance really quickly. The instructor kept the beat and they danced according to the breaks. They were laughing throughout the dance. In all, the dancing it was pretty funny.

The drummers were learning the Kassa drum beat. They pounded colorful sticks or their hands on the drums like this, rat-tat-tat. The drummers were playing very well and keeping up with the beat. They had a great time. The drumming was very entertaining and tiring because hitting the drum hard hurt.

African dancing and drumming has beats and movements. Some of the dancing has claps to right and claps to left with many people doing it at once. The bass drums, called Dun Duns, are topped with cow skin, which is unshaved. The djembes are topped with shaved goatskin.

African dancing has movements that are very different from our Western dancing and looks unlike disco dancing. Dancers dance for a long time and the dances can be very hard to memorize. The dancing has different moves that don’t have names like disco moves do.

On day two we watched more drumming and dancing. In the dance called Triba, which is a dance for women who have trouble getting pregnant, dancers clapped to start the dance and moved across the room to their djembes (African hand drums) and Dun Dun (bass drums) that were in the back, then they started to dance. At the end, they jumped, and moved their hands up in the air. They did a lot of steps that turned them 90 degrees. Another group was doing a bit of the “come and eat now” rhythm, which we did when we learned the rhythm “Kassa” in class. The song comes from a West African village in Guinea called Boke, whose people are called the Landuma. Each ethnic group has a different song and rhythm special for them.

Another group was learning the Makuru rhythm from Guinea, West Africa. It is a very fast song that has lots of movements and beats. It is performed as a celebration for the full moon. It is very challenging but they did every movement correctly. They were focused and steady and the drumming was the right volume, loud! All their movements were very creative. It was very entertaining because they practiced a lot. There was hard drumming and instructions, but they managed to do it and did it perfectly.

We loved African Arts Week and hope we can do it again.