IF YOU GO
What: Urban Bush Women and Compagnie Jant-Bi in Les écailles de la mémoire (The Scales of Memory)When: 8 p.m. SaturdayWhere: Joseph Caleb Auditorium, 5400 NW 22nd Ave., MiamiTickets: $15, or $10 for students and seniors; group tickets for 10 or more, $8Info: 305-237-3010 or www.mdc.edu/culture.The first journeys that Africans made to America were so horrific that we're loathe to remember them.
That is partly why two modern dance companies, Urban Bush Women, an African-American female troupe from Brooklyn, and Compagnie Jant-Bi, a male group from Senegal, chose to delve into that history. But in recreating those voyages, they discovered as much wonder as pain: the bonds of African ancestry and the human response to repression, and a connection as dance artists that allowed them to collaborate despite those differences.
''We were evolving themes -- a journey across cultures, across continents, our lineage of who we are, memory, resistance to oppression, and who we are now, which is love, and where do we go from here,'' says Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, artistic director of Urban Bush Women.
The two companies will perform the result of their collaboration, Les écailles de la mémoire(The Scales of Memory) Saturday at the Joseph Caleb Auditorium in Liberty City. It has already received critical raves. ''The force of uncorked acid,'' wrote The Washington Post of a performance at the Kennedy Center in February. ``The impact fairly roared off the stage.''
TheScales of Memory grew out of a two-year odyssey as the two companies visited and worked together, not only to create a dance but also to get to know and understand each other and their linked, but different, cultures.
''We have the same color, but not the same culture, because African-Americans are American,'' says Germaine Acogny, artistic director of Jant-Bi. ``So it was really important that they discover who we are.''
Acogny and Zollar first met at a conference at the University of Florida in Gainesville in February 2004 and first saw each other's companies that April, at the Dance Center of Columbia College in New York.
Both women are highly regarded, internationally known dance artists. Zollar has forged a reputation for making powerful dance theater, often dealing with social and African-American themes, since founding Urban Bush Women in 1984. Acogny is a pioneering modern-dance artist and educator in Africa, where she has fused western and traditional dance in Senegal since 1968.
A MIAMI HISTORY
Their groups have a history in Miami and with Miami Dade College, which brought Urban Bush Women to South Florida a number of times in the 1990s and is presenting the Saturday show. MDC also presented Jant-Bi in Miami in 2004 in Fagaala, which dealt with genocide in Rwanda.
The two artistic directors felt a strong connection at their first meeting, sharing not only a way of working -- improvising material with their dancers to come up with visceral, original dance theater -- but also a passion for their common cultural roots.
Zollar says she ''liked the emotional and physical power'' in Fagaala. Acogny says she and her dancers ``feel [Urban Bush Women] are connected with Africa, because they try to find their roots, and we feel maybe we can help them.''
In late 2005 Zollar and members of her troupe visited Acogny's school in the fishing village of Toubab Dialaw, south of Dakar. They ate with village elders and went to healing ceremonies, Dakar discos and communal village dances. They visited Goree Island, where slaves were held before being put on ships to America. The dark, dungeon-like cells for men, children and young girls made a powerful impression.
''Slavery has been made an abstraction in this country,'' Zollar says. ``We see very little physical evidence of it, we don't talk about it. When you go to Goree, that's made very real, and you experience the power of that history. It's bringing what we live in the U.S. as denial and abstraction to life.''
For their part, Acogny and the Jant-Bi dancers were horrified by the artifacts of slave life in America, which they saw in a tour last June of plantations and African-American museums in Tallahassee and Jacksonville: animal-like feeding troughs, ''breeding beds,'' chains and lynching ropes.
''I was so shocked when I saw how the people who came over from Africa, how badly they were treated by the white people in America,'' Acogny says. ``In Africa, slavery was part of life, . . . but the slaves were not treated like animals.''
Those experiences fed long hours of improvisation for The Scales of Memory, with the directors shaping material created by the dancers. But they weren't only wallowing in the horrors of slavery. Zollar and Acogny also wanted to address deeper issues: the effect of repression, whether through slavery or colonization; the way that memory, even repressed, shapes psyche and identity and the different ways the two groups, separated by gender and nationality but linked by history, would express those ideas.
POWER OF MEMORY
Memory was a dominant theme: ''The idea that there is a power of collective and a power of individual memory,'' Zollar says. ``I think what we remember or don't want to remember is important.''
Many black scholars believe that Americans don't remember enough about even the recent history of blacks in the United States and that not enough is done to understand it.
''It's almost impossible for an everyday African-American to visit a site on American soil that'll have the same impact as Goree Island,'' says Gus Mitchell, education director at the Riley House Museum in Tallahassee, who took the groups on their tour of slave sites last summer. ``It wasn't until the '60s that we were considered equal. Our parents can remember segregated bathrooms. That's the blink of an eye in American history.''
Slavery ''is a painful subject for African Americans because it was dehumanizing,'' says Phyllis Baker, associate professor of sociology at Miami Dade College and author of African-American Spirituality, Thought and Culture. ``A part of us would like to block that out. People who didn't grow up with segregation, it's not a part of their reality. Some people don't understand it, and not really understanding it has done us a disservice.''
The dance troupes hope their work will help people to understand and move beyond anger, to take the same kind of voyage they've taken in the last two years. ''Hopefully there's not one meaning,'' Zollar says. ``So whether you think of it as a journey across the continents, across water, history, culture, gender. . . . We want people to be able to see from their perspective.''
Says Acogny: ``The main subject is memory, and then to resist against things like this happening again, to resist the oppression of slavery and colonization. Then love is the only means to fight against that, to turn it around, to change people, to change daily life.''
