Embracing African dance: Workshop teaches women a new way to move

By Anna Scott and Kira Horvath

Inside the warm confines of a small basement dance studio, the African drumming pulsates like a heartbeat. Ten women dressed in brightly colored sarongs stomp their bare feet over the hardwood floors. Sweat drips from their foreheads, but the rhythm, the energy, is infectious and they continue to dance.

Marilyn Sylla and her husband, Sekou, of the Bamidele Dancers and Drummers brought their African heritage to a Tuscan-style bed-and-breakfast in Marblehead last weekend for a three-day intensive workshop. The eight women who participated in the class were drawn by the chance to connect to a different culture in a very physical way.

Dances have traditionally been an integral part of community life in Africa, Marilyn said, to mark rites of passage, birthdays, harvests and even simple greetings. In one session, Marilyn taught dancers how to tell the story of African slavery with their bodies. They walked hunched over to represent the weight of the world being carried on their shoulders, defiantly shook their fingers saying "no" to slavery, and threw their arms violently from high above their heads down to their sides to signify breaking chains.

The 50-year-old Marilyn led the group with her waist-long dreadlocks whipping around her face and a smile always present on her lips. The women clapped and laughed after each dance, trying to catch their breath and exchanging pleading looks with Sekou for a break while he continued to beat his African drum.

Cristina Lallier traveled all the way from Norwich, Conn., to learn how to dance with the meaning and soul of Africa. But by the last day she was "feeling sore in places I didn't even know I had muscles."
The group of non-African-American women were lured to the workshop, organized by Marsha Metzger of Endless Possibilities Yoga Studio in Boxford, for educational purposes and pure curiosity.

Marilyn has been dancing in honor of her African heritage for more than 25 years and currently teaches African dance at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass. Sekou came to Massachusetts from the Republic of Guinea, West Africa where he was the principal dancer, acrobat and musician of Les Ballet Africains, the national dance company.

Although dancing makes Marilyn feel close to her heritage, she thinks the message is more universal.

" The dances say something about being a human being. I can relate to them as an African-American, but also as a human being." The movements, she says, "just feel good on my body."