The movement is small, a little twisting in the hips. But like a tremor before an earthquake, it signals larger shifts. Soon the drums spring into action and dancers explode into percussive action – shaking, undulating, slapping the air with the power of those drums.
Wonderful moments like this return in ‘Accommodating Lie’, the hour-long work that the Afro-Colombian company Sankofa Danzafro performed before its return to the Joyce Theater this week. And those explosions of live drumming and dancing are reviving a stage that had kept the Omicron wave dark and quiet since late December.
But as the title of the work suggests, Rafael Palacios, the company’s director and choreographer, has more in mind. A program note describes the work as a “powerful awareness-raising call” that seeks to debunk stereotypes “about and around” the black body, by addressing the sexualization and exotification of people of African descent during centuries of slavery and racism.
Several times the dancers line up across the stage and a singer starts shouting prizes in Spanish. It is an auction that connects this representation, this display of black bodies, with the slave trade.
Yet the auctioneer’s voice, nestled in drums, is so quiet and inimitable that you could almost miss it. That is characteristic of this production, whose message and delivery are both curiously muted.
Much of the symbolism comes from a painterly design (by Álvaro Tobón), starting with the curtain at the back of the stage, made of straw like that used in the skirts once worn by enslaved Afro-Colombians. people. Through this barrier, the dancers move in and out, the entwined strands clinging to their bodies from time to time. Some of them also wear those skirts and pull on the rope to show how they rub. Or a dancer might pull on more rope, like a belt held by other performers winding it around her on a maypole.
The dance proceeds in a series of episodes, slow and stretched before breaking out, accompanied as much by silent flute, lullabies and ticking marimba as by batteries of percussion. A man who seems to be fighting against invisible opponents roars and collapses. Another man picks him up, carries him in a pieta-shaped crib, then sets him down again and helps him get up again with a convulsive, windmill, resurgent dance.
However, even such swells of intensity feel a little too faint or flicker. Even when the power of the African diaspora connection to the drum is enhanced with a dash of hip-hop, something tentative, perhaps withheld. Could this be part of the message, a refusal to go all out in front of an audience?
Or is that just Sankofa’s style? The work does have a great finish. The full cast of eight dancers emerge in rows, throw their most emancipatory, drum-driven steps down, then stare at the audience from the edge of the stage. The auctioneer starts again, this time with higher prices. Go once. Go twice. Sold.
Sankofa Danzafro
See you Sunday at the Joyce Theater, joyce.org.
