an interesting article i found

Article Tools Sponsored By
By JENNIFER DUNNING
Published: August 18, 2001

It is not often that New Yorkers get to see the Muntu Dance Theater of Chicago. That's a pity, because the company put on a first-class show on Wednesday night at the Damrosch Park band shell, where it appeared in the Lincoln Center Out of Doors festival.

Muntu was founded in 1972 as an African dance troupe. Now under the direction of Amaniyea Payne, also a choreographer and dancer with the company, Muntu has created a repertory of stylishly staged African dances, accompanied by drums, flute and whistle. The dancers, who also sing, perform full out but with wit and an easy rapport with the audience. The costumes are an exquisite blend of fabrics and colors, with masks, plumed headpieces and horsehair wands figuring prominently.

The Lincoln Center program concentrated on dances from West Africa, most involving rites of passage and harvesting. Each of the 11 dances flowed into the next in a continuous, largely undifferentiated swirl of color and styles. The first half, which included choreography by Abdoulaye Camara, was a selection of excerpts from dances of the Sene-Gambia region that was called ''Koutero Collage.'' The evening ended with a suite of dances, gathered under the heading of ''Ancestral Memories,'' from Mali, Guinea and Senegal, some choreographed by Youssouf Koumbassa and Moustapha Bangoura.

The dancers performed with such clarity that it was possible to see and enjoy each shift of style. At times the bent-kneed dancers appeared to skim the ground as they hurtled and spun about the stage. In a dance whose beautifully muted costumes suggested traditional African street wear, the women moved almost stealthily. In ''Koumpo,'' a masked harvest dance from Guinea-Bissau, an explosion of squatting, thudding dance as insistent as the drumming that accompanied it came to a momentary lull when the men sank unexpectedly and suddenly to a sitting position, one knee bent and wrapped with an arm.

The second half included dances in which all energy and motion seemed contained in the columnar bodies of the fast-moving women. In two other works the arms and then all limbs looked as if they were ploughing furrows in space. And in another dance the men's feet flew out to the sides as their bodies shot upward.

There were also moments of teasing humor. A furry spectral creature, sometimes called an egungun in African dance, lurched, somersaulted and tilted with an expressiveness that recalled the Bauhaus oddities that peopled Oscar Schlemmer's ''Triadic Ballet.'' After each of the creature's sorties, the men rushed over and brushed him clean with small whisks. As amusingly, admiring women patted down their dancing men in another piece.

The evening also included a jaunty jazz-flavored flute solo by Babu Atiba, the company's assistant artistic director. Mr. Atiba then proceeded to draw the audience into a vibrant call-and-response exercise in Mandingo and talked with eloquent simplicity of the sharing of cultures and life experiences.