It’s all in the hips.
When performing the traditional Ugandan dance baksimba, women swing their hips in pendular motion, making the fringe tied around their waists swish like brushes in a car wash. Their feet step with the beat, but the rest of their body stays composed, their hands riding palms down on the air beside them. The effect is hypnotic.
On a recent day at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a group of teenage students were trying to get the baksimba right. Stephen Rwangyezi, the director of the Ndere Troupe of Uganda, was giving them pointers. The timing they had learned by watching a video was off. But once Rwangyezi made an adjustment, showing where a heel drop synchronized with the drum pattern beat out by a Ndere musician, the students’ oscillating hips locked into the rhythm.
The students were members of the dance ensemble of the Youth Arts Academy at the Billie Holiday Theater in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. They were learning the baksimba so they could perform it with the Ndere Troupe at BAM’s DanceAfrica festival this weekend.
“There’s a technical side of tradition that must be learned,” said Abdel R. Salaam, DanceAfrica’s artistic director. “But then there’s also the visceral part, when the rules disappear.” Watching the students respond to Rwangyezi’s directions, you could see that transition in action.
Once they had the baksimba under control, women from the Ndere Troupe joined them, pairing off into teacher-student couples and holding hands as their hips rocked. Modeling themselves on the Ugandan women, the Brooklyn girls seemed to get out of their heads and into their bodies.
The Ndere musicians added more and more percussion, amping up the tempo and intensity. A Ugandan dancer ululated. Everyone smiled. The lesson had become a party.
The baksimba, Rwangyezi explained during a break, is a dance of fertility and peace. The flexing of the hip joints is good training for childbirth. The hands at the sides communicate calm, rather than fear or aggression. And the hip motion demonstrates relaxation. “You cannot shake your hips if you are stressed,” he said.
This is the kind of cultural knowledge that Rwangyezi founded Ndere to preserve. “Africa doesn’t suffer from a lack of resources or intelligence,” he said. “But we do have a lack of confidence because of how colonial education taught us that everything African was backward, primitive and evil.” That persisted, he said, even after Uganda gained independence from Britain in 1962.
When Rwangyezi formed Ndere in 1984, it was an uphill struggle against those prejudices. “I lost my teaching job because I was accused of teaching satanic music and dance,” he said. At the troupe’s first concert, three people showed up.
“But I wanted to say to the different tribes in Uganda that these dances are the wealth we should all be proud of,” he said. “Dances are the great books. Everything was stored in the dances.”
Ndere’s program at DanceAfrica, sampling dances from various regions, is structured around the span of a life — from children’s games to courtship rituals to adult responsibilities. “They all carry different messages,” Rwangyezi said.
Education is also the mission of Karen Thornton, the dance director of the Youth Arts Academy. When students from the academy participate in the festival — as they have each year since 1997 — it “opens their minds and lets them know that their world is so much bigger than their block,” she said.
At DanceAfrica the students learn respect for their elders and for each other. “Some people have a negative image of Africa,” she said, “and we are very proud to dispel that.”
For participants and audience members alike, she said, “Once you see the movement, you see the beauty of the culture, and you’re never the same.” The students look forward to each year and tell Thornton that they don’t want to graduate. “The kids grow up and they bring their children to the academy,” she said.
Skyler Dias, 17, has been taking dance classes there since she was 2. She followed her cousin and an older sister into class. “This is my legacy,” she said on a break from the rehearsal at BAM. “It means family, togetherness. I love it so much I’m never going to leave.”
Dias and her classmate Xavia Edghill, 16, said that learning the baksimba was a challenge for them, because most of their training had been in West African dance. “West African dance is all about crazy arms,” Edghill said. “This is all about the hips.”
Salaam chose Uganda as this year’s focus to remind audiences about East Africa. (West African dance tends to get more attention in the United States.) “These cultures have a down-home, gut thing,” he said, noting the role of East Africa in human evolution. “It was there that we all first learned how to be one with each other.”
That is a lesson the dancers at the rehearsal seemed to have absorbed. At one point, Rwangyezi tied a coat around his waist and pulled Thornton into the dance, a sweatshirt serving as her hip fringe. Dias, beaming at her partner, brightened the whole room with her smile.
At the end of the rehearsal, another Youth Arts student, Javoney Bobb, 16, demonstrated the leaps and spins of the highly athletic Ugandan men’s dance he had learned, and Rwangyezi agreed to find a place for him in the program. Reign-Marie Sampson, 9, showed off her moves, too. Then all the students lined up to hug Rwangyezi.
“You know how a computer sometimes needs to restart or refresh,” he told them. “That’s what you’ve done for me.”
Hiroko Masuike is a New York-based photographer and photo editor for The Times.
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