Field Notes 1 - Dancing, Drumming, and Insulting

The last couple weeks of class (TSDA0330: Mande Dance, Music, and Culture) have taught me a lot about how music is intricately woven into Mande culture and daily life. For one, it is very different from Western music and culture in that a percussive concept of performance dominates. Unlike in many Western cultures where melody and harmony reign over percussiveness, in Mande culture even the dances are percussive in nature, with intricate stamping patterns and ways of striking oneself. (See here for a good example of Djembe drumming and dance). There are many different types of drums—the Djembe, dundun, and kenkeni to name a few—which are integral to most performances. But Mande music is not just about the aesthetics—it plays an important role in addressing key issues of Mande society.

In class, we not only learn the moves of a dance, we learn the role that that dance plays in peoples' lives. The Dansa, which we are currently learning, is a popular dance of rejoicing that is danced by the Khassonke people (an ethnic group in the Kaye region of Mali—see map)during happy events. It is also danced to establish and reconfirm societal values such as “the display of strength, roundness of the female anatomy, virtuosity, and the fluidity of the pelvic region” through expressive movements. At the most basic level, many of the dances are about displaying one's ability to mark the beat, maintain one's balance, and display one's coolness, concepts that are very important in Mande society. As Michelle (the teacher) pointed out as the class watched footage of Djembe drummers in Mali, the best drummers are the ones who make it look the most natural and easy, but can still play the loudest and most complex rhythms.

Indeed, the rhythms of Mande music and dance are anything but simple—often, playing is multi-metric and it is not unusual for ¾, 4/4, and 6/8 time signatures to all be played at once (although sometimes on different drums). The dancer often responds to this multi-metric playing by using different parts of his/her body to express the different meters. For example, the dundun often corresponds to the feet, as it is the lowest of the drums, while the different sounds of the Djembe (base, tone, and slap) correspond to pelvis action, upper-middle body movement, and the gestures of the arms and the head, respectively. It takes a lot of coordination to do all this at once, I have discovered. The dances are very difficult to learn because of this, which makes me wonder—how old are Malian kids when they learn to do these types of dances? Are they as complex as they seem, or am I merely put at a disadvantage by my Western upbringing of no more than one time signature at a time?

As I said before, the class is not just about the dances or the music though, for they cannot be separated from Mande culture. Family heritage is a very important part of Mande society, and often at important social functions a caller will announce the deeds and accomplishments of each of the guests' families. Families are very proud of their histories, and respectful of them, too—one family (I forget which) remains indebted to another family because long ago, a man (from family 2) who gave another man (from family 1) his leg to eat while they were starving in the desert, saving that man's life. Though it may seem like a legend to most, it is a defining factor of inter-family relations to the Mande people.

One day in class, we did an exercise where we had to come up with insults about other families. “Make them as ridiculous as possible!” the teacher encouraged. A bit surprised by this unusual task, my family (Konate!) was stumped as to how we should insult the other families. Insulting people outright in public was such a foreign concept to us, we had no clue what to say or do. Michelle had told us an example of how people make fun of her family, the Coulibaly's. Known as bean farmers, people would make fun of her for “blowing a lot of hot air into the atmosphere”, accompanied by a chorus of farting noises. Rather than get angry, people are supposed to respond to these insults that refer back to ancient family acts by throwing back insults of their own. Dad jokes are popular as well—but the one taboo is insulting the mother, who is considered sacred.

As we relayed our insults back and forth at one another in class, Michelle continually encouraged us to be more vulgar, more outlandish, to even make fun of people non-verbally. It turns out that it is also a Mande tradition to do “dances of derision”, where a person is made fun of by the imitation and exaggeration of their movements by another. Problems between neighbors are often disputed and resolved through this sort of dance. Music and dance, then, are often used in Mali as social commentary.

I was also interested in seeing why other people decided to take this class which has turned out to be more of a 'Mali-outside-of-Mali' cultural immersion than a mere music and dance class. One student told me that she decided to take the class because another student told her that the class had changed her life. “It's a new way of expressing yourself”, she agreed, explaining that she had done a lot of visual art in the past and was frustrated with the medium, and dance was a nice change from this. I'm guessing that many people take the class for the same reasons, but I'm still curious as to what really makes the class so good as everyone says it is. Perhaps it is the fact that the culture is different from our own in so many ways that makes learning about it so appealing. Certainly that is what for me makes it such an intriguing class.

Authenticity is another issue that I would like to further pursue throughout this project—not necessarily in the sense of verifying whether the dances we do are “pure”, but in asking the teacher who frequently uses the term what she means by it. When telling the class about a guest dancer we were going to have, she described him as being able to show us an authentic version of the Wolosodon. We had heard earlier from a guest lecturer about the different versions of Wolosodon that she learned in Colorado and then New York, so it would be interesting to hear what my teacher means when she uses the word “authentic”. If I remember correctly she describes the dances we are learning as authentic Mande dances. This could also relate to Mande culture in America, and whether after a certain point it becomes “inauthentic”.

Anyway, this post is already way to long, but I have field notes as well from a Djembe drumming class that I am taking outside of class, but with the one of the drummers from the class:

Sunday morning Djembe drumming class – around 10 students, almost all white, middle-aged men and women – nearly all have their own Djembe drums, and seem to have taken classes before – one man appears to have some knowledge of Bambara (a language spoken in Mali – see here for more information), greeting a few men who were dropping off the Dundun (a different type of drum) in the language.

The class begins, and the teacher makes the drumming look easy, but even some of the seemingly experienced drummers have trouble putting together the rhythms with the correct hands (left vs. right) and the correct sound/type of drum hit (base/tone/slap) – one woman says to the teacher that he is “forging new neural pathways in our brains”. Even when I understood the rhythm and what to do, it was still hard to play it correctly every single time. It took lots of concentration, but as we practiced and worked the patterns into our muscle memory, they became easier and started to feel more natural. I wonder what our teacher's learning experience was like, and when he started drumming, and whether he considers himself an “expert” yet (he certainly seems that way to me, but I don't have much to compare him with). In the future I would like to ask the other drumming students what first interested them in drumming and what other drumming activities they participate in. Also, it would be interesting to hear where they got their Djembes from, as I know the teacher sells them but it is possible they bought them from somewhere else, or even went to Mali themselves to obtain them.