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Lords and Ladies of the Dance

The complex polyrhythms and scintillating sabars underpinning Youssou N’Dour’s mbalax music provide the perfect vehicle for the dancing prowess of his Senegalese fans. Typically tall and elegant, they move athletically and with ease, and even small children appear to have little difficulty in mastering quite intricate movements. At traditional sabar and taneber parties women enter the circle and they dance subtly, tracking the drum beats with their bodies, marking the rhythms with their limbs, levitating like birds of paradise, stretching towards nirvana in a flurry of ecstasy.1 Such women were the first to promote Youssou’s mbalax music.

Architect and film director Nicolas Cissé, who knows a thing or two about balance and symmetry, talked to me about how he had noted an exaltation and ultimate therapy in their dance:

There are steps where the dancer must be in perfect harmony with her body in order to execute the dance. These complex even irrational dances seem to turn on a fake note, a subtle half beat. The dancer enters a trance-like state as she becomes aligned with the cosmos. A transcendental eroticism liberates the women physically, spiritually and sexually and the same is true of the drummers whose rhythms incite them.

The first female dancer to join Youssou onstage was Ndèye Khady Niang, who charmed audiences with her energetic and seductive routines. For Youssou, she was an obvious choice: she had been President Senghor’s favourite dancer, having accompanied him on all his political campaigns, and by the early 1980s she was still the best dancer in Senegal. In 2009, a year before she died, I met her in the living room of her small bungalow in the Karak district of Dakar. Surrounded by large framed photographs of herself with President Senghor, Thione Seck, Youssou and other celebrities, she spoke animatedly about her experiences as a dancer and shared gossip from those times with me.

Youssou’s first male dancer/animateur, Alla Seck, was a true original, an artist who brought instant colour to the stage whether playing maracas or dancing with his idiosyncratic shuffle. He expressed himself not only with his remarkable gravelly voice in catchy call-and-response phrases but also in the way he dressed – striped socks and patchwork robes which signified his allegiance to the holy marabout Cheikh Ibra Fall. He used profound Wolof proverbs to score witty points and mimed stories, holding out his palm as if it were a mirror while coiffing his hair, or pretending to ask a passer-by for the time while looking at his watch. Alla liked to play the role of an innocent kow kow (peasant from the village), newly arrived in Dakar. He was born in Gossas near Kaolack and came to the city to work with his brother as a tailor in the area known as Usine Bene Tally, but he was destined for a life in the limelight. On stage he gave one hundred per cent of himself; perhaps too much for his own good. He ate little and he smoked ganja, making the tour bus stop regularly so he could purchase his provisions. During Youssou’s 1987 European tour, he fell ill in London and I drove him to the airport, unaware that I would never see him again. When he died of typhoid fever on 14 June, a month later, the stage was sad.

In Alla’s memory, Youssou and his staff organised a twelve-hour, all-night benefit concert at the Demba Diop Stadium in Dakar, featuring all the major bands in Senegal. Youssou dedicated his cassette Kocc Barma to his cherished artist and friend, whom he described thus:

Alla Seck was from another world. He came to this earth to be an artist, and I found him at the Miami Club, where he used to sing two songs a night or sometimes, when we were all competing for our space, he might not sing at all. I saw him playing maracas, and we persuaded Kassé to engage him in that role. Yet whenever he came to the microphone he always had something interesting to say, for he knew many Wolof proverbs. His dance style was entirely his own, and when Alla died I felt obliged to dance because the mark he made on my music was indelible.2

Alla has been role model and inspiration for the dancers who have followed in his footsteps: Gallo Thielo, the original ‘rubberband man’, so lithe, so witty, so inventive that his passage on to the stage always brought thunderous applause from the floor, and Pape Moussa Sonko, who worked with the Sorano Theatre dance troupe before being invited to perform with Youssou at Bercy in 2006 and who subsequently became a regular member of the touring band.

Dance has always been an essential ingredient in Youssou’s music. When he wrote ‘Sabar’ (sometimes called ‘Wundelow’, meaning to turn round and round) it became the hit single of the summer of 1986. In the song he warns dancers to respect the grace and meaning of the traditional, spinning ndawrabine, a dance which the Lébou people performed before the harvest to invoke rain and ensure crops would flourish. The dancers swirl and turn, legs high-kicking in the air, the graceful swing of their voluminous robes complementing their movements. Despite Youssou’s plea to respect traditions, some quite suggestive, even risqué dances have nonetheless been devised by Youssou’s fans, as Moussa Joh, a Gambian living in England, explained to Lucy Duran:

In the early days Youssou used to sing more or less straight kassak music. This was music for what we called sayisayi (naughty) dancing which boys used to perform when they were healed after circumcision and were well enough to start thinking about girls again. They would get into the middle of the circle, hold their groin, and shake and wobble their legs in rascal fashion.3

The dance names describe their action. The pelvic and knee movements of the moulaye chigin exactly match the sabar breaks. Stretch your legs too far while dancing the khoti chaya, and you can literally split your wide Arabic-style trousers. The reug reug bodiang is a squatting dance, and haj bi is a crude imitation of a dog lifting its leg. As for boungoun bangan, the term conjures up a shaking posterior and the ragajou describes a woman rolling her eyes. In the jelkati, the dancer’s upper arms, bent at the elbow, move in parallel motion from left to right. The highlight of an evening at Youssou’s Thiossane Club was often the moment when a girl would rush on to the stage, grab a microphone stand and begin gyrating her hips suggestively. In their excitement the men would shout ‘Diafondool!’ (Cling on here!) or ‘Songoma!’ (Attack me!). Even the doorman felt obliged to quit his post to gawp at the spectacle and Assane Thiam, still playing his tama, would pursue the girl as she left the stage.

23. Dancers in the Thiossane Club.