Summer Fridays
A guide to enjoying the best of the city every weekend.
Good morning. It’s Friday. Today, and on Fridays through the summer, we’ll focus on things to do in New York over the weekend.
It’s a tradition: Every year, DanceAfrica at the Brooklyn Academy of Music focuses on a different country and its dance traditions.
When Abdel Salaam, the festival’s artistic director, was casting about for a country to spotlight this year, he realized that his many trips to Africa had never taken him to Cameroon.
He booked his tickets and was mesmerized — and not just by the dancers he saw and met. He called the trip “a life-changing encounter,” despite muddy roads and fire ants along the way.
And so Cameroon became the focus for the DanceAfrica Festival 2024, the nation’s largest festival of African dance — and, BAM likes to say, Brooklyn’s unofficial start to summer. Performances, under the overall title of “The Origin of Communities: A Calabash of Cultures,” begin tonight at 7:30 p.m. and continue through the weekend.
The festival is an exploration of Central African history, as symbolized by the calabash — a vessel with both mystical and practical significance in African culture. There will also be classes and dance workshops starting tomorrow. FilmAfrica, a companion festival, will include a conversation with the director Jean-Pierre Dikongué-Pipa on Saturday at 2 p.m. His film “Muna Moto” was credited with bringing Cameroonian cinema to global audience in the 1970s.
And DanceAfrica Bazaar, which spills into the streets around BAM with more than 150 vendors, opens at noon tomorrow, Sunday and Monday.
“The thing that’s captivating about Cameroon as much as dancing was the rainforest, supposedly the origin of humanity,” Salaam said. Deep in the hot and humid forest are mahogany and ebony trees that can grow more than 200 feet tall.
“Everything is dedicated to the preservation of the rainforest,” he said. “If the rainforests around the Equator disappear, that’s the oxygen belt for the planet. It’s bye-bye.”
Siren – Protectors of the Rainforest, a Brooklyn-based company led by the Cameroon-born Mafor Mambo Tse, will perform. Salaam said that Siren “preserves, promotes and presents knowledge passed down through generations” — a constant for DanceAfrica, no matter what country is in the spotlight.
DanceAfrica has also partnered with Spirit Walkers, the Women of the Calabash, The Billie’s Youth Arts Academy Dance Ensemble, the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts and the DanceAfrica Council of Elders.
Salaam said that what sets Cameroonian dance apart are the rhythms — and the sound. The drums from the rainforest are made from trees and logs and are pitched lower than West African drums. “It’s not the same sonic value,” he said. “It’s not the same volume. The dancing moves in concert with those sounds. A lot of torso work. Arms and fiery feet.”
It is impossible to mention DanceAfrica without mentioning Chuck Davis, who founded the festival and was its artistic director until 2015. Davis was long considered America’s foremost master of African dance. He died in 2017, but his emphasis on community has continued, which means that audience members at DanceAfrica can “rarely expect to sit passively,” as Margalit Fox wrote in The New York Times in 2017. “Some might be called onstage to take part in the dancing; all, by festival’s end, would have joined Davis in reciting, ‘Peace, love and respect for everybody,’ the phrase that had long been his mantra.”
“As long as you’re dancing together,” Davis used to say, “you have no time for hatred.”
WEEKEND Weather
Through the weekend, expect sunny skies with temperatures in the mid-80s that will drop into the mid-60s at night on Friday. There is a chance of showers on Saturday with temperatures in the upper 70s during the day. On Sunday, expect sunshine with temperatures in the mid-80s — and a chance of thunderstorms in the evening.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until May 27 (Memorial Day).
What Else to Do This Weekend
Where else would ‘New York Stories’ be?
New York has one of the world’s most famous opera companies — the Metropolitan Opera, where you can see “Carmen” tomorrow afternoon and “Orfeo ed Euridice” tomorrow night.
As the music critic Gabrielle Ferrari observed, we may see a lot of opera here, but we don’t see too many operas that are set here.
But today at 7:30 p.m., OPERA America will present the world premiere of an opera that is definitely New York-centric: Robert Paterson’s “New York Stories.” OPERA America is at 330 Seventh Avenue in Manhattan.
Paterson collaborated with six writers: Mark Campbell, Margot Connolly, David Cote, Briana Elyse Hunter, John de los Santos and Sokunthary Svay. They contributed short librettos about New York lives across the five boroughs, touching on everything from people-watching to the alternate-side parking ritual that many people know only too well. Those all sound like the jumble that is New York, but Gabrielle says that Paterson’s expressive tonal melodies and energetic, percussive accents unite the stories.
METROPOLITAN diary
Baritone’s phone
Dear Diary:
On a cold, bleak October day, my husband and I sat in a cab moving at a snail’s pace down Lexington Avenue on our way to get our flu shots.
It had not been a good morning. We had just come from the hospital, where we had learned that my husband needed a hip replacement. The doctor had suggested we cancel our December travel plans and have the surgery right after Christmas.
While digesting this dispiriting news, a cellphone buzzed. We spotted it on the floor. It was not ours. I quickly answered.
The caller identified herself as the artistic liaison at the Metropolitan Opera. The cellphone belonged to one of the company’s lead baritones, and he would gladly pick it up at our apartment, she said. I gave her our address and name.
Later that evening, our doorman notified us that a gentleman was waiting for us in the lobby. I felt a frisson of anxiety at meeting a world-renowned opera star.
I shouldn’t have. He couldn’t have been more grateful or gracious. We talked with him easily for 20 minutes before wishing him well at his performances and saying good night.
It doesn’t get any better than this, I thought.
But it did.
The next morning, I received an email offering us tickets to two operas. We didn’t get to travel over the holidays, but we did get to hear the magnificent voice of the baritone whose phone we had found.
— Barbara Berg
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
