Workshop in the Brotfabrik People in Beuel learn the Sabar dance from Africa

Beuel · The Sabar dance comes from Senegal and is danced in clubs in all Africa’s big cities. It is also gaining popularity in the Rhineland.

“Africa! Africa!” This has been the name of a show by André Heller since 2005, which to date has attracted more than three million visitors to the great halls of Europe. Alongside artistry and singing, the show is mainly about music and dance, namely African dance, more perfect and energetic than has ever been seen live here before.

Sabar is the name of the dance from West Africa, mainly Senegal, to whose rousing drumbeats the dancers display their African talent and temperament. Helena and Diene Sagna made guest appearances with the cast in the show in Germany years ago, stayed here and brought a little bit of Africa to Beuel in the Brotfabrik last Saturday, not as a show but as demonstration dancers and expert teachers in several workshops, first for beginners, then for advanced dancers and finally the so-called Afrobeat as danced today in the clubs in all Africa’s big cities.

Ute Baoum from Auerberg has been dancing Sabar for four years and is fascinated by the dance. “Sabar is an old, traditional dance,” she explains, “that used to be danced at weddings or christenings in Senegal.” Sabar is a word that is used both for the typical drums that are an integral part of it as well as for the dance itself and for the dance show.

Previously, only women performed this dance, which requires lots of energy and is a lot of fun. “Now men also dance it,” she continues. And she should know as she is married to a West African. “Up to now there hasn’t been a Sabar dance scene in the Bonn area or good teachers,” she says.

But Diene Sagna, who has just arrived from London, and his wife Helene are trying to build something up here. Sabar, she explains, has nothing to do with the classical dances danced in Europe. Workshop participants first learn the basic steps to music and the drums played live set the rhythm.

The next step is your own improvisation, the variation of the steps learned. And when you master that and reach the third stage, the relationship between the music and dancers changes over. One or a few dancers then dance in the middle, the music chooses one of them and the drums then follow this dancer.

Although she has loved and danced African dances for more than 20 years, Susanne Niang from Beuel took part in the workshops. The communication with the drums is her challenge. First you learn the building blocks, like learning vocabulary. Then you speak whole sentences by dancing freely. Then the dancers lead “the conversation with the musicians” as she describes it. In Bonn, to her regret, there is no African dance scene. But lately Sabar enthusiasts have been meeting to dance on Wednesdays at 8.15pm at “Dance-Discover” in Kaiserstraße 1c.

(Original text: Rainer Schmidt. Translation: kc)

Meistgelesen
Neueste Artikel
Zum Thema
Aus dem Ressort