With the opening concert of its 50th season on Friday, Aug. 2, the Ko-Thi Dance Company proved itself again to be a Milwaukee treasure and, I think, a national one. The concert, titled “Juba-Lee,” was created by Ko-Thi’s new artistic director DeMar Walker and the African dance company’s choreographers, dancers and musicians, both adult and child. The big UW-Milwaukee Mainstage Theatre was barely big enough to hold their joyful energy. In a moving post-show moment, Ko-Thi’s founder and now-retiring artistic director, Ferne Yangyeitie Caulker, literally passed the baton—an African horsehair wand she’s treasured since childhood—to Walker. Her life’s work is now his.
Continuity through the centuries was the subject of "Juba-Lee." Ko-Thi’s 50 years coincides with the four hundredth anniversary of slavery in America. In a pre-show welcome, the company’s outgoing board chair Cheryl Blue made an appropriate comparison with the devastating child separations at our southern border today. Such cruelty was routine during slavery. The concert’s prologue, “Carried On…,” Walker’s choreographed dance-mime to a song by Mereba titled “Get Free,” showed children and adults leaving homes to face unknowns. What goes with them?
This prologue bled straight into the mid-20th century America of “The Git Down” by Tisiphani Mayfield and Walker. Jazzman Victor Campbell provided masterful accompaniment on a standard drum kit while Walker began a jitterbug that was also unmistakably African. Associate artistic director Sonya Thompson and the adult ensemble joined for a sophisticated African American jazz dance with hot flash and cool surprises. This swung further back in time to Walker’s “Ringshout,” which honored the clapping and stamping of slaves forbidden the use of musical instruments. Conga and stick players led by Ko-Thi’s music director Kumasi Allen and assistant music director Kameron Sykes—giants of the art—took the stage for “Ibo” by Walker and Thompson in a dazzling Haitian-inspired shout against bondage.
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Intoxicating contemporary interpretations of long-standing West African dance and music traditions completed the evening, inviting us back to old Africa, much older than Greece. Individual psychology is less important in this aesthetic than the highest aspirations of a community: love, peace, unity, an abandon to something bigger than oneself. With the rest of the audience, I found myself shouting out loud. I continually marveled open-jawed at the performers’ virtuosity while my feet and legs kept bouncing to the beat. Africa was the birthplace of our species, after all. Couldn’t that continuity exist?
