Photo via Ko-Thi Dance Company - Facebook
Ko-Thi ‘Under the Baobob Tree’
Ko-Thi ‘Under the Baobob Tree’
“I am the ancient one, rooted deep within the earth, cradled by the arms of time itself.” So begins a stunning poem by Kumasi Allen, the Ko-Thi African Dance Company’s music director. The speaker is a baobab tree, Africa’s equivalent to the California redwoods. Spoken in five parts, the poem marks the structure of the biggest, grandest, original music, dance and theater work this company has made since 2019, when they presented Jubilee in celebration of Ko-Thi’s 50th birthday.
Here’s the backstory: Born in Sierra Leone, Ferne Yangyeitie Caulker founded Ko-Thi in Milwaukee in 1969 and brought it to national acclaim. In 2016, she retired from the UWM Dance Department after 45 years of teaching and began the process of passing the artistic leadership of Ko-Thi to her longtime company dancers DeMar Walker and Sonya Thompson.
“We’d spend whole days together,” Mama Ferne tells me. “They’d write down everything I said about the struggles of being artists in the community.”
Onstage in Jubilee, she ritualistically passed the artistic direction to Walker and joined the Ko-Thi board of directors. Thompson became associate artistic director. Caulker devoted the next three years to sorting the Ko-Thi archives, reading decades of journals she’d written, and starting to write the company’s history.
Dance Whisperer
Ko-Thi ‘Under the Baobob Tree’
The pandemic heightened financial struggles. Unable to fundraise, longtime board members left, along with an exhausted administrative director and, finally, Walker. Thompson took the artistic leadership.
And Mama Ferne? “I remember this movie about a guy called a horse whisperer,” she says. “I refer to myself as the self-designated dance whisperer.”
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She spent the Christmas holidays in Ghana where “you surrender to the magnitude of baobab trees,” she says. “They were revered in African culture. People convened under their canopies. If those trees could talk, they could tell us so much about the world.”
And so the dance whisperer inspired Thompson, Allen, and assistant music director Deonte Ellis to create a work about Ko-Thi history “as a flow of activity under the baobab tree.”
Thompson describes it like this: “A baobab tree lives hundreds of years. They’re huge, and people build a campfire beneath them and tell what takes place in their village. We’re replicating that. Ko-Thi has its story to tell about what we do together as a village. We’ve been around for 55 years and we’re going to keep Mama Ferne’s legacy going. We’ll continue to fight.”
“Ko-Thi is truly a village,” echoes Caulker. “I’m 77, and our youngest dancer is four, and we’re on the stage at the same time in this show.”
That four-year old girl is a member of Ton Ko-Thi, the company’s Children Performing Ensemble. The oldest of its 38 dancers and drummers is 18. They’re all in the show, alongside the 18 adult company members.
Generational Wealth
Ellis is Ton Ko-Thi’s music director. “We’re showing Milwaukee that Ko-Thi has generational wealth,” he says. “The kids that we have right now are someday going to be some of our teachers, some of our master drummers and master dancers. They’re the ones who will spread this knowledge, and hopefully whoever they spread it to can carry on, and that’s how Ko-Thi is going to reach 100 years.”
Thompson is eloquent about the work. “I see Mama Ferne still learning, still growing, still teaching us. This is her dream. It’s our job to keep that dream going. She didn’t have to pass her knowledge on to us. She didn’t have to be patient with us. She could have closed this company a long time ago. But she kept it going because we kept coming into the space. Part of the reason we’re doing this show is to teach the youngsters to respect their elders. They don’t have the answers to everything, but children should listen. You never know what life is going to bring, or when you’re going to realize she taught me what I need to do. I think that’s what this concert is about.”
“It’s also to educate our community about Black culture,” she continues. “Mama Ferne says if you really want to gain some knowledge, you need to read a book. So, Ko-Thi is the book.”
“And the elder is a library,” Ellis adds.
“You carry so much in your head,” Mama Ferne explains. “And sometimes I need them to extrapolate it for me. People say to me, when are you going to sit down? And I’m like why would I sit down in a wheelchair and go to an old folk’s home and drool out of my mouth? There are too many senior citizens just dying because they don’t think anybody cares what they have to offer.”
“We open this show with a song that goes ‘We who believe in freedom cannot rest,’” she says. “That feeds directly into today’s headlines, so we’re contemporary also.”
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“Under the Baobab Tree” has one performance only on April 6, 7:30 p.m. at the Father Robert V. Carney Performing Arts Center of Pius XI High School, 135 N. 76th Street. For tickets and information, visit ko-thi.org.
