Attending Dance Performances from India and Senegal (Africa) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
I happily brought my young daughter Florence to all the free programs and activities for children that Madison (Wisconsin) offered to them when I lived there like the free zoo and year-round performances by entertainers, who came to perform at the Civic Center Auditorium. I found out about this programming in the local newspapers’ print versions, which is probably offered online now as well.
My favorite venue for year-round children’s entertainment was the Olbrich Botanical Gardens and Bolz Conservatory, which offered a dance series for children and scavenger hunts that were fun and educational at the same time.
I took my daughter to the first of a fabulous dance series of programs for children called Children of the Rainforest at the Olbrich Botanical Gardens and had just as much fun as she did. The first set of shows in the series was called Dances of India. The show was made up of six dance sequences that used song, dance, storytelling, and poetry. The dance sequences were called: Jungle symphony, Tippani, Mayur Dance, Ferris Wheel, Garba, and Village Mother.
The music of Anand Shankar evoked the rain forest as young dancers enacted elements of the jungle including the gentle and savage in the Jungle Symphony presentation.
The Tippani dance presentation featured a “functional” dance of India. It is called functional, because it helps with work. In this case, it is used to help women of the Saurastra to give them rhythm to their chore of beating the mud floor of a house during construction.
The Mayur Dance is the Peacock Dance and featured the peacock opening its feathers to dance. Dancers gently informed children of the wheel of life in the Ferris Wheel dance. Finally, the Village Mother dance taught about greed and the Earth’s resources.
This dance series was such a loving way to teach children to love nature, other cultures, traditional art forms, and beauty.
About two weeks later, I took my daughter to see an African dance troupe. The introduction to this group in the brochure described various dances coming from different countries: Gumboot Dance (South Africa), Che Che Kule (Ghana – Twi people), Goombe (Liberia), Drum Call (West Africa), Kou Kou (Guinea), and Dounba, Dance of Joy (Senegal).
The Gumboot Dance was created by South African miners who wore big rubber boots to work accocrding to the brochure handed out. Che Che Kule was a lot of fun. It is a call and response game of Ghana that the audience participates in with response, but also with movement, song and rhythm.
Drum Call could have been the basis of an adult symphony orchestra. It featured a Djimbe orchestra “using rhythms from 13th and 14th century West Africa” according to the guide.
My favorite dance had everyone in the audience up on their feet dancing. This was the Dance of Joy from Senegal. First, the dancers individually showed off their best moves and then everyone in the group was asked to get up and improvise based on the rhythms. My daughter and I were the last people to leave this show; I like to dance a lot.
We especially went to the Olbrich Botanical Garden’s Bolz Conservatory to visit the tropical plant conservatory in winter. They had several informative guides for visitors. My favorite one was the one on Indian plants. We liked looking at fish in the many ponds and trying to find plants that matched the drawings in the plant guide that was really a scavenger hunt.
The introduction to the guide and scavenger hunt said that 15% of the Earth’s people live in India. The guide was also a pharmacopoeia and cooking lesson for adults. The plants we had to find included pomegranate, scarlet ginger-lily, papaya, tamarind, fig, hibiscus, kumquat, lemon, angel-wing jasmine, coffee, coconut palm, banana, bamboo, black pepper, and acacia.
I always like learning new things and tried to impart that way of looking at the world to my daughter at Olbrich Botanical Gardens. It was nice to learn things in the warm Bolz Conservatory in a Wisconsin winter, too; I thought that the Olbrich Botanical Gardens and its programs should have been headline news sometimes.
By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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