National Ballet of Senegal

The National Ballet of Senegal was great! It wasn’t really a ballet, more like a story told in traditional Senegalese music and dance forms, but it was spectacular, full of color and sound and energy. There was a lot of drumming but also singing, xylophone-type instruments, and stringed instruments; a lot of dancing but also some acrobatics, and just a while lot of enthusiasm and verve. Somewhere in the first act a dapper-looking man in a suit ran up on stage and joined in the dance, to the amusement and confusion of the dance company. But at the end of the whole show, they invited us all up on the stage to dance… what fun that was! They nabbed Irene, who tried to pull Jennifer in, who didn’t want to go but had to because I was pushing her from behind. 🙂 Yay for $5 rush tickets in the third row from the stage! That stage is tall, being on it and dancing in front of all those people is quite something. But when you’ve been sitting in a little seat for two hours watching these people dance their hearts out to the beat of a group of musicians who are playing with all their might, why wouldn’t you want to dance! Now I’m all energized. I need to dance. 😀

[This post was imported on 4/10/14 from my old blog at satsumabug.livejournal.com.]