Urban Tap, photo by Joy Bell [Enlarge in New Window]

Tamango: Bay Mo Dilo

To the French Guianese dancer and choreographer Tamango Van Cayseele, tap is more than a repertory of complex, exhilarating rhythms expressed through the feet—it’s a conduit for his culture. Born into a family of healers in the Amazon, the founder of the Urban Tap dance company considers tap a crucially important “memory keeper—a cultural force with no borders.”

For his Creative Capital-funded project, Bay Mo Dilo (Give Me Water), Tamango draws inspiration not only from the rhythms of his childhood, but from the writings of the late French Guianese poet Léon-Gentran Dumas (1912-1978). In the 1930s, Dumas—along with Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor—founded Négritude, a movement that denounced colonialism, espoused pride in being black, and, especially for Dumas, argued against any accommodation with the West. Dumas was, as Tamango notes, the most militant of the movement’s founders—the tres pères, as they were called—who believed that “one way to react to the history of oppression was through revolutionary movement.”

A full-length dance-and-music work with videography, Bay Mo Dilo is based largely on Tamango’s personal experience—particularly in New York City, where he has lived for close to two decades. Accustomed to working primarily in improvisation, he has for the first time actually set choreography.

Asked how tap assumed such a prominent role in his personal and artistic life, Tamango reflects briefly before replying, “We have a rhythm memory.” He explains that tap was his first form of self-expression as a child. “You grow in it,” he clarifies, and as you do, “you master your own life.” Tap then is a real language, with codes connected to the historical conditions of slavery in America, where the use of drums was suppressed. “That’s where the feet start to enter,” he explains, since it was of course impossible to ban feet. Like the blues, tap was a vital means of communication and cultural transmission of everything from everyday messages to life stories—an ingenious form of nonverbal history.

Beyond the Négritude movement, Tamango cites such influences as tap legends Charles “Honi” Coles, Chuck Green, Jimmy Slyde, Bunny Briggs, and Buster Brown. He didn’t formally study with any of them, but met them in the 1980s, when he took part in various tap celebrations in which they were the main attractions. In the 1990s, he featured them regularly at Urban Tap concerts. He smiles in recollection. “They called us the young lions.”

Another major theme in Bay Mo Dilo is Voodoo, which, Tamango points out, is infinitely richer and more complex than the one-dimensional Hollywood version of zombies, curses, and pin-studded dolls. “When I say ‘Voodoo,’ I mean a whole culture—mythology, art, history,” he says. “I mean the symbolic legacies of our ancestors.” With their animistic reverence for nature, Voodoo practitioners needed to gather in secret, away from the hostile gaze of slave-owners. Night provided perfect cover and “a time when those whose culture was invaded or those who had been taken from their native land” came together. Referring to the emergence of French creole culture, his work suggests that “something happened in the world that people here don’t know about.”

Bay Mo Dilo features four dancers, including Tamango, and four drummers, including master drummers Eric Danquin and Daniel Doulos from Guadeloupe. Urban Tap will tour Bay Mo Dilo in February and March 2007, presenting its New York City premiere at The Joyce Theater March 20-25. By acquainting American audiences with the rhythms of his culture, Tamango hopes Bay Mo Dilo will enable them to get a better sense of the rich French creole world that it literally “taps” into.

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Performance > Dance | History | New York | 2006