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Out of Africa
Dance classes transport Nigerian dance rhythms, routines to Auraria
By Josie Klemaier
jklemaie@mscd.edu

Photo by Johanna Snow • snowj@mscd.edu Cathy Phelps, a part-time instructor at Metro, leads the group during the African Dance for Everyone class.

Adetunji Joda approached the crowd in the glittering atrium with both hands up to his ears, inspiring an enthusiastic response with his warm and welcoming smile.

After the assembled students had returned his greeting of “Good morning,” the Nigerian explained that this type of participatory zeal was central to the dances they were about to learn.

“I alone cannot do what we are going to do here,” Baba Joda said at the African Dance for Everyone event on Feb. 3. Joda explained to the group of more than 30 students that the Nigerian dances his company, Joda and Friends, teaches are designed to be cooperative. His courtesy title, baba, means father, and he fulfills this role by guiding dance classes with the rhythm of his drums.

“He is the grandfather of African dance in Colorado,” said Lindy Lyman, a musician and dancer who has known the cultural liaison for 30 years.

With a lifetime of experience, Joda explained that African dance is simply a broad term for an entire continent’s worth of history, culture and dance.

“You cannot just take one class,” he said. “African dance is not just one beat, one step, and then you learn it.”

Instead, it comprises a wealth of different styles that spans thousand of miles of geographic origins. More specifically, the performances of Joda and Friends represent the culture of Joda’s native Nigerian Yoruba people.

Joda and Friends began holding monthly classes at Auraria in fall 2006 after being contacted by Healthy Moves coordinator Linda Wilkins-Pierce.

“Like most of our Healthy Moves programs, it was a suggestion of one of our students,” Wilkins-Pierce said. Now the lessons have grown into a monthly Saturday program and have drawn students for a number of reasons.

“It depends on the interests,” Joda said about what a student can take from participating in African dance. The lessons gleaned from African dance can be cultural, physical or simply entertaining.
Baba Joda moved to the United States in 1958 from Nigeria and came to Colorado in 1971 after traveling through the Northeast with various African dance troupes. Since coming to Denver, Joda has been influential in Colorado’s African community and has been acknowledged by former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb, who named July 24 Baba Adetunji Joda Day. Also, the Annual Denver Black Arts Festival features a Joda Village dedicated to the African dance teacher. Joda has also founded or directed four major African dance companies, including Joda and Friends.

The dances led by instructors Cathy Phelps and Pamela Liverpool are warmups for traditional Nigerian dances, Joda said, that portray living things like birds, plants, animals and humans. The instructors hope to introduce more complicated dances in later classes, building upon these introductory moves as a base.

The songs and dances of the Yoruba people as led by Phelps and Liverpool require some coordination and commitment to enunciated movements of the hips, but mainly they require devoted participation and confidence. Saturday’s class started with rhythmic chants and claps, which took some dancers longer than others to get used to. By the end of the hour-and-a-half session, and after a few enthusiastic commands from Phelps to “travel,” or really get moving, the uncoordinated mass transformed into one seamless movement of energy, pulsing with the beat of the drums and shaking with the fervor of the chants. By the end of the class, each student readily jumped in to lead others in a dance move they had just learned.

At times during the instruction, some of the dance moves resembled yoga or a Rockettes routine. In addition to culture, students got a workout.

“My legs are burning,” said Kathryn Hadad, a Metro student who said she found out about the event through a campus-wide e-mail.

Sarah Mckelvey, a Metro graduate now attending UCD for her degree in multicultural counseling, attended the event as an assignment.

“I feel balanced,” she said about the workout. “At times it was awkward, but it was a new, different experience. Sometimes I got out of rhythm. You really have to feel it.”

Rosalind May, a UCD student who lived in Senegal for a year, came to the African Dance for Everyone class to revisit cultural ties.

“I like African dance, and I had a chance to do it before,” she said. “It’s nice to connect to it.”
African Dance for Everyone continues with two more classes, each from 10:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. on March 3 and April 7 in the St. Francis Atrium. Everyone is welcome to the free event.

Whatever the reason for participating, African Dance for Everyone is sure to evoke the African beat in everyone. Like Baba Joda said, “You don’t have to be an African or born in Africa to dance African dance.”

Find out more about Joda and Friends at http://www.afrikandance.com.