Revolutionary Movement
Guinea native Moustapha Bangoura is an internationally known proselyte for authentic African dance. But can this whirling dervish of a dance maker get his Chicago company to take root?
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Bangoura is Chicago’s only Guinea dance teacher and he is building the first African dance company in Chicago to focus exclusively on Guinea dance. Guinea dance, like the dance of other countries on the west coast of Africa – from Cameroon to Senegal – is highly acrobatic, says Doris Green, a retired African dance professor who taught at several colleges and universities in New York. The body is upright and the legs and arms do the majority of the work, she says. They leap. They jump. They hop.
The country is one of the main ancestral lands for African-Americans, having been one of the most heavily raided by European slave traders. Bangoura sees himself as a cultural ambassador for the people of Guinea. “I want people to know we are civilized,” he says. “We have education. We have culture. Do not think we are animals.”
Bangoura knows how to start a company. In addition to his Chicago troupe, he also has one in Paris, where he spends much of the year choreographing and teaching. Plus, he has more than 1,000 students worldwide, he says, and travels throughout Africa, Europe Australia and the U.S. to teach them. But the odds of success here are slim, even for a hard worker like Bangoura.
Dance is more expensive to produce than any other fine art, says Ann Norris, director of marketing and communications for Dance/USA. Unlike music, it generates no residual revenue. A start-up dance company today must hustle to survive. Even then, most just don’t have the money.
“You can make a CD and sell it really cheaply,” says Norris. But dance has a lot more overhead. “How many people are in an ensemble? Three to 20 plus people. Every single one of those people is an artist who needs to be paid regularly. You’ve got worker’s comp insurance. You’ve got liability insurance. The curtains, the floors, the costumes. If you have recorded music you have to pay music rights. If you have live music, you have to pay musicians. Then once it’s over, it’s done.”
The most stable dance companies in the U.S. must have annual operating budgets larger than $1,000,000, says Norris. Of the country’s hundreds of dance companies, there are 76 that have a budget that large. Out of the dozens of companies in Chicago, only Joffrey Ballet and Hubbard Street Dance, a contemporary company, have reached that level, says Norris.
The situation is even bleaker for African dance companies in the U.S. Of the 76 companies with budgets larger than $1 million, 76 percent are ballet companies. The rest are modern or contemporary.
Le Bagatae is one of those cash-strapped companies. It generally performs four to six times per year and holds an annual conference, where legends of African dance perform. The money that comes from the conferences and classes supports Bangoura. He earns additional income by traveling internationally to teach. That nets him about $35,000 to $40,000 a year, with an additional 10,000 in euros, he says. But his dancers moonlight with the company and earn their keep elsewhere. Sheelah Muhammad, the company’s 38-year-old assistant director, works full-time as the community development director for Oprah’s Angel Network. When she’s planning the conference, she works 20 more hours per week for Le Bagatae. Some of the other members are what Ann Norris called pick-up dancers. They join the ensemble when there’s a show. When they have scheduling conflicts, sometimes they have to miss rehearsal. One Sunday, two of Le Bagatae’s eight company members are absent. One of them dances for Najwa, another African company in Chicago, and skipped rehearsal to perform with them in Kankakee.
