DANC163-Ricky Chen-Asadata Dafora

Kykunkor, or the Witch Woman: An African Opera in America, 1934

 

It was interesting to read and learn about Asadata Dafora’s inspirations for his creation of African Opera, which eventually paved the way for future African concert dance forms in America. As a child, he did not foresee his future as a dancer, but rather, an opera singer. His connection to dance is through his native country, Sierra Leon, which he reminisces in a German nightclub one night in 1910 when he heard African songs. His nostalgia suddenly propelled him to remember the ritualistic dances he witnessed as a child and to actually dance them in the nightclub. It is the suddenly discovered passion from within him that drove him to create Kykunkor in 1934.

The production rose to prominence immediately as it became one of the top theatrical productions of the year. While critics were applauding the success of the performances, their comments strike me as unaware of the significance of Asadata Dafora’s performance. At first, people criticized the combination of Western melody with African rhythms: “When any sort of sustained melodic line was introduced, however, the atmosphere was automatically destroyed by the fact that the voices all used European tradition of voice production. These “cultured” voices brought everything right back to New York where it decidedly did not belong” The relationship made between “cultured” and “European” was inappropriate because it implied that Africans are “uncultured” and as one critic would say “controlled savagery.” The purpose of Kykunkor is to show the audience that African dance can be a serious art form if people stopped believing that ritualistic dances do not belong on stage. Asadata Dafora’s creation of African Opera is exactly what it is: a combination of Western art form adapted to present the complexity of African culture and artistic expression. Opera is not only limited to Europeans because it derived from Europeans, but rather, opera is a form of story telling, an art form appropriately matched to African oral story traditions.