Hallie Gammon - DANC 0163 - An Opera of the West African Bondo

It is interesting to read this article just after the one discussing Asadata Dafora's work - in his case, he took traditional African music, dances and stories and molded them into an opera of his own creation. In the case of the Bondo, Frederick Lamp studies their initiation ritual in the context of opera that is not created by one author or composer but is the intellectual property of an entire culture. This goes even further in challenging our Western notion of opera than Dafora's work did - critics of Kyunkor disqualified it on the grounds that its music consisted entirely of drumming and the focus of the play was not necessarily on vocal numbers. What would they think of the aŋ-wol? Not only is its orchestra once again entirely made up of drummers, but the cast includes the entire village, the set is spread over a wide territory, the four acts span a full day and night, and it is impossible to identify a single author/composer for the piece.

In our Western mindset, an opera is a work of art, which necessarily implies some distinction between the artist and the person appreciating the art. For us, art represents something - it is aesthetic and intellectual, but, while we would admit that the life of a person who has no contact with or interest in art is probably very dull, we wouldn't exclude that person from the community because of it. This is emphatically not the case in Temne culture: according to Lamp, this opera/coming-of-age ritual is "a prerequisite for adult life, a prerequisite for 'being.'" For the Temne, this opera is not a piece of art that is created by one person and appreciated by another. Participation in its creation is non-optional, an integral part of becoming a member of society and then taking others through that same journey. In this sense, we might almost wonder if dance in Temne culture should really be considered art -- part of my dictionary's definition of art includes the phrase "to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power." These characteristics are certainly part of aŋ-wol, but its primary purpose goes much deeper -- Lamp says, "the opera of Bondo aŋ-kus not only is a drama symbolizing the transformation of girls into women, but it is, in fact, the means of that transformation." For Westerners, there is a clear distinction between art and "the real world" -- most of us do not believe that events portrayed in a dance or theatrical performance have a direct, material effect on the quality or status of real events or persons. The purpose of art is sometimes to accomplish something, but this is usually in a more intellectual sense -- to provoke thought or reaction, not to change the nature of being.

For the Temne, this Bondo opera is something far beyond what we as Westerners can comprehend in the context of art. We might come much closer in thinking of it in terms of religion (for example, we can relate it to confirmation in a church, a Bar Mitzvah or similar, though the analogy is incomplete since these rituals do not initiate us into the entirety of our culture), but, for me at least, this seems to lead us back into thinking of the dance and theatrical style of what can be rightly termed a performance as merely symbolic acts of something that takes place by some other means. The Bondo opera is an instance of a kind of dance that we simply do not have in our culture -- dance that accomplishes something spiritual yet at the same time very concrete in the way it transforms a girl into a woman. This is yet another instance of how and why Westerners fail to truly comprehend the absolute primoriality of dance to African culture.