SWARM>IN MINDS: Cooking the narrative

A DIALOGUE BETWEEN JONATHAN BURROWS AND MAMADOU M'BAYE, MODERATED

By Diane Shooman

On Thursday, 17 July 2008, Mamadou M'Baye and Jonathan Burrows met for the first time, and held a conversation about their respective teaching. corpus initiated the meeting because both performers appear to be working toward very different ends as artists and teachers. Yet, among many other things, complex, textured rhythm plays an important role their work. The course I observed of Mamadou's was entitled “African Children's Dance” and his clientele were 5 1/2 to 8-year olds. Jonathan's course was called “Creative Writing and Dance” and the clientele were experienced professionals. Mamadou was working on movement, story and song, and Jonathan had teamed up with Adrian Heathfield for this workshop on choreography “… to find what is possible and what is not possible when you choose to speak, and what is possible and what is not possible when you choose not to speak.” The following is an excerpted version of the dialogue between Mamadou M'Baye and Jonathan Burrows.

Jonathan Burrows: Burrows.

M'Baye: If you were born in Africa, in your tribe, they would talk to you, they would tell you the beginning of Burrows from the first generation to the present day. They dance too, they show it with movement, with songs. I come from one family like that.

Burrows: Your family are Griots?

M'Baye: Yes, they are Griots. My mother was singing, my father was drumming.

Burrows: Do you have these genealogies? Do you know the strings of names?

M'Baye: Oh yes.

Burrows: I read "Roots" by Alex Haley recently. He traced one of his forebears through a Griot. (A lively conversation about Haley's family and the history of Senegal and Gambia ensued).

M'Baye: The first thing the child hears when he is born is songs. And these songs are the songs of his or her roots. For example, next week I'm in Africa with my children, for holidays. When I visit my aunt, she doesn't say "Hello, Mamadou, how are you?" No. She sings the meaning of the roots of my family "M'Baye". She says …what is your family name again?

Burrows: Burrows.

M'Baye: She sings: "Burrows, Burrows from …" (sings). This is how we say "How do you do?" So this is what I try to give the children.

Burrows: Who follows you in your family?

M'Baye: In my family, who follows me? My children.

Burrows: And they're learning?

M'Baye: I have three boys. It is crazy, because they were born in Berlin. That means they are in two cultures, between two civilisations. But I am also working in a school with children. And with all the children, I do instruments and culture. Every four weeks, they each learn a new instrument.

Burrows: But not just drums?

M'Baye: We sing and there are drums, saxophone, guitar, piano, violin, bass. At the end of the year, we do a concert with all the instruments. Then each child tells me which instrument they want to continue with.

Burrows: I play a melodium, which is a button squeeze box. I play English folk music on it. I have for 20 years.

M'Baye: That's the key. You know, today in class, you heard the children singing (sings the opening phrase of the refrain that the children sang). I translate for them the story of the song. Some times I cry in my class because here they are, European children. And after the first day, they are more African than me.

Burrows: Do your sons speak Wolof?

M'Baye: My sons speak Wolof, French, German and English.

Burrows: Wow!

M'Baye: I speak 25 African languages, because in Senegal there are 27 tribes. And every tribe has a completely different language, as different as German is to French. All of our neighbors speak different languages. And as a child, when you play with the neighbors' kids, you have to eat with their families. Even if you're just one year old. If you don't eat there, the parents go to your parents and say "Why? Why doesn't your child eat with our family?" And by eating together, you learn their language. So when I came to Europe, and moved to London, it was no problem. I moved near Highgate Station, Hornsey Rise.

Burrows: That's where my flat is.

M'Baye: It was around 1979, 1980. There were white South African people …

Burrows: Yeah, there were a lot of South Africans in that area, yeah.

M'Baye: French, Africans, a beautiful ratatouille.

Burrows: Yeah, yeah (agreeing). I still have my flat in Crouch End, but I live in Brussels.

M'Baye: Yeah? I live in Berlin. It's crazy. I told myself, "I want to go everywhere in the world. I want to see the world. But not Germany." When I was a child at school, the French taught us about Hitler. I said, "I won't go to that country." But as I was crossing Germany from Amsterdam to Norway with my brothers, I said: "I'm getting out here. I want to know the Germans today." And since this time, I've been living in Germany.

corpus: I love these stories. In fact, I love the fact that you entered this room and immediately started telling a story. Both of you are working with stories in your present workshops …

Burrows: At times in the workshop we have done something that involves people telling stories. But I mean, that's what we like to do; human beings like to tell stories. Even when there is not a story there, we look for a story.

M'Baye: When I show a movement, like this, I give them the language of the movement. The children are from Austria …

Burrows: How old are they?

M'Baye: The first class is 5 1/2 to 8.

Burrows: (chuckles) That's a nice age.

M'Baye: The second class is 9 to 12-year olds. On the first day, when I introduce a movement, sometimes at first they have a problem. In German, we ask: "What's happening?" I say: "Was ist los, was ist los? Was ist los, was ist los?" (Accompanies this rhythmic speech with an opening gesture of the arms and alternating feet).

JB and corpus: (laugh in surprise and enjoyment)

M'Baye: This movement – it's a language. It's life.

Burrows: I make my living doing very strange performances with another man who's a middle-aged bald gentleman. He's not a dancer, he's a composer. We work a lot with rhythm, we work a lot with counterpoint. I was looking for a way that we could be more complex with counterpoint. And in fact Matteo (Fargion) who I work with, his wife knows a lot about African music. She suggested to us an African notation system to do with complex counterpoint in two parts. And that was what we worked with. And we do build up in the performance a very fast and very, in a way, virtuosic counterpoint of sometimes movement, sometimes sound. Sometimes we sing, sometimes it's speaking.

M'Baye: African music is the sounds of Nature. In my classes, I say on the first day: "We are not dancing, we're cooking."

Burrows: Cooking?

M'Baye: Yeah.

Burrows: Brilliant!

M'Baye: We're making vegetable soup.

Burrows: Yeah. With ingredients.

M'Baye: I tell the children: "This vegetable is from Senegal, this vegetable is from Ivory Coast. This vegetable is from South Africa." And then we cook!

Burrows: That's a kind of strategy towards distracting the self enough so that the self can be revealed, because otherwise your desire to dance is so strong that you hold on too strong to yourself to dance. I like the analogy with cooking. Matteo is a very good cook, and that analogy of cooking with composition is something that he often mentions. It's about choosing the right ingredients and putting them together.

corpus: I visited both of your classes today. Being in your groups back to back, one common feature was the trust and confidence of the participants, and their openness to each situation. Mamadou, you were working with little children, but you conducted professional class. I was astonished by the length and complexity of the phrases they were dancing and singing, and their joy, their thrill, their delight and ease. I felt your genius as a teacher. You were challenging and encouraging them all at once, and they were having the time of their lives. I couldn't help but wonder what would happen if every child's heart, mind and spirit could thrill to intricate structures and long to recreate them with other kids, because they are conveyed with such respect and love and joy. I have to confess, I was so moved I locked myself into one of the little bathroom stalls and cried for all the children, present and past, including myself, who never had a chance to take a class with you. (M’Baye and Burrows laugh sympathetically).

M'Baye: I talk to myself, you know, I ask myself: "Why am I a teacher? Why am I teaching dance? Who am I?" I told myself: "Everybody's a prophet". Everything we need is waiting for us. (Pointing to heart). We just have to get to it. When we do some work, when we do it with heart, with the natural giving heart, it's just to be there. God bless us!

corpus: Thank you! Then, after reapplying my mascara, I slipped in as discreetly as possible into your class, Jonathan, despite the "Do Not Disturb" sign.

Burrows: I didn't put up that sign. I like being disturbed.

corpus: Half the group was in the middle of an improvisation, for which Adrian and you appear to have provided some parameters. There was such a clear space, even though there was a lot happening. The participants were open, listening carefully to each other, having such a good time. I was fascinated and so impressed by the keen sense of time, and by the subtle rhythms people set up with each other. You could feel them.

Burrows: There is a lot of contemporary dance that uses words and narratives. But there had been a split between spoken theater and danced theater. We want to look at ways that we can bring the two together. What we were working on today was where rhythm mediates between speaking and moving.

M'Baye: (Affirmative nod)

Burrows: That is something that would be very familiar to you (indicating Mamadou). But I just picked up on it, because I set a task for people to make something in duets on Tuesday, and somebody chose that as a way to bring the two things together. And it was very wonderful. It was simple what they did. So that's what we were looking at today. Not complex rhythm. Because that takes longer than two hours to absorb and work on. But at least some beginning about the part that rhythm plays, and how it can form a bridge. I saw that often what happens in the presence of speaking in contemporary dance performances is that things become very serious. And heavy. It can lose spirit. And rhythm is one thing that kept the thing alive.

corpus: Speaking of life, I'd like to ask both of you what as teachers you hope to awaken in your students.

M'Baye: I don't like to show them that they are students. I give them the key of the door. Then I say, if you have time to lock, then you will have time to open.

Burrows: Yes, it's up to them.

M'Baye: When they listen to this language, then mostly they give me what I need from them, and then I give them what they need from me, the key.

corpus: The awareness that they have the power to find doors and open them?

M'Baye: 90 percent of human beings get the key, but they don't know which door to open.

Burrows: It's usually the one right next to them, but they're trying to open the one that's across the way … that's the problem. (All three laugh.) The ones that are going to do something interesting are going to do it anyway. It doesn't matter what I say. I try to avoid the word "exploration". It sounds like you're approaching something with the sense that you know that it is not the thing you are actually doing; it's an exploration of that thing. I'm not exploring something; I'm just working. But I always end the workshop by suggesting that people forget everything I said and what we worked on. If anything was useful, it already did its work … When it's not conscious anymore, when it has become theirs, then they can use it and by then they don't know that they're using it. … Sometimes the material knows better than you. If it interests you, it was there before you came. You just recognised it in the workshop.

M'Baye: I say, if you can talk, you can sing. If you can walk, you can dance.

(August 15, 2008)