Monday, 1 October 2012

Dance Templates and Sex-on-Stage


I. Leaders Club, on Iddi Mosi (the second night of Eid in TZ)

Alex Perullo wrote a brilliant book called Live from Dar (2011) in which he suggests that the success of Tanzanian bands is measured by how enthusiastically the audience responds.  The more the spectators dance, sing along, come up to the stage, get on stage, or shout out their approval, the more successful the musicians are thought to be.  And this determines whether the club/venue will hire the musicians again – cuz every venue wants to provide a good time to their customers. 

The original part of Perullo's thesis is that artists aren’t wholly responsible for the popularity of their performances.  Most old clubs and social halls in the city contain these embedded histories, or what Perullo calls “codes of response” – a kind of ingrained template of dancing and responding for the audience to follow.  After a venue has hosted hundreds or thousands of performances, the space has a kind of happy protocol; a performance is expected from the audience, not just from the band.  This means that older venues tend to host more “successful” performances than newer ones, because the audience is naturally more inclined to sing, whistle, jester, or get up & dance.  Perullo named the Leaders Club as a newer venue in which bands had a difficult time getting the audience to participate; he described one event where the audience sat tepidly in plastic chairs for the duration of the performance.

My first trip to Leaders Club was on the second night of Eid, and spirits were high.  That night, the Club was hosting a competition between two beloved, semi-historical bands: Msondo, who specializes in ngoma (or traditional Tanzanian dance), and Sikinde, whose forté is “Afro-jazz” – an easy-swingin’ fusion genre that bears little resemblance to actual jazz.  Msondo was in full swing when we arrived, and all the Msondo-loyalists were shaking and shimmying in front of the stage.  On an adjacent stage, Sikinde were setting up their instruments and testing their sound-system, prepping for a hard-hittin' retaliation.  The whole thing looked like a rap or dance battle, complete with gangs of supporters on either side.

While there was definitely some mad Afro dancing going down, I understood what Perullo wrote about the hesitance to participate.  There were plenty of middle-aged guys in the audience who were just slouching deep in their plastic chairs, chins on their chests, staring apathetically at the stage.  I sat next to one old dude who had two samosas in hand, and his dress shoes unlaced on the grass in front of him.  

"Which band do you like better?" I asked him.

"Sikinde," he grunted.  He licked the samosa grease off some fingers.

"Why... are they better musicians?" I probed, feeling all anthropological.

"Uhnnn-ghslkh," he snorted from his slouch. I tried to decipher the snort: was that affirmative? ambivalent?

He leaned over very creakily and asked me, still chewing: "Eh.. are you married?" My friend arrived at that precise moment bearing Tangawizis (hardcore TZ ginger-ale) and we quickly downed them before Sikinde started performing.  The rest of the night was spent in unplanned and unregulated and never-before-seen dancing, because at Leaders Club, no one knew what the hell they were supposed to be doing.  Hooray for non-historical venues!

II. Leaders Club last Friday, site of the Tanzania Live Music Festival

We'd actually planned to go out somewhere else last Friday, but after vuting on the porch to too many OK Computer tracks, we suddenly realized it was 11:30 and the event we'd wanted to go to was over.  But we weren't discouraged -- we could hear hyper, syncopated Tanzanian dance tunes wafting down the road from what could only be Leaders Club.  So we followed our ears (or, in our ganjafied clarity, what we understood to be our vibrating hearts) down the road to the music.  At the gate, they made us pay the standard 3-dollar entry fee, and in return, we got these tickets that said Tanzania Live Music Festival. 

We all looked at each other like, "Did you know this was a festival?"

Inside, we saw a massive outdoor stage looming on one side of the field.  There were hundreds of empty chairs in front of the stage, and a glitzy crowd milling around in the grass.  Only the front row of chairs was occupied by some fashionistas, and a guy with grills.  We danced and swayed for a while in the dark, until someone suggested, "Wanna sit down and rest for a while?"  But as we headed toward the plastic chairs, a huge guard stepped in front of us and demanded to see our VIP tickets.

"Show me VIP ticket," he said.

I looked at him: "Uhhhhmmm......"  At that point I had a hard time responding, because I was registering every festival-decibel with ultra-high acuity, and also because I couldn't understand why anyone would pay $15 to have access to plastic chairs.

"Get out!" he said, pointing to the dark abyss beyond the chair-area and the sound-booth, to where some ladies were adjusting the fabric over each other's bums.  

"But... we aren't even in the VIP section right now," I reminded him.  

"Out, out!"  he said, snapping his fingers like an angry mom.  

The bands/ dance troupes that performed that night were mostly bongo flava (Tanzania's mainstream blend of hip-hop and bad pop) and each successive group seemed like it was trying to outdo all the others in terms of sexual provocativeness.  I know I was absorbing everything through a mental magnifying glass, but it seemed like they were making totally shocking group-sex configurations on stage, wearing either tight weird bodysuits, or these retro-fringy cheerleading costumes that were worse than Halloween in an American college. And at some point they were so risqué that we all disintegrated into laughter -- we were laughing so hard that we had to lie down in the grass.  What was happening on stage was actually grotesque and terrifying.  Live Music Fest?  More like "Come watch live porn with your friends and family."   But everyone else was thinking the same thing -- a few Tanzanians around us were looking at the ground, some were watching with utter absorption, and most people were just laughing til they ached.

Then it started raining, and a Zanzibari mama-group came on, dressed in demure floor-length dresses. We got up and danced in the dark and the tumbling night-water to some wholesome muzik.  One of the sound-booth guys told us the festival would go til morning, but we left around 3, when the world was still feeling alriiiiiiiiight.

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