African troupe full of heartfelt dance

Yesterday celebrated the 34th anniversary of Guinea’s independence from France, and Les Ballets Africains, one of Africa’s most accomplished dance troupes, celebrated it with breathtaking enthusiasm at the Maine Center for the Arts.

The entire evening demonstrated the vitality of natural rhythms from within and without the human body. Beginning with “Rhythms of Africa,” a 10-minute percussive piece, the 35 dancers and musicians filled the stage with heartfelt movement, song, drama, and energy. Their sinewy dark bodies and uninhibited movement carried the audience into a faraway world, one of complete devotion to the land and to the communion of all its inhabitants.

At every acrobatic turn, the dancers venerated that earth. The center of their movement was always the solar plexus, the space wherein human life finds its beginning, nourishment, and hungers. Unlike the traditions of western ballet, in which dancers attempt to defy gravity and the shapes of their fragile bodies, this unpretentious and demanding movement didn’t fight gravity, but embraced it. Agile dancers dove into the floor as if into water. Others rolled their bodies like wheels across the stage. Women clentched their fists, flexed their toes, and called out in nasal voices.

Except for the time during intermission, the performers moved constantly for two hours, presenting a total of five pieces, including abstract, traditional, and narrative imagery. The most amazing moments were those in which solo performers moved to center stage to present fascinating skills, such as a series of low-to-the-floor flips, quick-stepping foot work, or cyclonic turns. The audience was most amused by lighthearted, improvisational shenanigans between dancers.

The epic piece, “The Bell of Hamana,” told the mythic story of a woodcutter who kindly aids a tortoise that has been turned over on its shell. Afterwards, the woodcutter tries to fell a tree but is interrupted and captured by terrifying spirits of the forest. Before they can destroy the doomed woodcutter, however, the tortoise intercedes, saves the man, and gives him a bell, the first of the Mandingo civilization. He returns to the village, where a welcoming celebration gloriously explodes.

In “Malissadio,” another lengthy story piece, a great drought ends when a pregnant mother offers her unborn child to the river spirit. The child grows into a beautiful woman and is persued by a hunter. The dance of their love, an essentially separate dance joined in occasional folds and steps between the two bodies, was filled with sensual, playful, loving joy.

The brilliantly colored costumes (no less than a 10 per dancer for the longer pieces) and the pulsating rhythms evoked the richness of this culture. Each of their steps and the clean, tinny sounds of unusual African instruments seemed to transport them back to native soil, and, indeed, we all should have been outdoors thrusting our hips to the backbeat rather than sitting in a concert hall.

The speed with which last night’s audience leapt to its feet surely indicated a sincere appreciation for the beauty and skill of Les Ballets Africains, but it’s quite probable that most of the viewers needed to leap by the end of the evening. It was really the only appropriate response to this spirit-lifting artistry.