KanKouran Dance Company recently marked 43 years of existence with an annual concert that brought hundreds of revelers to Howard University’s (HU) Cramton Auditorium for hours of nonstop West African drumming and dancing.
During that evening, Gen-Zer Lyric Hunte counted among the dozens of young people who showcased their artistic prowess on stage. As Lyric explained, preparation for this year’s concert allowed for growth in her role as a leader.
“I would go into groups and help other people,” Lyric told The Informer. “Sometimes I would help people individually if they felt like they didn’t have it. I just felt like I created a space where they felt comfortable enough to come to me if they felt like they needed help with anything, or if they felt like they still didn’t have it after doing it a lot of times.”
Lyric, granddaughter of longtime KanKouran youth dance instructor Veronica Hunte, has been a part of the dance company since the age of 2. Currently, she’s at Duke Ellington School of the Arts (DESA), where she’s currently studying dance with the goal of one day performing with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and launching her own venture.
Just weeks into her sophomore year, Lyric said she continues to see the benefits of her KanKouran education.
“I’m not ahead of everybody, but I kind of got a sense of it already because I have been at KanKouran and I have been exposed to [the need for] discipline and having to be at classes and rehearsals,” Lyric told The Informer. “Even at my school, if we have a show coming up, we might have extended rehearsals, and I already get out of school at 5 p.m, so I might be getting out at 7:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. KanKouran has already formed that discipline so it’s nothing new.”
As Lyric, a member of KanKouran’s fourth generation of dancers and drummers, reflected on the recent concert, she expressed appreciation for her new role as a mentor to younger performers. She said she’s doing for them what’s been done for her years prior.
“I was still getting to understand myself, so I would look at the people that were older than me and they would be good inspiration,” Lyric said. “Last year when we were rehearsing for the concert, we had a specific dance and the babies would do our dance behind us. So, full circle.”
Assane Konte Looks Back While Reaffirming His Vision
The title of KanKouran Dance Company’s 43rd annual concert was “Sunugaal: Our Boat,” which Assane Konte said draws parallels between the generations of KanKouran participants and the alliance that the Lebou, Serere and Walo-Walo kingdoms of modern-day Senegal formed to protect against foreign invasion.
“The kids I used to teach, they’re teaching the kids now. And those different ethnic groups [in Senegal], they’re connected together, have the same spiritual life, and are married,” said Konte, co-founder and executive artistic director of KanKouran. “That was the purpose of the theme, to be able to use that spiritual line between those different ethnic groups in Senegal … from the top all the way down. I still have people [who have] been with me since 1983 from the class. We raised so many generations, and some of them still come back after graduating college.”
On the night of Sept. 5, Konte executed yet another concert with the help of his artistic director Sue Ann Forde; musical director Papa Assane M’Baye; and a team of nearly 80 dancers and drummers, all representing a lineage of KanKouran participation going back four generations.
Nearly two dozen of those who graced the stage at Cramton Auditorium participated in community classes hosted by KanKouran throughout the year.
This combination of talents and experiences culminated in a program that started with an ancestral call for blessings, and later a metaphorical excursion on a boat that took audience members to the Lebou and Serer in Dakar and Mbour, respectively. Other stops on the journey exposed the audience to Lebou and Wolof cultures in St. Louis, Senegal, and that of the Walo Walo in Dagana.
The journey later ended in Dakar with a Wolof celebration. For Konte, the concert conveyed a message about what KanKouran has been able to accomplish in nearly half a century.
“KanKouran was founded here, not in Africa, so we started here to go back home,” Konte told The Informer. “Africa is the oldest ground in the earth. That’s the way everything started. It’s still part of who we are. It’s a drum beat. When you go to church, you can listen to it. The music and the dancing are all connected together. We’re the only ones who have that.”
Konte and former music director Abdou Kounta founded KanKouran in 1983 shortly after Konte’s move to the District. By the time of the dance company’s inception, Konte had already been making a name for himself in shows across the U.S. In 1985, after two years of training dancers, KanKouran hosted its first full-length concert, “A Visit to Africa.”
For more than 40 years, KanKouran has offered 12,500 dance classes for 800,000 participants; 28,000 school performances for more than 11 million young people; and 26,000 stage performances in the D.C. metropolitan area. This fall, KanKouran will host youth drumming and dance class at Dance Exchange in Takoma Park, Maryland.
While Konte touted KanKouran’s impact on young people in the District, he expressed his frustration that the dance company doesn’t have a building to call its own after decades in the District. He calls a permanent home base the last piece of the puzzle in his dream for KanKouran.
“I really want to have a school just like Dance Theater of Harlem and The Washington Ballet because we don’t have any dance school of African culture,” Konte told The Informer. “That’s the vision from the beginning because KanKouran is a corporate institute, and inside the institute [we] have the dance company. It will happen before I get out of this earth. It will.”
KanKouran Persists Through the Generations
Sponsors of KanKouran Dance Company’s “Sunugaal: Our Boat” concert include: D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities via National Endowment for the Arts; the Mellon Foundation; Events DC; the International Association of Blacks in Dance; HU’s Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts; and WHUT and WPFW 89.3FM as media partners.
Those who couldn’t attend the Saturday evening concert had dozens of classes to choose from during the Sept. 4-6 conference that KanKouran hosted at Washington Marriott Capitol Hill in Northeast. Throughout much of that weekend, participants got a taste of dancing and drumming originating from Senegal, Guinea, Liberia, Mali, Ivory Coast, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Antonio Vargas, a D.C. public school student who performed at “Sunugaal: Our Boat,” credited the drumming instruction as an anchor that’s kept him rooted amid all the distractions.
“It gives me something to do,” said Antonio, a senior at Columbia Heights Education Campus in Northwest. “I have a hobby outside of school and outside of soccer, which is my main thing, so it gives me balance in my life. … I’ve connected with people that have given me the opportunities to perform at other events and side gigs, which I’ve taken advantage of to help save up for college.”
Antonio, who aspires to study physical therapy and play soccer in college, said he started his relationship with the drum as a toddler while at KanKouran with his mother. That 15-year activity, he said, has piqued his interest in go-go, Afrobeats, and musical genres across Brazil and Mexico.
As Antonio explained, it’s also ensured that he can’t stay away from the drumbeat for too long.
“I was sitting in the classes that were happening just now and I didn’t have a drum, so I have to just watch,” Antonio said the day after the concert. “I wanted to drum so bad, but I didn’t have a drum. It’s just the feeling that you get inside of you, especially when you start hitting a slow state, it’s like, ‘Man, I’m digging this.’”
Antonio’s mother, Desepe de Vargas, said Antonio and his older sisters, one of whom dances professionally, had no choice but to connect to the culture.
“The fact that my children are in dance and music is because of nurturing from the womb and them being developed in that environment,” said de Vargas, a Liberian mixed-media artist and educator. “I kept my children in KanKouran because it was a tangible connection to their West African heritage. When you bring up a child in the way they should go, when they’re older, they will continue. And, that’s what it’s been for all three of my children.”
De Vargas, who served as principal at DESA between 2014 and 2017, told The Informer she first learned about KanKouran through her husband, a member of the African martial arts community.
Throughout her nearly 30 years with the dance company, de Vargas has taken her talents to the stage on a few occasions. Even when she’s not before the people, de Vargas said she still finds an appreciation for the artform and its connection to what she’s been able to accomplish with a paintbrush and canvas.
“The arts for us are not something separate. It is part of community,” De Vargas said. “It is part of who you are individually, and it is an expression of daily life, of cultural life. That’s why some of the dances mimic birds. Some of the dances are dances to celebrate the harvests. Some of the dances are to celebrate rites of passage. It is our cultural expression.”
Hunte, known to many as Mama Ra, also expressed gratitude for how she and other longtime KanKouran members have used their talents for the benefit of the dance company and all who take part in the culture.
“KanKouran has a particular legacy that people don’t leave [because] you have this history, you have this respect, you have this ancestry, you have all of these elements that are lingering there all the time,” Hunte told The Informer. “By the time you get to [Lyric and Antonio’s] age group, they’re pretty talented, but they’re following everybody that came before them.”
A New Yorker of Caribbean heritage who has had training in classical music, Hunte joined KanKouran at its inception after a stint with Wose African Dance Theatre. During the late 1980s, while teaching dance at Ujamaa Shule, Hunte’s students participated in KanKouran’s Saturday dance classes. They and students from other African-centered schools became the first members of KanKouran’s youth company.
Decades later, as her granddaughter and other young people take the mantle, Hunte said she’s reminded of the cyclical nature of African culture, and all it encompasses. She also evoked appreciation for the space that KanKouran has created.
“One thing about KanKouran is that nobody’s rejected,” Hunte told The Informer. “That is a concept that’s in African culture because a lot of this dancing comes out of particular ceremonies. It comes out of your feeling that it’s coming out of the music that’s being generated. I wouldn’t call it like some kind of dance that you learn. It’s not really coming out of that experience. It’s coming out of what’s coming out of you.”
