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Alexandra Tomalonis
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Compagnie Jani-Bi of Senegal

Compagnie Jani-Bi of Senegal
By Alexandra Tomalonis
Special to The Washington Post
April 9, 2001

Men in business suits, standing ankle deep in sand, delicately drink water served to them in tiny cups; men with briefcases exchange handshakes, at times warm, at times aggressive, the power balance eloquently expressed by the smallest shifts of weight and gesture. Compagnie Jani-Bi of Senegal’s “Le coq est mort” is full of such pictures, which tweak our ideas of man and his relationship with nature, and with his own nature.

The 70-minute work by Susanne Linke of Germany and Avi Kaiser of Israel danced Friday night at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater, subtitled “A piece for eight men,” was billed as “Tanzteater meets African dance” and the meeting produced fascinating images. Tanzteater builds dances from patterns and gestures more than steps, uses materials as integral parts of a work rather than decorative props, and often aims at addressing serious issues; African dance is very virtuosic and has been the religious and social expression of its people for thousands of years.

The choreographers used African dance to explore the alienation of man from nature. The “musical realization” by Etienne Schwarcz juxtaposes African and classical passages. Western choreographers have often addressed the theme of “civilized” man at war with his base animal nature, but in this African piece, natural man is shown as superior, wary of the trappings of polite society that can be both false and dangerous.

The men shed clothing during the dance, gradually changing from business attire to only trousers, and bare feet in the inescapable sand. At the end, machine gun fire erupts out of the score, and most of the men fall lifeless. The two we’ve come to know best (it was impossible to determine the identities of the dancers from the program), a tall man who moves with immense dignity and a shorter, extremely quick fellow with a liquid flexibility, become chimpanzees, moving with an amazingly realistic animal gait while retaining the characteristics they exhibited as men. It is these chimps who mourn the fallen men, sobbing, hitting their eyes with limp, ineffectual hands, dancing the unspeakable agony and rage at the stupidity of war and bloodshed.