Uganda - Ndere, Makerere

In the morning, we eat breakfast.

And then we meet with Stephen Rwangyezi of Ndere Center who tells us something of the history of the place. He tells us that in 1912 Uganda, the British colonizers created anti-witchcraft laws which banned drumming and other elements of traditional performance and ritual in Uganda. He tells us the missionaries taught young children if they played the piano or dance ballet, they would go to heaven. The drum, of course, being a sure way to hell. He talks about how shame with one's culture become internalized. Invisible after some time. And so that now he, and other artists, are doing the work of recontextualizing traditional forms as something admirable and relevant to contemporary culture. Ndere creates performances with traditional dances and instruments from all over Uganda and also runs a theater for development network which links over 2,000 amateur companies performing educational theater for their communities. Rwangyezi says he wants people to understand Uganda is not just Idi Amin. It houses thriving, beautiful performance.

After Rwangyezi, we eat lunch.

And then we travel to Makerere. This is a major University in Kampala that houses a Music, Dance and Drama Department. This is where Deborah was voted best overall student. She has explained in the past that the Music, Dance and Drama field (MDD) is perhaps not the most supported field. She tells us in fact the MDD is said to stand for Musilu Dala Dala (Deborah, am I getting that right?) - a fool through and through. Here at Makerere, we tour the departments' three small buildings. It's summer and they are empty, but still they look somewhat in disrepair next to the newer and larger buildings of the rest of the university. We meet friendly professors who lead us through the buildings and explain which classes happen in which rooms. We pass students rehearsing under a large tree. The landscape feels green and dense. It's so green it gets in your bones, the feeling of something coming to life. And the cobwebs over the chairs in the room for dance. And the broken glass on the windows. I know some great artists that have come
from this institution. It must be difficult to concentrate here. And people do.

(Also, just some trivia, apparently, Barack Obama's father graduated from Makerere.)

And then there's dinner. Dinner with performance. Every Wednesday and Sunday, the troupe performs for the residents of Kampala and their visitors (like us, tourists) - a repertoire of dances, singing and storytelling. And they are very good at what they do. When the Ugandan borders were drawn at the end of the 19th century, they enclosed 4 major language roots and at least 31 different languages. Different dances. Different rituals. Different musical instruments. Ndere combines instruments from different origins in its orchestra. They perform dances from different areas together in one night. As part of the performance, the MC performer, Okello Sam, shares stories about the origins of each dance and what it meant inside of that community. The grand finale is a dance where performers balance clay pots on top of their head while continuing to sing and dance. OK, but I'm not talking like one clay pot here. I'm talking 6-8 clay pots piled on top of each other until the line of pots is taller than the dancers. And they balance this line while performing complicated hip movements and weight shifts. Virtuosic.

And then the questions. In taking these dances out of context, what is being preserved? And, yet, if Ndere did not perform shows bi-weekly for tourists would it survive? Ndere takes economically disadvantaged kids, trains them in traditional dance and song and pays for their education. 25 full time residents, 12 years or older. What does preserving a culture look like?

Today is made possible with a generous grant from California Institute of the Arts.