Music highlights Kwanzaa celebration at Mt. Lebanon Public Library
Yamoussa Camara leads a dance session during the Kwanzaa celebration at Mt. Lebanon Public Library.
Seny Camara plays percussion.
Yamoussa Camara talks about West African culture.
Yamoussa Camara leads audience participation.
Dolores Heagy and Nico Savoia perform.
Yamoussa Camara plays the bala, which he said the Europeans named the balafon.
From left are Nico Savoia, Seny Camara, Dolores Heagy, Mohamed Camara and Yamoussa Camara.
Yamoussa Camara sings while playing the bala.
Nico Savoia takes a break.
Yamoussa Camara tells a story, with Dolores Heagy in the background.
Seny, left, and Mohamed Camara play percussion.
Even for folks who don’t usually dance, the sounds generated by African percussion instruments can make you want to move.
And so Yamoussa Camara had little trouble with audience participation during the Kwanzaa celebration held Dec. 28 at Mt. Lebanon Public Library.
”Let’s go!” he’d say, pointing to guests who almost invariably stood up from their seats to join in the dancing to the rhythm provided by musicians playing traditional instruments.
A former lead drummer and dancer for Les Ballets Africains, the national dance company of his native country of Guinea, Camara led an entertaining, energizing and informative program during the event commemorating half a century of Kwanzaa.
The holiday, created in 1966 by black studies professor Maulana Karenga, is based on the year-end harvest festivals that have taken place in Africa for thousands of years. It is celebrated from Dec. 26 to Jan. 1 and, according to Karenga’s writings, “was not created to give people an alternative to their own religion or religious holiday.”
Camara, who teaches West African dance at Carnegie Mellon and Point Park universities, provided a lesson about the instruments that were set up at the library. One was a bala, or balafon, a xylophone using hollow gourds as resonators.
”We used to communicate with that instrument from town to town, before the ‘big man’ invented the telephone,” Camara explained. “If there was something happening in this town here, we would let the next town know that something is wrong here, so they can come over and help.”
One of the types of drums on hand was the djembe.
“This is what the military in West Africa uses to communicate: Where is the enemy coming from? Which way? You don’t go that way. Go this way, because they’re coming from that way,” Camara said.
Also being played was a rope-tuned cylindrical drum with a rawhide skin at both ends.
“We call this doundon,” Camara said, “because that’s the sound he’s going to make: doun-doun.”
He elaborated about two variations of the instrument: the sangban, which is smaller than the doundoun and produces higher-pitched sounds, and the even-smaller and higher-pitched kenkeni.
“It’s a little baby, daddy and mommy,” Camara said. “So it’s a family.”
Joining him in providing accompaniment were sons Mohamed and Seny Camara; Dolores Heagy of West View, who has been taking lessons from him since shortly after his 2007 arrival in Pittsburgh; and Friendship resident Nico Savoia.
Along with his university work, Camara teaches African dance classes for students of all levels on Saturday afternoons in Squirrel Hill, and African drum classes are on Sundays in Bloomfield. For more information, visit camaradrumanddance.com.