Bush Mango Drum & Dance was co-founded by Blair Hornbuckle and Colleen Hendrick and has been serving the Rochester, New York community since 1989.
West African drum and dance is at the core of all we do at our 34 Elton Street home.
You can find our professional company performing all over New York State! Visit the Events and Performances page to stay up to date.
We teach adults Monday - THursday evenings. Visit our Drum and Dance Classes Page.
Our program for youth is extensive! Visit Youth Project under Drum and Dance Classes. We can be found teaching and performing in schools through-out the region weekly! Visit the Community Programs page to find our Arts in Education news.
About the DRUMS AND DANCE
The dance and drum studied, taught and performed at Bush Mango Drum and Dance is inspired by the traditional music of West Africa.
The jembe (djembe is the French spelling) is moving toward world status as a percussion instrument, rivaled in popularity perhaps only by the conga and steel pan. Jembe traveled abroad in the 1950s due to the world tours of Les Ballets Africains. In the U.S., interest in the jembe first centered around Ladji Camara, a member of Les Ballets Africains in the 1950s, who since the 1960s has trained a generation of American players. Since the late 1980s, international interest in the jembe has taken an unprecedented turn. Tours of national ballet troupes from Guinea, Mali and Senegal, and former drummers from these troupes, are playing to growing crowds. There are increasing numbers of jembe teachers, and some of them are leading study tours to Africa. Major drum manufacturers have found a market for industrially produced jembes. Jembe has a long, widespread and profound tradition in West Africa. There is much more to that tradition than the physical act of moving hands to recreate rhythms, for those rhythms and their associated dances have vital meanings in Africa. From the clearing of fields, the celebrations of marriage, and the passing into adulthood to secret rituals, the jembe is there to guide.
African dancers and jembe players teaching abroad are charged by their legacy with faithfully communicating their traditions to foreign students. It is up to us as students of drum and dance to seek them out, to learn about their culture, to study the sounds and movements of the masters, and perhaps even to visit them in their towns and villages. Otherwise, their tradition may become so diluted that its very essence is lost.
Eric Charry, author of Mande Music: Traditional and Modern Music of the Maninka and Mandinka of Western Africa, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. |
