Brian Slattery Photos
Seny Tatchol Camara, giving instructions on how to strike the drum.
On a recent Saturday, the main hall of Yale’s Afro-American Cultural Center echoed with the sound of drums, playing driving, intricate rhythms together — compelling enough to bring someone in off the street to ask if she could join in. She was in luck: the drums were part of an African drumming and dancing class offered by the New Haven School of African Drum and Dance, which, after a long Covid-imposed hiatus, has resumed, holding classes Saturday afternoons and Monday evenings for the forseeable future.
The classes are taught by the father-son duo of Aly Tatchol Camara and Seny Tatchol Camara, both now acknowledged masters of their craft.
“We’ve been here, in this very building, for over a decade,” said Seny, “almost as long as I’ve been alive — I’m 24 now.” The idea from the start was to create a community-minded, open class, teaching traditional West African rhythms and dancing. “A lot of the drum and dance now has been like ballet, for entertainment, but we go deep into the meanings, the purposes behind everything, educating people on the cultural values of this music.”
The classes happen at the Yale Afro-American Cultural Center, 211 Park St., every Saturday and Monday. On Saturday, drum class runs from 2 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. and dance from 3:30 p.m. to 5 p.m. On Monday, drum class runs from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. and dance from 7:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. But the idea that pulls them all together is that drummers who take the class are then invited to play, alongside experienced drummers, for the dance class.
For Aly and Seny, the connection between drumming and dancing is familial as well as cultural. Aly is from Boke, in Guinea, “right on the water.” He danced as a child and got recognition, “first from local companies, then big companies,” Seny said. Dancing took him from Guinea to Senegal, where he became a part of Les Ballets Bougarabou. He toured internationally with them, first to Europe, then to Canada and the United States, including New York. “There were a lot of students from New Haven who said, ‘we need something in New Haven, for the New Haven community. And he came here, and ever since, he’s never left. This is his new home.”
He met Seny’s mother, Cheri. “She’s the daughter of a dancer, so the arts runs in the family on that side,” Seny said. They met in a dance class, where Aly found her dance style “too hyper,” he joked. But they connected, and “then look what we produced,” he said of his son, with admiration. Seny was born in New Haven but has “been back and forth a couple times” to Guinea he said. “I love it there. I love it.”
When people ask Seny how long he has been drumming, he says, “since before I was born, because my mother, she danced and taught the whole nine months of the pregnancy. Stomach out to here, and she was going.”
“It’s like asking a goose when they learned how to swim, or when they learned how to fly,” Aly said.
“It just gets passed down, from generation to generation. That’s how it works,” Seny said.
In the drumming class, Seny passed some of that along to his students. Seated behind a djembe, he said, “sometimes I wish this got taught as a language, because some of the things that we do, it goes beyond the structure of the Western idea of music” — in the realms of both tonality and rhythm. Understood through the lens of Western music, drumming could seem enormously complex, but “to us, we’re not counting it — we’re speaking a language. Everything that we do has purpose, so we’re speaking to that purpose, especially in the relationship of drum to dance.” Rhythmic phrases are associated with specific dance steps, he said, and “it is all very beautiful.”
“But first, let’s get our alphabet, so we can speak,” he added.
He taught us the three sounds a djembe makes: tone, slap, and bass, along with the hand positions needed to make those sounds, and whether the fingers should be poised or relaxed. As he taught us our first four related patterns, he contextualized the djembe within the family of drums including the dundun and kinkine, and introduced us to the djembe’s ancestor, a drum called the yembe.
With Seny’s guidance, we played the patterns he gave us. He then introduced us to a traditional rhythm called the banda, which was, in fact, a series of interlocking individual parts. Showing us the parts one by one, he allowed us to take our time learning how to coax the different sounds out of the drums he asked for, while also getting used to the patterns our hands had to follow to make the rhythms feel right. In the end, he split the parts among us, and the full rhythm flourished in the echoing hall, with Seny adding improvisations to show where else we might be able to go in the future, what else we could make the drums say.
And, as both Aly and Seny suggested, the rhythms snapped into sharpest focus when playing for dancers. My hands were already tired from the drumming class, but I was game to try. Semy gave me a basic rhythm to hold down, and I fell in with the drummer on kinkine and dundun while Seny and fellow drummer Jocelyn Pleasant brought the rhythms to another level. Seny encouraged me with smiles and nods, letting me know I was on the right path. Ten minutes into the dance, I understood more and more. Seny’s patterns were a call and response with the other drums, but also a duet with Aly, who was leading the dancers on the floor through a series of moves that enriched the conversation.
For a few precious minutes, under the guidance of the experts in the room, we all moved and breathed as one. The air felt like it took a more solid form around my hands, as my eyes moved from drummers to dancers and back again. My lack of technique and experience ensured that I couldn’t stay at that peak. At one point, distracted by a particularly beautiful syncopated pattern the other drummers did, in response to a move Aly pulled on the dance floor, I lost the rhythm I was supposed to play entirely, and stopped playing. Semy had helped me when I stumbled earlier, but this time he let me listen close, as he had taught us to do earlier in the afternoon. I heard my missing part in the holes left in the others’ playing, and came in strong. Semy gave me a sound of affirmation; I’d found my way back into the rhythm without his having to show it to me. But that was because he had taught so well.