KanKouran West African Dance Company Stays True to Tradition

I was happy to spend an evening at the Randall Community Center in Southwest with Assane Konte and his energetic KanKouran West African dancers. Its annual drum-and-dance conference and performance take place this weekend. My story appears here.

"The program at Lisner will highlight dances with roots in Afro-Caribbean culture and feature drum-and-dance ceremonies from Senegal, Liberia, Mauritania and other West African nations. 'We're taking [the audience] back to our culture,' Konte says. 'Starting here, with what was left over from Africa when black people joined the Baptist church in America, the show travels first to the Caribbean covering the spiritual dances of the islands, then we cross the sea to our ancestral homeland -- Africa.'"