Moving with purpose

African Takeover struggles to bridge Tulsa’s great divide

The lead-up to the African Takeover July 19 at Living Arts seemed like the perfect time to spotlight Tulsa’s African drumming and dance community. What I didn’t know when I set out to write this story is that we have no unified drumming and dance community. As I soon learned, the fractured state of African arts in Tulsa raises questions about authenticity, cultural appropriation and historical literacy—all of which leads us back to Tulsa’s fraught racial history.

There’s the predominantly white group of drummers at Living Arts, African congregants who drum and dance as part of a religious community, black drummers and dancers from north Tulsa, and artists who take varying degrees of liberties with African traditions. Though this story is by no means an exhaustive profile of Tulsa’s drummers and dancers, it’s my attempt to shed light on their complex and multi-layered challenges.

The drumming community that now holds Wednesday night classes at Living Arts originated in the mid ‘90s with local musicians Leslie Brown, Josh Massad, Joan Crager, Michael Back, Rob Bowe, Jeff Porter and others. Inspired by their first exposure to African arts at a gathering in Vermont, Brown and her colleagues began networking to bring African teachers to Tulsa. The community has evolved over the years but has never become racially diverse, despite, according to Brown, efforts to reach out to black Tulsans. 

African-dance instructor Deena Burks returned to Oklahoma three years ago after more than a decade of workshops and dancing around the U.S. Burks, who has studied under several African masters and spent time in Guinea and Senegal, thought that her deep knowledge of traditional African drumming and dance would give her credibility in Tulsa’s arts community. Despite having local musicians like Brown and Porter behind her from day one, Burks, who is not black or African, said she’s been met with ongoing race- and gender- based resistance to her instruction as well as a general lack of enthusiasm for authentic African arts. She’s been working to build support for traditional drumming and dance in Tulsa, but she didn’t anticipate the extent to which racial tensions would stifle her progress.

“There’s clearly defined color lines here, and it’s been really tedious,” Burks said. 

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The distinction between playing with rhythm and learning authentic African drumming and dance is a matter of respect and integrity. Shekhem-t Ausart grew up in Jamaica, lived and danced in New York City for 30 years and moved to Tulsa 15 years ago. The protégé of internationally known African dancer Pearl Primus, Ausart has danced on and off Broadway as well as in Africa. Ausart said it’s critical to receive instruction from an African master teacher or someone who learned from one. 

“I’m not saying that you cannot master the rhythms,” Ausart said. “You cannot claim to be and do something if you have not connected with those who are representative of that process. Now, what you want to say is, ‘I am beating a drum.’ But you don’t know African rhythms. Because every single rhythm has a meaning, has content, it has purpose. It has effect, it’s connected to an entire circle of life.”

Burks makes a point to educate her students about each rhythm’s ethnic group of origin, ceremonial purpose and correct movements. When she does deviate from tradition, she’s transparent about it.

“I try to adhere to how my teachers teach me,” Burks said. “I try not to even present it in a western way—because people want to hear it and see it broken down in notation and stuff. I do resort to that if I need to teach a drummer to really get them to learn something. But I try to present it in a non-western way as well.”

Authentic drumming and dance also requires deep knowledge of the art’s cultural origins.

“African dance is that intermediary that connects spirit, mind and body, connects you to your individual soul, that of your ancestry, everybody in your family, but also the greater community in which you live,” Ausart said. “That is the holistic approach to African dance.”

 Traditional drum making, from harvesting the tree to cutting the animal for its skin, is undertaken with ceremony and prayer. Synthetic drums aren’t made with the same care, don’t hold the same meaning and might do more harm than good because the drums affect the physical body and the spirit.

“When you beat the drum, it awakens the pulse in the heart,” Ausart said.

Specific gestures also have physical, energetic and spiritual purposes and implications. Ausart gave the example of a fertility dance that’s used for women trying to get pregnant and also performed at planting time. It brings blood into the womb, strengthens the ovaries and raises Ayida Damballah (a term for life force, otherwise known as Chi or Kundalini).

“Fertile earth, fertile woman, beautiful child,” Ausart said. “So everything is connected to that circle of life. Before you start dancing, before you start moving, you need to understand those internal principals, so then when you dance, you’re not just dancing—you know that every movement that you’re doing is connecting you to something higher, something greater than just your own person.”

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Jeanette Robbins-Biles, who’s danced for 12 years and taught African dance locally and at Vanderbilt University, was initially among those skeptical of Burks. She had a change of heart when they attended the same conference in Boulder. Almost everyone at the event was white. 

“And they were getting it,” Robbins-Biles said. “They were dancing just as well—because they have a base of a community of people that have been dancing for 10 years. It’s a shift. And Tulsa, culturally, has not shifted.” 

The shift she described is from watching to participating, and from superficial drumming and dancing to deep immersion in African tradition. Robbins-Biles says it will take time to build an inclusive and authentic culture of participation here. 

“Until Tulsans are really willing to engage in cultures other than their own, it won’t thrive,” she said. 

Despite her initial reservations, Robbins-Biles is now Burks’ biggest supporter in Tulsa—which is great, because local support for African arts is apparently pretty hard to come by. Local arts organizations’ responses to Burks’ African Takeover (and the corresponding visit of two Senegalese guest artists) have been lukewarm and worse.

“They won’t return our phone calls, emails, all that,” Robbins-Biles said. “I don’t know why. If you have some Senegalese people here in town for a month, are you not going to take advantage of that?”

Ausart has also gotten behind Burks and African Takeover. Her Nubian Heritage Arts organization is underwriting the fees for the Lacy Park facility, and Ausart is helping to promote the festival.

“It’s been a long three years, a long road,” Burks said. “But I have had breakthroughs, and things are happening. And I’m elated to be accepted into Lacy Park this time.” 

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In order to build a unified and stable African arts community, Robbins-Biles and Ausart emphasized that Tulsa needs a strong core of traditional African instruction. Sponsoring extended residencies for master teachers and nurturing the community will require more resources and better artist compensation—a notorious weakness for Tulsa. 

“(In New York) I lived, played and made money as an artist,” Ausart said. “I get on stage, I work for an hour, hour-and-a-half and make two or three grand. I come to Tulsa, and they say, ‘Fifty dollars.’ And I’m looking at them like, what? To do what?”

Instead of trying to live on such meager sums, Ausart created a summer arts program, founded nonprofit Nubian Heritage Arts and connected with the Tulsa Performing Arts Center Trust’s Chad Oliverson and Shirley Elliott, who were extremely receptive to her work. She described a time when she went to the PAC with performers from north Tulsa. Though they’d been performing in Tulsa for decades, they had never stepped foot in “the big house,” as they called it. 

“That’s why Shirley Elliott and Chad Oliverson were so welcoming,” Ausart said. “They were of a mindset that we need cohesion, we need diversity, we need inclusion.”

In addition to a lack of support for artists, dance and drum classes are cost-prohibitive for many Tulsans. As an alternative, Ausart suggested a reciprocal approach that requires non-monetary forms of engagement and service from participants.

“Just building a dance community changes things,” Robbins-Biles said. “It gives you something to look forward to. It gives you something extra to do. There are very few cultural events in Tulsa that are non-white.”

Still, all the money in the world won’t build a legitimately diverse arts community. Our lack of interracial collaboration appears to be a symptom of a deeper issue.

“There has been a breach in the human process in Tulsa,” Ausart said. “That was the genocide that happened in 1921.”

“I’ve worked with this community, and there is a sense of shame and guilt with many people, which creates an oppression within their spirit. And that further negates the trust that could be established between these two groups of people.” 

“There is this great divide. And the first question is why? And the why comes back to: There is a hurt; there is a pain somewhere. The pain is in white people, and the pain is in black people, and never the twain shall meet, until that honest conversation takes place. There is a culture in America that says, ‘If I pay you money for so and so, that makes it ok.’ This has nothing to do with money. This has everything to do with healing wounds, the spirit of reconciliation.”

“The conversation of 1921 has not happened for real yet. And if you do not identify an illness in terms of its real cause, then you will never heal. … That’s how I see 1921. It’s a cancer that is still eating at Tulsa as a whole. … 1921 happened. Own it. It happened—your ancestor did this part; your ancestor did that part. Take off the rose colored glasses and call it what it is.”

Ausart said she sees Burks as an ambassador for African dance and a potential conduit for reconciliation. In addition to connecting black Tulsans with the strength and spirit of their heritage, Ausart said African drumming and dance have the power to bring healing to Tulsans of all backgrounds. 

“The spirit of black people here has been broken,” Ausart said. “And through the dance, through the drumming, and trying to bring that older part of their culture back in, (African arts can) help them to reconnect so they can put that experience in its proper place and be able to move on.”

African Takeover: A Cultural Art Festival // July 19 at Living Arts // 5-9 p.m. 

African Takeover celebrates African traditions through music, visual and performing arts, culture and food. Proceeds from the event will help cover the costs of bringing guest Senegalese artists Sidya Cissokho and Thiane Douf to Tulsa for the month of July. 

The festival will include visual arts, a traditional dance and drum performance by Third Eye Vision and Cissokho, and a live Afro Pop/Afro Jazz band with Cissokho and local musicians. In addition to music, there will be spoken word performances, a fashion show, traditional Senegalese food and a Caribbean flash mob.

A professional dancer, drummer and musician, Cissokho grew up touring the world with his father, a well-known Senegalese musician. A master of the djembe, the Dunduns, the Balafon, the Sabar dance of Senegal and the traditional dances of Guinea and Mali, he has also worked with artists including Shakira, Angelique Kidjo and Stevie Wonder. Cissokho lives in North Carolina.

Douf is a fashion model and musician in Dakar, Senegal. Although he has come to America as a performer, Douf aspires to be a film actor and make the cover of a top fashion magazine such as GQ.

Tickets to African Takeover cost $5 for entry or $10 for entry and food.

For more from Molly, read her stories on native comedy troupe the 1491s and TPS Superintendent Deborah Gist.