gr3vans's Blog

This is Sarah-Lee Koumbassa's Dance Class. From here on out I will refer to it as OWDD and assume that she is teaching unless otherwise noted.

Lead Djembe - Karim Koumbassa
Accompaniments - David, First timer Newman
Shekere - another new guy forgot his name

Sangban - Me
Kenkeni - Nick
Dununba - Michael

Warm up - Kassa
Dance for the evening - Soli (week 1)

Everything seemed pretty 'on' tonight. The energy was good, Soli especially rocked. While we were waiting for the dancers at one point I went into the echauffement that Michael Hunter had just showed me and got stuck... this could be because we didn't go over the sangban break and, yeah I got the stink eye from Karim (well deserved). After class Karim showed Michael and me some interesting variations for the dunun and sangban. S var had a really cool 'lilt' at the end. Hopefully I can get him to go over it again so that I can work on applying it with the dancers.

Sarah likes to do the same dance several weeks in a row and this was the first week of soli for her intermediate class on Thursdays. Before this was a couple weeks of Tiriba and then Mendiani for about 6 weeks before that.

Attendance for dancers was pretty slim but we still had a good time.

I would like to add the echauffement notation as well as the Sg break, but still need to learn the notation on this site (advice?).

Cheers