"Blue Tribe: Crossroads" blends contemporary dance with traditional African dance to express the transitions and challenges in the lives of the show's contributors.
"I guess it's just a sign of my times," said Rujeko Dumbutshena, the show's main choreographer. "It's basically about what I see my girlfriends and my community going through. Instead of just doing traditional African dance and taking the meaning from that, I thought we could express our own meanings."
The show will involve more than 100 dancers and musicians, most of whom are Dumbutshena's pupils, including the beginning and intermediate African dance students at UNM; the dancers and musicians of the Blue Tribe School; the core group of dancers she has been performing with for many years and the kids from the Thomas Bell Community Center where Blue Tribe instructs an after school class.
The challenge has been organizing all the different classes because each has learned its portion of the program separately. The key to this endeavor has been the level of cooperation and comfort with one another the dancers exhibit, Dumbutshena said.
"It's easier to (coordinate) when you've been working together as a community already," she said. "It's easier than you would imagine because you feel good around each other."
The notion of community is very important to the tradition of African dance, said Deborah Chen, assistant director for the show and productions manager for the Blue Tribe School.
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"There's more of a narrative thread to this production than anything else that Rujeko has ever done and having that amount of people to work with has been helpful in conveying that narrative," Chen said. "The number of people on stage can be very powerful and because African dance is about community and the interrelationships between people, it seems very fitting to get as many people involved as possible."
Chen said it's been hard to combine modern dance forms with the traditional African dance while still maintaining the integrity of the traditional dance. But, she said, this is what sets this production apart from any other they've done.
"We (the dancers) are not of African origin," Chen said. "It wouldn't seem right to have us trying to be something that we're not. We can understand and respect and try to learn the practices, but it wouldn't make sense for us to pretend that we are members of that culture and to perform it as such."
The questions of origin and authenticity have presented themselves to Dumbutshena as well.
"I've presented traditional African dance for a long time now," she said. "The thing that didn't really compute for me, after a while of doing it, was the fact that there was something that didn't quite connect because they weren't expressing something that was from their own emotion or reality."
The idea of expressing transitional periods for individuals and community - Dumbutshena addresses the war in Iraq - came out of a desire to bridge that gap. When developing the show, she considered the things people around her were going through like divorce and separations, job changes and the death of loved ones, basically " those kinds of crossroads that you get to in your life."
Still, the show will incorporate some traditional African dances that focus on universal themes. The program includes Yankadi, a dance used during funerals and as a flirtation ritual. Both meanings of Yankadi will be present in this weekend's show.
"Blue Tribe: Crossroads" is sponsored by the Panjea Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing African culture to Albuquerque, and will benefit for Blue Tribe School.
The Who, When and Where
Who: 'Blue Tribe: Crossroads'
When: Friday & Saturday 7:30 p.m.
Price: $9 Students, $10 in advance at Blue Dragon Coffee House, $12 at the door
Where: Sandia Prep Theatre
532 Osuna Rd.
Tickets and info: 489-0144
