Ballet Nimba from Guinea is an African dance theatre company and music recording artist. It is the first of its kind to be based in Wales, UK. It was founded in 2010 by Guinean choreographer Idrissa Camara with its home in Cardiff and is made up of a collective of about 15 dancers and musicians.
Ballet Nimba, Wales's first and only professional Black dance company, was founded by Guinea-born choreographer Idrissa Camara in May 2010, following receipt of a grant from the Arts Council of Wales. [1] [2]
Ballet Nimba features traditional and contemporary West-African Dance and Music, with a strong presence in the Black Dance Sector. Idrissa Camara was named as one of the top 10 people to meet at the 2010 Decibel Performing Arts Showcase, Arts Council England's biggest bi-annual event promoting diversity and equality in the Arts. [3] In 2013 Idrissa Camara was awarded a Trailblazer Fellowship from the Association of Dance of the African Diaspora. [4] These 2013-14 trailblazer bursaries were given "in recognition of creative spark, ambition and leadership potential". Ballet Nimba is based on the "African Ballet" tradition which was born in Guinea to tell the stories of the Griots (travelling musicians and the region's oral historians) using artistic choreography and made famous by Les Ballets Africains. The name Ballet Nimba not only reflects the inspiration behind their work but is also a political statement regarding the reclamation of the term "Ballet" and challenges the perception that African dance is something from the past to be viewed with nostalgia, rather than the dynamic and exciting art form which it is.
In 2012 Ballet Nimba became recording artists with their first album Saiyama, and performed on the world stage, headlining festivals in the UK and in Europe. Their album was digitally released in 2013. [5] They were asked to attend the Trac Cymru programme for International Development in 2013 and subsequently were successful in being picked for the WOMEX legacy tour for October 2013 [6]
In 2014 Ballet Nimba produced its first film, a Documentary Film by Idrissa Camara. It was first screened at Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff at the Wales Dance Platform Event. It had its North American Premiere at the Silicon Valley African Film Festival [7] where it won the award for Best Documentary Short.
Ballet Nimba are self-styled ambassadors for West African Art and culture in the UK. The artists are from several West African nations and they have performed all over the UK at festivals, art centres and rural touring venues, most significantly at London's Southbank Centre [8] and WOMAD's UK festivals. [9] Their performances incorporate acrobatic dancing, traditional musicians and drama. Productions are based on traditional mythology but performed by young contemporary artists with an original sound track. [10]
"World music" is an English phrase for styles of music from non-Western countries, including quasi-traditional, intercultural, and traditional music. World music's broad nature and elasticity as a musical category pose obstacles to a universal definition, but its ethic of interest in the culturally exotic is encapsulated in Roots magazine's description of the genre as "local music from out there".
A djembe or jembe is a rope-tuned skin-covered goblet drum played with bare hands, originally from West Africa. According to the Bambara people in Mali, the name of the djembe comes from the saying "Anke djé, anke bé" which translates to "everyone gather together in peace" and defines the drum's purpose. In the Bambara language, "djé" is the verb for "gather" and "bé" translates as "peace."
WOMAD is an international arts festival. The central aim of WOMAD is to celebrate the world's many forms of music, arts and dance.
The Australian Ballet (TAB) is the largest classical ballet company in Australia. It was founded by J. C. Williamson Theatres Ltd and the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust in 1962, with the English-born dancer, teacher, repetiteur and director Dame Peggy van Praagh as founding artistic director. Today, it is recognised as one of the world's major international ballet companies and performs upwards of 150 performances a year.
Bembeya Jazz National is a Guinean music group that gained fame in the 1960s for their Afropop rhythms. They are considered one of the most significant bands in Guinean music. Many of their recordings are based on traditional folk music in the country and have been fused with jazz and Afropop styles. Featuring guitarist Sekou "Diamond Fingers" Diabaté, who grew up in a traditional griot musical family, the band won over fans in Conakry, Guinea's capital city, during the heady days of that country's newfound independence. Bembeya Jazz fell onto harder times in the 1980s and disbanded for a number of years, but reformed in the late 1990s and toured Europe and North America in the early 2000s.
The Baga are a West African ethnic group who live in the southern swampy lands of Guinea Atlantic coastline. Traditionally animist through the pre-colonial times, they converted to Islam during the mid-eighteenth century under the influence of Muslim Mandé missionaries. Some continue to practice their traditional rituals.
Akram Hossain Khan, MBE is an English dancer and choreographer of Bangladeshi descent. His background is rooted in his classical kathak training and contemporary dance.
The music of Cardiff has been dominated mainly by rock music since the early 1990s with later trends developing towards more extreme styles of the genre such as heavy metal and metalcore music. It, along with the nearby music scene in Newport, has brought a number of musicians to perform or begin their careers in South Wales.
WOMAD Charlton Park or WOMAD UK is the name given to the World of Music Arts and Dance (WOMAD) festival held in Charlton Park near Malmesbury, Wiltshire, England, since 2007. It is the direct successor to WOMAD Reading, which was held in the town of Reading each year from 1990 to 2006, and previous WOMADs elsewhere in England since 1986.
DanceAfrica is a heritage and community celebration equable on the manifold dance forms of the African Diaspora held annually in New York City, Washington, DC, and Chicago. Included are indoor and outdoor performance including live music, a film series, master classes, education programs, and an outdoor bazaar. Its current artistic director is Abdel R. Salaam.
Manimou Camara is a master drummer and dancer from Guinea. Manimou specializes in several percussive instruments, namely the dynamic hand drum called djembe, three bass drums called dunun, sangban, and kenkeni as well as the kringni. He is the founder of Dounia Djembe, a Seattle-based percussion and dance company. He is a member of the Kpelle people and Malinke ethnic groups.
Les Ballets Africains is the national dance company of Guinea and is based in Conakry. It is one of the first African national dance companies. It has toured extensively around the world. Although the French name might suggest the idea of European ballet to English speakers, the focus of the company is actually on promoting traditional African dance and culture.
Tessitura is an enterprise application used by performing arts and cultural organisations to manage their activities in ticketing, fundraising, customer relationship management, and marketing. It refers to itself as "arts enterprise software."
Ballet Manila is a classical ballet institution and dance company in the Philippines. It currently highlights more than fifty highly trained dancers in the highly rigorous Russian (Vaganova) method of classical ballet. Locally the company has performed in 47 cities holding more than 4,100 performances. The company has done tours in Asia, Europe and North America, where it has held more than 140 performances. The company is most notable for its in-house creative director, principal dancer and prima ballerina Lisa Macuja-Elizalde. Along with Ballet Philippines and the Philippine Ballet Theatre, Ballet Manila is one of the three major ballet companies in the Philippines. It regularly held its performances at the Aliw theater and Star Theater which were damaged by a fire in 2019, which are both located within Star City at Pasay. The concept of a ballet company by the dancers, of the dancers and for the dancers was the idea of Lisa Macuja-Elizalde when she, along with ballet master Osias Barroso and ten other dancers established Ballet Manila in 1995.
Jupiter Bokondji is a musician from Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). He and his band, Okwess International, released their first album, Hotel Univers, in May 2013 in the United Kingdom. The band was created in 1990, and they toured the African continent. However, at the same time that their popularity grew, a civil war broke out in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Some band members fled to Europe to escape violence, but Bokondji stayed in Kinshasa. As the war died down, his popularity grew again, and in 2006 he was featured in the documentary Jupiter's Dance. This brought him to the attention of UK producers and musicians, which led to him joining the African Express tour, the production of Hotel Univers, and performing at the 2013 Glastonbury Festival.
Idrissa Camara is a dancer and choreographer originating from Guinea in West Africa. He has made the UK his home and is founder and director of Ballet Nimba, an african dance theatre Company which he founded in 2010. Idrissa is also a music recording artist having produced an album Sogay with his company's musicians and more recently he has turned his hand to film making producing the short documentary Fare Ta.
Greensboro Ballet is a professional ballet company in North Carolina. It is the only ballet company in the Piedmont Triad. It is one of the few non-profit ballet companies in North Carolina. Greensboro Ballet has presented works by George Balanchine. The company also has performed a number of works made especially for the Greensboro Ballet by Rick McCullough, Jill Eathorne Bahr, Leslie Jane Pessemier, Elissa Minet Fuchs, and Emery LeCrone. Maryhelen Mayfield, who served as artistic and executive director of Greensboro Ballet from 1980 to 2019, choreographed over twenty-five works for the company.
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Msafiri Zawose is one among the prominent contemporary Gogo musicians. His name is associated with his traditional Gogo style music, which relies heavily on the zeze and ilimba in combination with distinct lyrical harmonies.
Unlimited is a commissioning programme that celebrates the work of deaf and disabled artists, originally conceived for by Arts Council England for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. Since its inception, the programme represents a multi-million pound investment which to date has commissioned more than 70 pieces of work across theatre, dance, visual art, music, literature, film, poetry and performance art. Several Unlimited-commissioned pieces have gone on to have a global reach, such as Sue Austin's Creating the Spectacle, which has reportedly been seen by more than 150 million people worldwide. Others have won critical and industry acclaim within their field, such as Touretteshero's Backstage in Biscuit Land, which earned the company the 2014 Total Theatre Award for Best Emerging Company. Unlimited is currently delivered in partnership between Shape Arts and Artsadmin with senior producer Jo Verrent.