“They did a thing for the ancestors,” Abdel R. Salaam told Observer, “and then the rains came.” He was talking about his recent trip to visit the Baka people in the Dja Faunal Reserve, located in southeastern Cameroon. “So, we’re sitting there in the rain and they’re dancing in the rain. And then they pull us up and we dance a little bit with them. This was not a company. This is just the people, right? Dancing. They started dancing at like six o’clock, six-thirty, and stopped dancing after midnight… And I thought, how do I translate this experience to the stage?”

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Salaam has been DanceAfrica’s artistic director since 2016, taking over for the late and great Chuck Davis (1937-2017) who founded the festival in 1977. Now in its 47th year, the nation’s largest African dance festival will put the spirit of Cameroon in the spotlight with its program The Origin of Communities / A Calabash of Cultures from May 24 through May 27 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

The first DanceAfrica in 1977 is the stuff of legends. According to Mikki Shepard, the festival’s original producer, there were elephant and camel rides in the streets. Alex Haley, author of Roots: The Saga of an American Family, walked into the lobby at intermission and said he could speak for ten minutes. He ended up talking about history and legacy and why DanceAfrica’s journey was important for forty-five minutes to an over-capacity theater without air conditioning on a sweltering hot day in June.

Salaam performed at that first festival and has been involved with it ever since. He explained that, though the first few years featured only African American dance companies, Davis soon began featuring international artists as well. Around the 24th year, it became an annual ritual to go to the continent or someplace in the diaspora and find companies that are invited to perform. Which brings us back to this year’s pick: Cameroon, known as “Little Africa.”

“I’m still reeling inside from it,” said the festival’s producer Charmaine Warren (who is also a performer, historian, and writer) about the production staff’s trip to Cameroon. “It was beautiful, being with the Baka. And that’s part of what........

© Observer