The elders danced in their fraying turbans as the opposition party's candidate for president campaigned across the swirling sands of the Sahel.
He gossiped with the elders, threw dances in his house, engaged half-heartedly in the local courting rituals and explored the beliefs, superstitions and intensely local politics that formed their worldview.
After few dances elders wilted and discreetly withdrew.
But knowing that Mr. Houston-Jones, an erudite, mischievous elder of contemporary dance, will serve as guest curator is, frankly, enough for me.
In "Time Is Time," Dianne McIntyre, a revered elder of black dance, draws on Baldwin's poem "Song (for Skip)" and a live jazz score by Onaje Allan Gumbs.
If Brown has taken his inspiration from his black-dance elders, the crucial person, I believe, is not Ailey but Garth Fagan.
Abercrombie & Kent's new Connections tour, "East Africa: Tanzania and Kenya," for instance, includes a visit to a local school, a meeting with a Maasai village elder and a dance performed by members of a local tribe.
As elders performed traditional dances yesterday in the shadow of Uluru and boys showed off their spear-throwing skills, he recited a litany of despair: people living 30 to a house, girls sniffing petrol in a quest for oblivion, children leaving school without numeracy and literacy skills, men hanging themselves.
Unlike their elders, they were already dance trained, and showed it.
It would encourage new interpretations of the "Rite," whose plot of male elders watching a girl dance herself to death has generally been understood as entirely heterosexual.
François Kevorkian is one of the New York's beloved dance music elders, bridging today's city to the one depicted in Life and Death (he rose to prominence as a DJ and remixer in the early 80s), continuing to champion musical multiplicity, balancing new and old (at his Cielo swan song he presented Scuba, a popular British DJ who plays minimal techno).
