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A carnival celebration of culture
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LA Times, A carnival celebration of culture >>
Perú Negro, a showcase of black pride, lets loose and has fun at UCLA.
By Lewis Segal
At home, Perú Negro is a vehicle for black pride, expanding and enhancing
native cultural traditions with influences from West Africa, Cuba and
elsewhere to create a diverse, vibrant statement of contemporary
Afro-Peruvian identity.
On tour, however, this 35-year-old music and dance ensemble unleashes a
nonstop carnival of rhythm that only briefly turns serious - as in the
pithy ballad "De España" - and grows increasingly celebratory in a 2
1/2-hour performance.
At Royce Hall on Sunday, the second half of the UCLA Live program
emphasized comedy, starting with seven quasi-competitive box drummers and
including a corps of masked Corpus Christi devils ("Son de Los Diablos")
too intent on showing off their percussive footwork to do anything evil.
Dominating all the merrymaking: artistic director Ronaldo "Rony" Campos
and his brother Marcos, who not only joked through their impressive
display of intricate Zapateo challenge dancing but joined singer Mónica
Dueñas in an extended audience-participation songfest.
Despite the Campos siblings' best efforts, though, the comic highlight may
have been "Toro Mata," the traditional Peruvian equivalent of the African
American cakewalk, in which slaves mocked the pretensions and rigidities
of their masters. Here the dancers' spectacular torso and back flexibility
brilliantly complemented their parody of minuet-style formality.
The first half of the program had plenty more examples of the 10 dancers'
ability to look loose and improvisational while matching one another
perfectly step for step, beat for beat, shake for shake. It even offered
the evening's only dance solo: wild head-lolling bravura by José Durand.
Much of this first hour belonged to the versatile Dueñas, alternately
somber, serene and sensual but always intelligent - and nearly always
dancing. The company boasts an array of fine instrumentalists, including
some who can coax music from animal jawbones. But dance proved absolutely
integral to the Perú Negro experience, so everyone danced sooner or later.
As Juan Morillo writes in the introduction to the group's latest CD, "the
dancers become the timekeepers and the percussion and guitars swing to
their mandate." So did the audience Sunday at UCLA.
02/10/04
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