While her husband M’bor beat an energetic rhythm on his Senegalese d’jembe drum, Oumou Faye, garbed in colorful clothing from her west African homeland, wasted no time in arranging a group of Mount Madonna School (MMS) middle school students in rows to teach them lyrics and a series of choreographed movements for the KouKou dance.Watching the students learn the movements (and at times joining his father to beat a drum) was the couple’s youngest child, three-year-old Seymi. This was the Fayes’ second visit to MMS; last spring they came and performed for elementary students who were learning about Africa’s many cultures.
‘Dance is good for your body, it’s good for your brain,’ M’bor Faye told the students. ‘ KouKou is a dance that people do when they want to ‘get happy.’ It can be part of a wedding celebration. It starts slow and then goes faster and faster as people become ‘crazy’.’‘The dance was really neat to learn,’ commented sixth grader Amirah Ibragimchayeva. ‘It was a different style of dance for us and I enjoyed the experience of learning something new.’
Teacher and Middle School Director Lisa Catterall invited the Fayes to teach dance to MMS’ sixth, seventh and eighth grade students, and hopes to host other guest artists at MMS in the future.
‘Our school is very small and I always look for opportunities to bring the world and its cultures to our students,’ commented Catterall. ‘We are not large enough, for example, to offer electives in many dance styles, but we can bring dance up the hill occasionally. Our faculty was also invited to participate in the class and some did. When teachers and students learn together, we foster lifelong learning by example. Our school’s goal is to be a learning community and having visiting artists helps us achieve that goal.’Catterall, who also serves as a consultant for the Centers for Research on Creativity (CRoC) at the University of California, Los Angeles, has a longstanding passion for arts education. She has written curriculum frameworks and state standards for several states in the arts domains and said she wants MMS middle school students to receive a complete education across dance, music, theater and visual art, including learning to understand art in different cultural contexts and appreciating the role art plays in communities worldwide.
‘I invited Senegalese artists because most students have not yet had the opportunity to learn African dance,’ she explained. ‘When I was in high school, I began studying African dance and later spent a year studying dance and drumming at the African Academy of Music and Arts in Kokrobite, Ghana. For me, this is a form of dance that offers one of the quickest connections to many of the positive benefits of incorporating dance in daily life.’Catterall pointed out that MMS’ performing arts program does an excellent job of developing students’ competence in dance, music and theater, and said the skills students build when they learn art from other cultures increases their ability to discern a deeper context and become comfortable with complexity and multiple meanings.
‘My aim was to expose the kids to an art form they were unfamiliar with and to enrich their arts education,’ she explained. ‘In Africa, dance is taught in a way that is as exacting and specific as ballet is in America. In America, however, the ability to complete an entire traditional African dance successfully is given to students in a single class. In other words, students have the gratifying experience of learning the movements so well that they can embellish and land on the beats correctly in a single class. I feel like the happiness of that achievement, and that immediate release of stress, is a gift I wanted our students to have.”####
Contact: Leigh Ann Clifton, Director of Marketing & Communications,
Nestled among the redwoods on 355 acres, Mount Madonna School (MMS) is a community of learners dedicated to creative, intellectual, and ethical growth. MMS supports its students in becoming caring, self-aware, discerning and articulate individuals; and believe a fulfilling life includes personal accomplishments, meaningful relationships and service to society. The CAIS and WASC accredited program emphasizes academic excellence, creative self-expression and positive character development. Located on Summit Road between Gilroy and Watsonville.