Hit from Africa

The performance opened with a thud of tom-toms and the calls of masked, grass-skirted witch doctors exorcising spirits. It closed with an exuberantly costumed rain dance that compares in color and good humor to New Orleans' Mardi Gras. The show: a fast-moving, two-hour demonstration of native dances by Les Ballets Africains, a troupe of skilled amateurs from newly independent Guinea. The 28 dancers have won raves all over Europe, last week dazzled Manhattan audiences and critics.

As in most folk dancing, the women were mostly decorative, while the men made the main contribution with dramatic jumps, a kind of rhythmical chain-gang walk, and a Charleston-like dance step. Scenes ranged from flirtatious rambles in the market place to formally styled initiation ceremonies. One episode, simply enacting the death of a man and a witch doctor's earnest attempts to save him, conveyed the feeling of real tragedy, accompanied by chanting as insistent and haunting as Ravel's Bolero.

Les Ballets Africains is the creation of Keita Fodeba, a 37-year-old lawyer who became Guinea's Minister of the Interior when that country chose independence last fall in Charles de Gaulle's referendum. As a law student in Paris in 1949, Fodeba led two other Guinean students, Artistic Director Kante Facelli, 35, and Administrator Achkar Marof, 28, in singing African songs over the French radio. What they sang went over so well that Fodeba assembled a successful dance group recruited from fellow Africans in Paris. Then the trio took off on a "25,000-mile" talent hunt for authentic West African dancers, organized contests, persuaded ritual dancers that performing publicly outside Africa would not profane secret rites. To keep the flavor authentic, Fodeba insisted that costumes be of native materials, even brought along a highly convincing fire eater.

As part of the authentic flavor, three of the ballet's women dancers appeared bare breasted in several innocuous numbers. Though this stirred neither critics nor theatergoers, it raised the eyebrows of New York's License Commissioner Bernard O'Connell, and he ordered bras upon the ladies. As the troupe's American manager protested publicly, he noted that only New York, of all the cities on the tour (the group has already played Boston and Philadelphia), was affronted by authenticity. After the U.S. tour ends, the African dancers expect to go back to their villages, where they hope to buy land with their ballet earnings and live untroubled by license commissioners.

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