Ghana Drumming and Dancing

The first day in Ghana was a beautiful and sunny day.  It is towards the end of the rainy season here and the air is hot and humid.  I had signed up for a drumming and dancing workshop so at 10am we rode a bus for 10 minutes into town where the workshop was held in a pavilion.  The dancing group came from Accra (the capitol of Ghana) and the drumming group was a local group (from Takerati).  This was the first time that the two groups had performed together.  They did several different performances for us.  They were very good, and the drumming was very loud.  Afterwards they split us up into two groups my group went and learned drumming first while the other group went and learned the dancing.  We learned two different drumming parts to a performance called Panloco (don’t remember the exact spelling but that’s close).  After learning the first part and getting its rhythm down, we learned the second.  Then they spilt us into two groups and gave us either the first or the second part and we played them together.  After about an hour of drumming we switched with the dancing group and we learned the dance that goes with the drumming we just learned.  It was lots of fun.  We went to lunch about 5 minutes away at a hotel where we ate pasta salad, rice, rice with plantains, beef with “gravy” (it did not look like the thing we know as gravy), and chicken.  It was very delicious.  After lunch we went back to the pavilion and they performed some more for us.  One of the dances that they did had a long elaborate story that I can’t remember all of.  What I do remember is that for some reason the men were trying to trick the gods into thinking that they were women.  They wore skirts and carried fans and did these really fast circle hip movements kind of like in Tahitian dance.  It is the local dance of somewhere in Ghana that I don’t remember, but the dance teacher was from there and he was by far the best at it.  Finally we divided back up into our groups and while half of us were doing the drumming the other half were doing the dance.  My group was the second group to do the dancing.  When we finished the entire dance that he taught us the teacher sent us in the circle two at a time to do free style dancing.  When it was my friends and my turn we went into the circle dancing and just having a good time.  I was really into the music and decided to do some sauté chase (spell?) (jumping turn ballet thing) that in retrospect I shouldn’t have attempted because I was tired and I haven’t been keeping up with my dance exercises like I should.  Well I ended up spraining my ankle.  Luckily the dance ended soon after that and I could sit down.  Oh well I had a good time, I don’t regret going and it’s raining today anyway so there is not much I could do even if I had been able.  So I am following the clinics (and past experiences) advise and resting and icing and resting and propping up and wearing my ankle brace and icing some more.  I will get better soon.  This also gives me a chance to catch up on a few things that I have gotten behind in.  I also drew diagrams of the dance and the drumming that we learned so that when I get home in a few months I will still remember them.