Culture Desk Editor, "Sidi Goma Performs exhilarating Sufi Devotional Music and Dance" - The Somerville News - Somerville, MA, USAThursday, April 9, 2009
Sidi Goma performs exhilarating Sufi devotional music and dance filled with intoxicating drum patterns, joyful praise dances and virtuosic feats of agility that gradually reach an ecstatic climax.
The wildly energetic ensemble of 12 drummers, dancers and singers provide a rare opportunity to discover the joyful and exuberant music and dance of the hidden community of Sidi from Gujarat, India.
The mysterious, little-known Sidis are the descendants of Africans who traveled from East Africa to India over the last 1000 years. The Sidis of Gujarat are a tribal Sufi community of East African origin which came to India eight centuries ago and made Gujarat their home.
As Sufi Muslim devotees to their African saint and symbolic ancestor, Bhava Gor, their sacred songs praise the gift of joy he brought from the waves of the sea. Sidi Goma is a loosely-knit, semi-hereditary Sufi organization, with a core group of performers that is rounded out with a rotating cast of other men from the village, depending on who is available at the time.
They perform in a group of twelve: four lead musicians (drummers/singers) and eight dancers.
Sidi Goma's program presents an overview of Sidi ritual performance, from the traditional muezzin call to prayer to a staged ritual performance of a damal. It centers on danced zikrs (prayers), consisting of joyful, satirical praise dances to their ancestral saint, Bhava Gor. In a distinctly African practice, the performers are "dressed" in fabric, made up with face paint and matching peacock-feather headdresses and skirts.
However, it is their musical instruments that provide the Sidis with their most vital link to Africa. They employ a variety of hand drums and hand percussion instruments in performance, among them coconut rattles, an under-arm drum, double-headed drums and a large foot drum. The most distinctive Sidi instrument is the malunga, a braced bow similar to the Brazilian berimbau.
Like all Sufi's, there is an ecstatic component to Sidi Goma's ritual, with its rhythmic chanting and hypnotic, ever-faster drumming.
Their performance, which starts with the a cappella muezzin, crescendos to a frenzy with increasingly virtuosic dance solos and singing. It finally climaxes in a coconut-breaking feat, in which coconuts are tossed high into the air and cracked open with a head butt, that leaves the stage a slippery but fragrant mess, littered with milk, shattered husks and rose petals.
Since the 1990's, Sidi Goma has been performing outside of their community to raise consciousness about the discrimination and poverty that Sidis face in India.
In recent years, Sidi Goma has been busy developing their international profile: touring the UK in 2002, East Africa in 2003 and North America and Europe ever since. In 2005, they released their first album, Black Sufis of Gujarat. They also recorded on Sidi Sufis: African India Mystics Of Gujarat, an album of unique field recordings by UCLA ethnomusicologists Amy and Nazir Jairazbhoy, made in collaboration with Abdul Hamid Sidi and the Sidi community during their survey of Sidi shrines in Gujarat in 1999-2002.
Proceeds benefit Sidi education projects in Gujarat.
Free preperformance talk with dance critic Debra Cash: 45 minutes prior to each show.
World Music/CRASHarts presents the Boston debut of Sidi Goma: The Black Sidis of Gujarat on Saturday, May 2, 8pm at Somerville Theatre, 55 Davis Sq., Somerville. Tickets are $28. For tickets and information call World Music/CRASHarts (617) 876-4275 or buy online at http://www.WorldMusic.org/
[Picture from the Sidi Goma Website: http://www.kapa-productions.com/sididotcom/]
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