Sabar: Embodied Knowledge Between Ritual and Community (English)

In the summer of 2024, alongside the workshops, an accompanying academic program took place featuring guests from the Senegalese Sabar tradition. The Berlin-based griot, singer, dancer, and drummer Nago Guèye Koité and his long-standing collective SAF SAP, the dancer, choreographer, and dance school founder Germaine Acogny, dance scholar Aïssatou Bangoura-Sow, musicologist and ethnologist Ibrahima Wane, as well as drummer Bouyo Ndiaye Rose and Sabar dancer and educator Yama Reine de Sabar, engaged in an exchange on tradition, technique, and research regarding Sabar. This gave rise to a diverse program exploring polyrhythms and the politics of bodily movement in Sabar. The English-language video below offers further insights into the series through conversations with participants and impressions from the workshops.

The series brings together—in a way rarely seen in Europe to date—Senegalese artists, Berlin's existing Sabar diaspora scene, and academic research. At the same time, the workshops raise the question of what happens when a ritual, social practice is transferred into an institutional space. 

What is lost in the process—and what new meanings emerge at the same time? In this context, Pereira describes Sabar as a technology: a tangible space for movement, exchange, and the sharing of knowledge.