By Herman Silochan

The half a dozen pioneering Caribbean ensembles from the 1970s have dwindled to three, and they have survived because of their dedication to education, offering something worthy of their ancestry.

You think of the classroom, the library, lecturers on the podium, but it’s the performing arts where interpretations give insight. They bring excitement too.

If any group that is exemplary in this search, it’s the Collective of Black Artists, or COBA, founded twenty years ago and still growing.

“Our mandate from day one was to present the finest traditions of African aesthetics,” BaKari Lindsay told me at their studios in Bloor West Village last Saturday. Our long standing friendship has been based on that search for what is true.

Of all the Caribbean and African dance presentations I have been to, COBA seriously demands audience attention to each movement where the subtleties of life are interpreted. Remember, there is interpretation of time and place removed hundreds of years and oceans from our Canadian metropolis. This is the crux of COBA.

BaKari’s is one of the original founders, his personal and professional life is what has given this company its great life. He did a stint with the Danny Grossman Dance Company, the National Dance Company of Trinidad and Tobago, among several top institutions in his early years. That self-education meant attaining a Master’s Degree in
Dance Ethnology and a Bachelors of Education at York University. It also meant spending long periods on the African continent, especially the west, with educators and other dance professionals.

In addition to his intensive stage preparations, he is on the faculty of Ryerson University. But his work at Toronto’s AfricentricSchool these days is what adds to his passion of imparting solid knowledge to his youthful followers.

COBA’s current offices is a warren of rooms filled with perhaps Toronto’s finest collection of African drums, three dance floors for practice, rows and rows of costumes everywhere, and a long cutting table with sewing machines. It’s a madhouse here many days. BaKari is not shy in taking up scissors and cloth to create his interpretations of those elaborate costumes we see on stage

The grandest reward for COBA to date is this summer’s move to studios in the brand new Regent Park Arts and Cultural Centre. Well deserved.

Les Rythmes de la Foret, COBA’s latest work, can be best described as coming from the bush, the Village versus the City. Even in Africa, urbanisation is seeing the loss of ancient spontaneous repertoires; it can be a challenge to rekindle what is slowly withering away, but still so important to the culture. More than that, BaKari reminds us that there are many layers to African culture, in addition to time and place.

“What takes a young man from Trinidad over three decades to embark on such an epic lifetime voyage?” I want to know.

The answer is complex, as it is straightforward. “Tell you what, let’s see next weekend’s ‘Rythmes de la Foret’ and we shall talk afterwards, but also look at the whole cast, it’s dance as an educational tool, and we shall begin our journey.”

Rythmes de la Foret will be performed at the Fleck Dance Theatre at Harbourfront on February 3-5.