The beloved annual Atlanta African Dance & Drum Festival celebrates traditional African dance and music. (Photographs by Benjamin Shepard)
At the Atlanta African Dance & Drum Festival, the steady beat of the drums and the grounded movements of the dancers speak a language older than words, one that restores our connection to home and honors who we are.
Hosted by the Afrikan Djeli Cultural Institute, the annual celebration has become one of the most anticipated summer festivals. Now in its 16th year, the event returned to East Point with three days of music and movement workshops, an artisan marketplace and a high-energy finale concert featuring the acclaimed St. Louis-based company Afriky Lolo.
From July 25 through July 27, dancers, drummers and families from across the country came to Atlanta to celebrate the cultures of the African diaspora. Workshop offerings included traditional Haitian dance, Afro-Cuban/Orisha, Sabar and dance styles from the countries of Guinea, Mali and Ivory Coast.
Diádié Bathily, the Ivorian-born founder and artistic director of Afriky Lolo, was one of the featured professional dance instructors for the Festival. “Americans, especially African Americans, deserve to know their culture,” he told ArtsATL. “It’s so diverse. I cannot be numb to it. This is my mission — how I can bring Africa to African Americans who cannot go there.”
Bathily founded Afriky Lolo in 2003 after he came to the United States and taught in the African dance program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. After three months, the university decided to extend his stay. “The community demanded that I stay longer, including some of the universities and dance studios,” he explained. “They felt like what I’d been teaching was completely new and it came with incredible information African Americans and Americans needed. They felt like I was a bridge between them and Africa.”
Since then, his company has grown into a movement for preserving traditional Ivorian and West African dances and teaching their meaning to audiences around the U.S. Afriky Lolo’s performance, The Goddess Zaouli Lives, which centers on the multi-colored wooden Zaouli mask, a symbol of feminine beauty and communal unity among the Guro people in central Ivory Coast.
The Zaouli dance, created in the 1950s, was inspired by a young Guro girl named Djela Lou Zaouli. It is traditionally performed at important celebrations and funerals and is believed to bring prosperity to the village where it is showcased. Renowned for its swift footwork and hypnotic rhythm, it takes a performer several years to perfect their technique, and many start learning when they are children. During a performance, the dancer engages in a psychological duel with the audience — holding their body still while their legs perform a series of fast-paced moves.
“Zaouli is flexible like a snake, but you have to be light on your feet like a bird,” Bathily explained. “In the Guro country, you have different stories of Zaouli. I did some research to do a kind of adaptation of this story. There is a moral at the end, and it’s about a beautiful girl and how her heart was broken by a guy. If you want to see the whole story, you have to come to see the show. But by the end, her heart is broken and she’s dancing beautifully to express herself.”
While many African dances have been adapted or modernized for the stage, Bathily remains committed to cultural authenticity. Every step, gesture and drum pattern is grounded in the history of this dance and the country in which it was created.
The Afriky Lolo performance featured a cast of more than 40 dancers and musicians from ages 6 to 60, including Bathily himself, with live drumming and elaborate costuming brought from Ivory Coast. Bathily says having a wide age range of dancers is a pivotal part of the experience.
“It’s part of the culture. I love that because it’s representing a village in Africa. You have to be humble as you are learning. Dance is fine, music is fine, but education in the dance exists also, and people forget about that. To keep people together, you have to educate them on how to stay together and how to respect each other. That’s the most important.”
Bathily’s commitment to honoring tradition mirrors the values of the Afrikan Djeli Cultural Institute (ADCI). Founded by artist and entrepreneur, Aiyetoro Kamau, ADCI has been instrumental in nurturing a space for diasporic African arts in Atlanta, not only through the Festival, but through seasonal classes, youth education and community engagement. What sets this festival apart from others is its grounding in African spirituality, intergenerational knowledge and grassroots organizing.
Over the years, its mission has remained the same: to honor the ancestral traditions of Africa while making them accessible to modern audiences. “We have to keep supporting the arts, especially at this time when the current administration is taking funding away,” Kamau said to the audience at the conclusion of the finale concert.
For Bathily, the Atlanta festival holds personal significance. “Atlanta is one of the amazing places in America. They have a huge African American community and have been doing African dance for a very, very long time before even I came to America. We feel like we are a community, even with Atlanta people, because the dancers, we know each other; the leaders, we know each other. So the village keeps expanding.”
Bathily hopes the audience leaves the show not only entertained but inspired. His final piece of advice? Keep dancing!
“I will advise everyone to dance. Please dance,” he said. “Nobody is a good dancer or a bad dancer. Dance is expression. It’s therapy in Africa. You can have people having a lot of problems. But once we arrive in that place with everybody, they forget about what is going on, and they are sharing that moment. That moment you feel like you are in heaven; you feel like you are on top of a mountain when you go in the middle of that circle, people cheering and clapping for you, healing you from everything. This is traditional therapy. And I’m saying therapy, but it’s more than that. Because African dance and drum is a healing thing for human beings. It’s your soul.”
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Tyra Douyon is an Atlanta-based journalist, content writer and editor with a master’s in professional writing and a bachelor’s in English education from Kennesaw State University. In addition to freelance writing, she is a published poet and a staff editor for an independent literary arts magazine.
