SHORTLIST – THURSDAY 12/22/05 – Dance
Akim Funk Buddha This Zimbabwean B-boy expat’s eboNYasia project, Urban Global Holiday, includes international choreographers and performing artists offering Kaeshi belly dance, Hipno/body popping, Mayuna/Blue Muse Dance, vocalist Jenny Fujita, and surprise guests, for an evening sure to hymn the new New York. At Joe’s Pub, 425 Lafayette, 212-239-6200, funkbuddha.org ZIMMER

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Ringleader of the Hip-Hop Circus
Pop

BY JAMES CARMICHAEL
February 8, 2005

Dressed in some downtown take on traditional Zulu garb, his bare chest sparkling with glitter, Akim Ndlovu, aka Akim Funk Buddha, begins "Amazulu" by pinning his heart on his (absent) sleeve. As collaborators stamp and chant around him, the diminutive and magnetic dancer/throat-singer/beat-boxer/poet exhorts his audience to remember that "dance is the world's most important weapon; use it wisely."

If dance is indeed a weapon, Akim Funk Buddha is some kind of delightful drunken master. His loosely constructed "hip-hop circus" at La MaMa employs enough varying traditions to send a reviewer scurrying back to his press packet. The rotating cast includes beat boxers, rappers, dancers, singers, martial artists, and B-boys. The music is provided by members of the ensemble - what instruments get played apparently depends on who's there that night.

In front of projected urban scenes and graffiti art, the evening unfolds in a flowing, episodic series of acts. In one virtuosic duet, a tea ceremony sets the stage for a playful battle between Funk Buddha and Kazuma Motomura that mixes martial arts and body-popping. In another sequence, a startlingly convincing "baby" Funk Buddha coos into the mike as he discovers beat-boxing by rattling a can of spray paint and imitating the sound. When Zhisheng Zhan leaps up from the audience to play his (pretty amazing) Chinese mouth organ over Funk Buddha's vocal percussion, the whole thing has a feeling of "Hey! Look who's here!"

This informality makes for a slightly tenuous first few minutes - one wonders if the loosely grafted dance, music, and spoken word elements will crystallize into something holistic, or if the evening will remain "interesting." Buddha, though prodigiously multitalented, lacks the specific spoken word power of a Marc Bamuthi Joseph or Will Power; in speech he is simply calm, inviting, and conversational.

Once the inventive interplay between the various artists gets rolling, however, this relaxed quality becomes invaluable and a thematic unity presents itself. As in any well-orchestrated circus, a rhythm emerges, accelerating and peaking as the evening draws to a close.

What makes the evening so engaging, even (particularly?) for those with little or no familiarity with hip-hop, is its understatement. The dance emphasis is never on technical skill or power moves (which are abundant), but on the humor and narrative of scenario. When Funk Buddha and Pete List, a vocal percussionist/guitar-player/mime, somehow create two interweaving beats and a throat-song melody between their two sets of vocal chords, they're not trying to amaze you. They're doing it because it's fun, and they want you to have fun with them.

In fact, they insist on it. Funk Buddha has created a show that successfully employs hip-hop as a mode rather than a theme. "Amazulu" creates a relationship between performer and audience that is true hiphop, and in doing so succeeds in its mission to reference the native antecedents to the modern form. The performers frequently engage the audience directly, sometimes physically, and at the end of the evening - should you be so inclined - you can get up and dance on stage.

Without calling attention to his own ability to do so, Funk Buddha has created a hip-hop show that is true to the purest aspects of the form: He mines a built-in sense of community, centered on improvisational performance of vocal and physical expression. "Amazulu" employs new forms and catchy combinations, but the inclusiveness and innate theatricality it taps into never seem to get old.

"Amazulu" until February 20 (66 E. 4th Street, between Second Avenue and Bowery, 212-475-7710).
Sage Francis plays The Bowery Ballroom tomorrow night (6 Delancey Street, between Bowery and Chrystie, 212-533-2111).

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The new Back view

February 10-16, 2005
A B-boy world
By JIMIIE BRIGGS Special to the Amnews           

Akim Ndlovu is a 35-year-old dancer, griot, teacher, choreographer, and activist born in Syracuse, New York, and raised in Zimbabwe. In other words, he’s a New Yorker. But his current show at La MaMa E.T.C. on East Fourth Street, “AmaZulu – Dance As a Weapon: The Hip-Hop Circus, Part 1,” proves him to be some much more than easily grasped labels.

“The inspiration for this came from my desire to explore where and why we make music,” explains Ndlovu. “Not necessarily the historical beginnings but academic beginnings.”

A self-described old-school B-boy, his hour-long show incorporates Japanese, Zulu and urban American vernacular to create a provocative, dynamic mélange.  “AmaZulu” somehow manages to juggle human beat-boxing with East Asian martial arts and African-inspired drum, making the circus reference the title more than appropriate.

Under the theatrical moniker of Akim Funk Buddha, Ndlovu has made appearances at venues throughout the city in recent years, including Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors Festival, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and World Financial Center’s Winter Garden.

Returning to the States from Africa at the age of 20 years old, he released an album in 1992 called “Zimbabwe Legit” which blended straightforward hip-hop beats with traditional African lyricism.  A two-time winner of the Harlem Arts Theater Poetry Slam and the PS122 Dance Contest, he has spend much of the past decade journeying throughout Southeast Asia and France to study dance and spirituality.  The spiritual and cultural threads are subtle but easily detectable in “AmaZulu.”

“The spirituality is something I wanted to present, but not in a preachy way,” he says.

In addition to his performance work, he is youth worker at the Center for Contemplative Mind in Northampton, MA, and creator and founding director of the Urban Affairs Department at Projectile Arts. 

“Amazulu” can be seen at La MaMa through February 20.

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