Sankofa Danzafro - The City of Others

Through movement vignettes, The City of Others unpacks the racial undercurrents of Colombia, a country home to Latin America’s second largest population of people of African descent. Witness the dreams, tensions and resistance in the Afro-Colombian dance and music of this powerhouse company. Drawing from capoeira, contemporary dance, hip-hop and African forms, Sankofa creates on stage a city in which everyone matters. Founded by Rafael Palacios in 1997 on the Pacific coast of Colombia, Sankofa means, “to return to the root,” an African philosophy that proposes that the past is a keyhole through which to view the present. Palacios told Boston’s Fjord Review that the company’s mission “is to question the overall knowledge [and] to build a voice of self-awareness, which will allow us to reveal the ‘epistemologías’ of the African diaspora in the world. ... The City of Others is based on my own experiences and the dancers’ experiences with regard to racism in Colombia and the struggles to resist and therefore debilitate it.”