BRATTLEBORO — Caro! I'd shout in one of the early years of my guest's visits, running into the house from my adjoining office with a message for him from a drummer.
I've learned not to do that. Not to shout and barge. Because often - five times a day - he is praying. As I head to his room, I see Caro Diallo, a Muslim from West Africa, standing on his prayer rug, head bowed, looking both humble and majestic in the white robes he dons for prayer after a ritual washing. I stop dead in my tracks, suddenly feeling clumsy and loud.
One of the things I have loved about hosting Caro Diallo over the past eight summers as he teaches West African dance in the Brattleboro area is what his prayers do to my home. They create a certain stillness. As I glimpse his bowed head and feel the silence, I stop and remember the ever-present, the often-forgotten, the sacred.
I first met Caro in 1993 in Dakar, Senegal when I traveled there to study African dance. A young dancer, he invited me to the rehearsals of his African ballet company, where I watched him leap in the air, somersault, and land on concrete. He was a stunning dancer even then and soon was charged by the company director with teaching the rest of the ballet's dancers.
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When I moved to Vermont and found no African dance classes nearby, I invited Caro - by then, living in Switzerland - to come and launch African dance here in the Brattleboro area. That was 2002.
He began the classes at West Street Arts in Dummerston and soon had a large following. When he returned to Switzerland, teachers from Boston arrived to keep the class going. While there have been a series of teachers since then - including Astou Sagna, Serena Stone, Kabisco Kaba, Jai Fuller - and moves from Dummerston to Putney to Brattleboro, the class has never faltered. Naomi Lindenfeld coordinates the class that meets Wednesdays at 7 p.m. in the Stone Church.
The next year, 2003, we launched the Abene African Dance and Drum Festival so that Vermonters could study intensively with Caro each summer. “Abene,” which means “place where good will be encountered,” is the name of the small fishing village in Senegal where Caro runs the Black Soofa cultural center.
There, in a spacious camp of many small, round houses by the sea, Caro trains his Black Soofa dance company and teaches African dance to Europeans and Americans. After having first encountered Caro at the Abene Festival, many Vermonters have traveled to the original Abene to study dance and drumming with him and his company.
Vermont's Abene Festival usually falls during Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic calendar when, for 30 days, healthy adult Muslims do not eat or drink anything between dawn and dusk. So Caro teaches at the Festival during the day without having drunk so much as a drop of water. His students can't tell. Fueled by the rhythm of an orchestra of live drummers, Caro teaches each of his two-hour classes with no-holds-0barred.
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Watching Caro, I sometimes think: These breath-taking movements emerge out of the stillness Caro enters daily on his prayer mat.
I once asked him if, since his work requires such strenuous physical activity, he couldn't receive a dispensation from the Ramadan fast.
“It's my choice to be a dancer,” he replied.
He added that he wanted no dispensation, as the fasting helps Muslims develop empathy for the poor who are obliged to go hungry and thirsty.
He elaborated in a recent kitchen-table conversation over the danger of greed.
“When the rich lose compassion for the poor,” Caro said, “the world falls apart.”