Spotlight on Zimbabwean Mbira Ensemble

By Krista Spies spieskri@grinnell.edu

One musical group on campus centers around a single instrument. The Zimbabwean Mbira Ensemble provides students, faculty, staff and community members with the opportunity to not only learn the mbira, but also to experience and share in a collective musical space.

“The music is a vehicle for shaping this potentially profound, potentially transformative shared experience,” said Tony Perman, director of the Mbira Ensemble and assistant professor of music at Grinnell College.

By Molly Wilcoxson wilcoxso@grinnell.edu

When looking at the world of Jewish folk dance, Amanda Lee sees not only a dance, but a form of political protest, community and storytelling.

Lee, who is currently a visiting assistant professor of theatre, dance and performance studies at Grinnell College, is in the process of wrapping up her MFA thesis on Jewish folk dance titled “Communal Acts of Resistance.” The thesis aims to explore the importance of dance to the Jewish diaspora in Eastern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and even the Caribbean. It is the culmination of her MFA program at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, which she will finish in June.

Prior to teaching dance at Grinnell, Lee previously served as an assistant visiting professor at the College from 2019 to 2021 in the French and Arabic department. Her return to Grinnell comes after her time as a visiting assistant professor at Boston University, where she taught both French and Performance Studies. Lee said that she appreciated the opportunity to teach at a liberal arts college again.

“The students’ minds are very interdisciplinary,” said Lee. “One thing I really love is having the chance to dialogue on so many different levels… and knowing my students are going to bring all kinds of interesting research questions to class.”

Lee’s background in dance is extensive. She began her dance career primarily in ballet, before switching to more contemporary styles. Jewish

LEE

BY AMANDA folk dance, specifically, runs deep in Lee’s family — her grandmother practiced it, dancing for the leftist New Dance Group in the early 20th century. Her Jewish identity as well as her background in dance led her to pursue her master’s degree, hoping to focus more on Jewish folk dance as a whole.

To Lee, studying folk dance is important for many different reasons.

“I like the idea of thinking about folk dance as a way to preserve tradition through body-to-body transmission,” she said. “As a kind of diasporic practice that connects Jewish folk dance through the diaspora.”

Lee also sees Jewish folk dance as a manifestation of how the Jewish diaspora connects to their heritage. In preparation for her thesis, she studied Yiddish music and its connection to storytelling within the Jewish art scene.

In addition to this, her research interests also include international labor movements and the connection between art and politics, a passion that comes from her time with her grandmother. “We would always practice Jewish folk dances together, but she would also [tell me], ‘Okay, these are the ways that we practiced labor organizing through dance.”

Lee is currently teaching a special topic course on Jewish folk dance within the Theatre Department. She routinely holds workshops and events for students to explore the world of Jewish folk dance, including on May 1, in observance of Jewish Culture Week. This will be followed by a performance of the dance on May 5, which serves as the culmination of her MFA research.

Perman specializes in the music of Zimbabwe and the semiotics of music and emotion. He started the ensemble when he first came to work at Grinnell.

“I think it offers something about how to relate to other people in other parts of the world that are hard to get from a book,” he said.

In addition to the creation of collective experience as a motivation for directing the ensemble, Perman also said that there is importance in “connecting students to this musical history from Zimbabwe that is a deeply complex art form with 1,000 years of history in order to shape those kinds of experiences that is maybe unfamiliar to most of us through the classroom doors.”

Shabab Kabir `26 said that when they joined the ensemble, they realized the collective and participatory nature of the music is different from the other ensemble groups. “I feel like if I make a mistake, I can move on,” Kabir said.

This year, the ensemble has 10 members: five students, two faculty and three community members.

Perman said that the four aspects of the mbira style that the ensemble focuses on, which specifically come from the Shona community in Zimbabwe, involve playing the mbira itself, keeping the beat with hosho gourd rattles, dancing and singing. He said that historically, “it emerged really closely tied to ancestral spirits and other kinds, so it’s played in ceremonies for spirits that are, like, all-night parties basically.”

The mbira instrument itself is a hand-held wooden board with metal keys, played with one’s thumb and index finger. “It’s a unique instrument to Africa, not to Zimbabwe,” Perman said. “There’s different kinds all across Africa. There’s some in the Americas after the slave trade, but they’re really different. This one [that we play] is very specific to Zimbabwe.”

The director acknowledged his position as a white American academic teaching this particular music style in the context of colonialism and racism in the United States. He said he tries to “get students to reflect on what it means to embody, to step foot into these histories. Once they get into it — most of them get hooked in some way and stick around — and once you do get hooked, then you have to start reflecting on what does it mean for me to do this, and what responsibilities come with this privilege?”

Every year, the Mbira Ensemble brings in a new guest musician from Zimbabwe who has played the music their entire life. “I like to think of myself mostly as just the conduit between students here and the expertise there,” said Perman.

Assistant Professor of Music Putu Tangkas Adi Hiranmayena, who is a member of the group, said that though he was aware of mbira through his studies, he was never able to play it until coming to the College. “It’s just a really good community-building ensemble where there’s no real prerequisites to play. It’s just supposed to just be for us and the community surroundings, not necessarily supposed to be presentational. So, I like that aspect of it.”

Perman said that historically, mbira music is not associated with concerts. The players are “sort of doing work in service of the event so that people can sing and dance and celebrate. It’s hard to do that in a concert because then people are watching them as pressure to perform for those [audiences], whereas the value of the ensemble for me is doing it for yourself as a group,” said Perman. Despite this, the Ensemble has an outdoor concert forthcoming to encourage dance and share their collective musical experience.

The Grinnell Zimbabwean Mbira Ensemble will hold a concert on Wednesday, May 3 at 7:00 p.m. in the Bucksbaum Haight Courtyard outside of the Bucksbaum Center for the Arts.