It is a company with a cause that is carrying out commendable work within the Afro-Colombian community in this Latin American country. The choreographer Rafael Palacios is the one who has created this dance project that is currently touring Europe, so the Dansa Metropolitana has taken the opportunity to present it in Catalonia.
They are Sankofa Danzafro and this week they stop for a single day – Saturday, the 9th – at the Joventut theater in l’Hospitalet de Llobregat, one of the twelve municipalities that are part of this festival that celebrates dance throughout the entire month of March with an avalanche of 270 proposals spread across 116 spaces.
The City of Others, as the show is called, denounces the lack of opportunities even today, and generation after generation, black communities continue to suffer, under unacceptable marginalization and ethnic discrimination. And they demand political power that translates into true forms of coexistence. That is, that The City of others is the city of all.
“Personally, I feel proud to bring this company, because the activity that Rafael Palacios is carrying out in Colombia, within the Afro-Colombian community, is incredible. “You shouldn’t miss it,” said Cesc Casadesús when presenting the bulk of the international programming hosted by Dansa Metropolitana.
This danced narrative presents a choreography that vindicates the rural lifestyle in which communities help each other and share resources, since they do not consider themselves exclusive masters of what surrounds them. That is, far from the inequality generated by large cities, which are often not exactly a source of progress, but rather of loneliness, hostility and discrimination, they warn.
Born in Medellín, Rafael Palacios created the Sankofa Danzafro company in 1997. The word sankofa means “return to the roots” and refers to a way of seeing life that “invites us to know the past to understand the present and build the future.” , they defend. Thus, Palacios recreates tradition and contemporaneity in stagings that talk about Afro-descendant culture.
The company is, at this point, a reference not only in Colombia but throughout the South American continent and, little by little, in other parts of the world. The show was created within the framework of the commemoration of the abolition of slavery in Colombia thanks to the Medellín Academy and the Afro-Colombian Integration House.
