‘Goddess’ Brings Kenyan Folklore to New York

In “Goddesss”, an original musical about a mysterious singer in Mombasa, the Moto Moto nightclub is not just the place of Afro-Jazz, it is a great equalizer, where Kenyans of all religions, tribes and social classes shake and turn their bodies in the rapture.

“I am literally with the loves of my life on dance floors,” said director Saheem Ali. “So I understand the power of an event that changes the life that occurs in a communal dance and joy space.”

It is that electrical sense of belonging that Ali sought recreation in “goddess”, now in previous views in the public theater after an 18 -year development process.

“My first child is Leban,” Ali told his cast the first day of essay for “Goddess.” “He was born in 2006.”

“My second son is” goddess, “he said, referring to the musical.” And she was born in 2007. Eighteen years, never again for a show “(it arrives after her Broadway production of” Buena Vista Social Club “, the animated scenic adaptation of the beloved 1997 album that is located in the Havana nightclubs and was nominated for 10 Tony Awards, including the direction of Ali) of the direction of Ali).)

Creating an original musical from scratch is its own Tay. And in the heart of this passion project is the myth of Marimba African folklore, the music goddess that created Heartbreak songs. It took years to find the right collaborators and perfect the plot.

While the long -lasting Broadway program “Hadestown” is based on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, shines as a kind of exception to the stories that tend to become musical. “Goddesss” does not have a underworld, but could have a similar attraction, with characters that include a fortune teller, the invitation of attention and a trio of sensual narrators and singers who act as ducts between human worlds and spirits. The issues in their nucleus are universal: resist family pressures, foster the talent that brings joy, listening to the quiet inner voice. The key, Ali said, was doing it staff.

“I slowly needed for children together the power that was in the center of history that meant something for me,” said Ali, who is Nairobi.

The story focuses on Nadira (Amber Iman), a talented singer who begins to act on Moto Moto, transfixing the club’s clients with his heavenly voice. Corted by her is Omari (Austin Scott), newly studied in the United States and interpreting the saxophone secret against the wishes of his most traditional father, the governor of Mombasa. Nadira, who does not seem at all, also has a controlling father: a mother who is the goddess of evil. Such is the premise of “Goddess”, a love story.

“It’s personal, it’s cultural, it’s your home, it’s your people, it’s its history,” Mean said about Ali. “Everyone is invested in a different way because that level of investment and love comes from top to bottom.”

The long journey for the show (which had a race at the Berkeley Rep Theatre in 2022) extends even more: until 1994, when a teenager Ali, sitting in a class of English literature in Kenya, learned for the first time the myth of Marimba, the goddess who turned a weapon into a musical instrument and whose cheerful mother never cursed her to love for never finding love.

“Those ingredients,” said Ali, “the child of human nature, its limb, how some can be so endowed and have a curse: those ingredients child or stuck with me.”

Years later, in 2007, when I was finishing a MFA in the direction of the University of Columbia, he said he asked himself: “If I wanted to do something original from my birthplace, what would be?”

He thought or marimba. “And she hadn’t left me since I was 16 years old.”

But he was still finding his voice as an artist. “I need to return to my roots,” said Ali, who is now the associated artistic director of the public theater. “I need to return to the storytelling of when I was a child, and making parodies, and how we would use the battery to create atmosphere.”

The playwright Jocelyn Bioh (“haha’s African Hair Braing”) was enlisted to write the book, Michael Thurber for music and lyrics, and Darrell Grand Moulie for choreography; Everyone worked at “Merry Wives”, an adaptation of Shakespeare set in an African diasporic community in Harlem-For Shakespeare in the park in 2021. (In March, the public announced that Bioh was moving away from the way Mames, Whoho Mames. Directed, was appointed a new collaborator and has contributed with additional book material).

What arose was a story that is based on the family expectations of Ali, which challenged to follow the theater. Ali grew in an observant Muslim home, one where, he said, music and art were prohibited.

“My own theater creation was very surreptitious,” he said.

Later, Ali moved to the United States to study computer science, but quickly changed his specialty to the theater. He didn’t tell his parents up to six months before graduation. Only his father attended.

“So I understood the pressure of trying to be an artist in a family where, you know, culturally, religiously, there was even that pressure there,” he said.

To achieve something authentic, attention to detail would need to be microscopic. Ali knew that Swahili, an official language of Kenya, would be interwoven through the musical, and that his cast would speak English, also an official language, with Kenya’s accents. Then he took advantage of Karishma Bhagani, who is mombasa, as a playwright and cultural consultant.

“I think we feel so deeply to give life to these stories,” said Bhagani, “because they told us these stories through a different way of archiving, through our grandmothers, or through the vellators, or through the vellars we have created.”

Every time Bhagani taught the cast Kenya’s English pronunciation of a word “mohm-b-wah” similar to the word instead of “Mum-bah-wah”. They taught him in return his American dialects. (She has perfected the inflection of the Valley girl).

“You have to learn how to sing this dialect and where you are placing it, what vowels you are using,” Scott said about playing Omari. “And that is a completely different breakdown from this instrument that you have used for years and reconfigure it.”

Swahili, such as language, music and food, is a mixture of African influences, southern Asia and the Middle East. And music in “Goddesss” – buoyant, exuberant and kaleidoscopic – reflects that diversity in a large mixture of jazz, pop, Taarab, Afrobeat and soul, with Arab and indigenous African influence. It is a change, said Thurber, of the music of Western Africa, the western public tends to know.

“Oriental Africa has its own musical lineage, its own tradition,” said Thurber. “And it turns out that it is phenomenally unique and phenomenally rich due to Swahili influence.”

The choreography is also based on a cultural lineage of deep Africa or East Africa, as well as a contemporary canopric dance to exhibit the diversity of mombas sweep.

With a mombasa nightclub, Mourtie said: “I can play in different fields and genres.”

Ali plans to continue presenting tose tradions This Summer in a Starry Production of “Twelfth Night” at the reopened Delacorte Theater, in which the play’s twins immigrate from Kenya to the Mythical Land of Illyria, featuring lupita nyong’o in A. WHOI IN ALI IN ALI IN ALI IN A. IN A ALI IN A. IN A. IN A. IN A PRODUCTION IN A PRODUCTION IN A PRODUCTION “IN A PRODUCTION IN A PRODUCTION” IN A production in a production in a production in a production in a production in a production in a production in a production or who in a production or who in a production or who in a production or “in a production.

Ali said there is a line line to all his work.

“I’m about to joy,” he said. “When you feel joy, when you feel the transformation, reorganizes your body’s cells.”