[Cape Verde, Roots]
Ginga[1]
is one of the most artistic music videos I’ve ever seen. I do of course stress
the visual aspects of the artistry, in saying so. But it is such delightful
singing as well. What a magical place it is for the dancing spirit, and for the
spirit of the dance – and for all the hearing ears! All of the dancing shoes of
the world have a place there! The beat is spell-binding, and is itself
spell-bound and swept up by an impossible verve. It is, steadily, out of this complicated
world altogether; and we, all of us, with it – truly! The eye, entitled without
any fuss, gorges. It gorges!
Here, the juju of funk dances, too,
and will put you in a trance in a moment; as I think it puts Sara Tavares herself
– her eye-lids fluttering and eyes glazed and half-open. What hope do the rest
of us have? We start dancing back and forth, and forth and back, oblivious of
the ‘millions and millions’ of invisible eyes glued upon our own texting bodies
and our dancing spirits. It is a day that should never end, but will; giving
way to the next promising one. Six minutes (six and a bit), as I’ve seen, can
lift the world.
The ‘aged’ video images, seemingly from
deep in the last century, have the aura, the ‘flavor’ even, of old wine in old
casks; and are just as appealing. The naughtily winking lady, whose mind is
elsewhere and not the dancing – wait till the man there sees the clip somewhere
else! Jagged motions aren’t hard to imagine, seen here, when you
also see all the robotic moves.
Even
Shaka Zulu, the one we saw in that captivating TV series about two decades ago,
as I remember, has a slot in this collage of footage. He makes a cameo appearance,
of a kind, and gets a mention in Sara’s song. He makes us take a second look
just to be sure he is ‘still’ the one.
On a related matted: Is the Ginga clip we have here deliberately turned, in a film studio, into a period-piece older than when it was really shot, and all the mesmerizing motions sped up a
notch, with a sleight of hand, for transcending effect? Those are intriguing streams of thought. Parts of it do seem to be, “or/either” Sara’s appearance in ‘the
whole ecosystem’ was ‘staged’ – “or something.” But it is also possible that
such footage is archived there in Lisbon, where she lives[2], as part of Portugal’s expansive colonial record;
and that she was given fair access to it. In which case how she was inserted
into what we see so seamlessly becomes “the thing” to ponder. But any creative
and well-equipped studio can in fact easily do what we see was done.
[1] About
the word Ginga, Danila do Rosario
suggests in the conversation thread that it has the same connotation as “shake body”. Likewise, Humanrace
(this is obviously a pen-name) translates it to mean “shake your body or move
with me” [See Azizi Powell (2016) “Portuguese
Cape Verdian Singer Sara Tavares – ‘Longe do Mundo’ & ‘Ginga’”].
Phonetically, though, you hear it as jinga,
which broadcasts a totally different but unintended meaning to
Swahili-speakers’ ears.
