Friday Late Ritual: Events

All events were free and drop-in, unless otherwise indicated.

DJ set with DJ's Rita Ray & Max Reinhardt
Grand Entrance
18.30-21.50
A soundscape of the music from the secret religions that arose from the slave trade. From Santeria to Voudou to Gnawa, the rhythms that kept dreams and identities alive from Brazil, Haiti, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal.

Sakara performance
Lecture Theatre
19.30-20.00 and 20.30-21.00
Extraordinary Nigerian jazz percussionist Lekan Babalola joined Fatai Ayinola Ishola of Lagos to play the Sakara, a traditional ceramic drum used in music from Fiji and in Apala music.  A specially commissioned film accompanied the performances as well as interviews with Babalola and Ayinola Ishola.

Batá drumming and Orisha songs
Paintings, Room 87
18.45-19.45 and 20.45-21.30
Batá drums are an integral part of the Cuban Orisha spiritual tradition that has its origins in the Yorubas of modern-day Nigeria. They are perhaps the single most powerful material symbol of African resistance to appear in the Americas. UK music and dance project Rumba Orisha performed Orisha songs and dance.

The roots and shoots of Candomble
Raphael Gallery, Room 48a
19.00-20.00
In a session that included traditional and popular songs, the Adriano Adewale Group explored the religious Yoruban roots of the highly influential Candomble sound of Brazil. Many musical forms have emerged from communities which used to practise Candomble, including Samba, Maracatu and Tambor de Crioula.

Byron Wallen Quartet and Gnawa singer Boujemaa Boubal
Raphael Gallery, Room 48a
20.30-21.30
With this special line up, the deliciously dark sounds of Byron Wallen's trumpet playing mingled with the evocative voice of Boujemaa Boubal. The mesmeric world of North African trance rhythms joined with influences from funk to dance music.

Memphis harmonica blues
Café
19.00-19.30, 20.00-20.30 and 21.00-21.30
The late great Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré once said that the blues men and women of the Mississippi delta reclaimed the musical memory of Africa that slavery had failed to eradicate. Errol Linton (harmonica and vocals) performed with Jean Pierre Lampi (double bass) to produce a rough and ragged urban blues with rural roots.

Gnawa Njoum
Nehru Gallery, Room 41
18.30-21.00
Gnawa generally refers to people who practice healing rituals. With ties to pre-Islamic sub-Saharan African animism rites, Gnawas play a deeply hypnotic trance music and, in conjunction with call-and-response singing, hand clapping and krakeb cymbals, the ceremony invokes ancestral saints who can drive out evil or cure illness.

Capoeira dance workshop and performance
The John Madejski Garden
18.30-19.15 and 19.30-20.15
The public was invited to watch and learn Capoeira, the spell binding, impossibly acrobatic Brazilian version of martial arts as dance. Capoeira Abolicao are the UK based maestros of the form.

Talk: The Rituals of Vodou
Seminar Room 1
19.00
Leah Gordon, author and photographer of 'A Book of Vodou' discussed the rituals of vodou in a talk that included film, images and music.

Uncomfortable Truths tour
Throughout Museum
20.30
V&A Curator Zoë Whitley led a tour of Uncomfortable Truths, the motivation for Friday Late Ritual.

More on Uncomfortable Truths

Film screening: Journey into Rastafaria
Seminar Room 1
21.00 (25 mins)
The Rastafarian movement grew in Jamaica and the West Indies out of the aftermath of slavery. Mixing African ritual and tradition with Christian prophesy, Rastafarians see Haile Selassie, King of Ethiopia as the messiah and look to repatriation to their true home - Africa. Filmed at a Niyabingy ritual of drumming and chanting deep in the jungles of Jamaica 'Journey into Rastafaria' gave an insight into the life of Rasta today.
Director: Dylan Harvey
St Marx Films, 2007

Devil Dancer
Throughout the Museum
19.00-21.00
Visitors witnesed Arie Shola - Yoroba influenced Masquerade and devil dancing from Sierre Leonian Secret Societies