Music: Witch Woman

A tiny out-of-the-way Manhattan theatre had a visit from the police fortnight ago. Inside, an African opera was playing, half-naked bucks stomping the stage and pretty dark-skinned girls wriggling excitedly. But the police were not disturbed by the stage doings, nor by the fact that the producers had radical leanings and called themselves “workers.” Trouble was that the 23rd Street Unity Theatre, a small rude hall which used to be a beauty shop, had a licensed capacity for only 150 persons whereas 300 spectators were squeezing inside nightly, crowding the aisles and hard, wooden benches.

Kykunkor (Witch Woman) closed for a few days but last week it reopened uptown in the smart little Chanin Auditorium. Best seats at the Unity Theatre had cost 35¢. At the Chanin they were $2.75 and the list of enthusiasts had grown to include Leopold Stokowski, Lawrence Tibbett, George Gershwin, Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Carl Van Doren. “One of the most exciting shows in town,” critics were saying. But the songs and dances make it so. Kykunkor’s plot is slender. It tells of an African villager who chooses a bride, succumbs to the evil magic of another less comely party (“the witch woman”), lies unconscious until a witch doctor restores him. Three African drummers slap out the only accompaniment, sometimes weirdly soft, sometimes fiercely loud. Abdul Assen, the witch doctor, had polite audiences in chills last week as he groveled over the prostrate bridegroom, chanted and yelped his frenzied incantations. The bridegroom, a wide-smiling Negro with a large gold tooth, was Asadata Dafora Horton, Kykunkor’s librettist, composer, choreographer and director. He is a native of Sierra Leone. His great-grandfather, a slave for a time, took the name Horton from the Nova Scotian who owned him. Asadata Dafora started studying tribal music and dancing in his ‘teens, traveled all over Africa, learned 14 dialects which he supplemented later with English, French, German, Spanish, Italian. He drifted to Europe, sang at the Scala in Milan until the War, during which he fought for the British in the West African Fron-tier Force. When he settled in Harlem in 1929 he was distressed to find that to the U. S. African music meant only Negro jazz. So he set to work on Kykunkor, singing it while a Harlem piano teacher wrote down words and music. No one attempted to score the intricate drum beats. Asadata Dafora taught the players by ear and after a recent performance, the drummers struggled to pass the lesson on to Leopold Stokowski.