Dances of Africa Book

Dance is the central theme of this remarkable book, which features one hundred sixty photographs taken by French photographer Michel Huet. Spanning a period of more than forty years, from 1945 to 1985, the photographs depict the dances and ceremonial rituals of fifty African tribes, among them the Yoruba, Tutsi, Dogon, Mbuti, and Masai - the result of Huet's extensive travels from Senegal to the Congo Basin, from the Ivory Coast to Rwanda, in his quest to record every aspect of African life. Each picture is a masterpiece, capturing the harmony of movement, the spontaneity, the gestures, the expressions, as well as the colors and details of the extraordinary costumes, and jewelry. The earlier black-and-white images, spectacularly reproduced in tritone, are set against the brilliant color of those taken during the '70s and '8Os: in some cases, Huet returned to the places he visited in the '40s and '5Os to photograph the same rituals and ceremonies. Accompanying this exceptional collection of images is a highly informative text by Claude Savary, Curator at the Museum of Ethnography in Geneva, Switzerland. In the introduction he outlines the political history of Africa over the past fifty years and presents an overview of the traditions that form the basis of African ritual life. His intriguing commentary on the photographs explains the various ceremonies pictured and gives a brief ethnographic description of each of the peoples covered in the book.