We end our week in Barbados with the Barbados Landship Association. A popular Landship dance is the “plaiting” of a Maypole. The choreography of Landship often tells the story of the “Middle Passage,” the brutal transport of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. In a favorite dance, eight dancers “plait a Maypole,” turning multi-colored ribbons around a maypole until they’re very short, then them unwinding again. This tradition connects dancers with West African stories of the clever Anansi, an eight-legged spider, who was said to have helped the Akan people learn to weave and build houses. Watch the Barbados Landship Association in action.
We are revising the AllAroundThisWorld.com site — the information you’re seeking may still be here, but a lot of links are broken and details may be out of date. We are currently using a new (better!) site — ExploreEverywhere.com — to tell you all about our class offerings, our “pen pal” program and how to become one of our teachers, and will eventually be moving all the goodies from here over to there. So, GO TO THE NEW SITE!
