The Kora Dance Ensemble employs the West African kora, a dancer, upright bass, and clarinet to engage with and perform selections from the kora repertoire.
This group consists of Chet Corpt on kora, Janelle Bel Isle is our dancer, Brady Kish on bass, and Eric Likkel on clarinet. We hope to present the music and movement of West Africa, keeping with the basic principles of these art forms as best we understand them. There is so much African influence throughout all our previous experiences — playing jazz, blues, soul, studying kora in Gambia, or dancing in an African ensemble — that we feel this goal to be tantalizingly approachable.
Chet’s first African kora teacher, the late great Malamini Jobarteh, would say “Kora is an ocean”. This group understands that assertion as meaning that Mande music and dance is a wave that has touched many disparate shores, and continues to do so.