Year 15 (2009)  »  Festival 15 featuring

Famaleafrobeat

Femaleafrobeat is an all-female drum band. Our music is inspired by fascinating rhythms from west Africa.
Our drum arrangement reflects the traditional setup of the ethnic Malinké people from the Hamanah area of Guinea. The three main bass drums include the large dununba, the medium-sized sangban, and the small kenkeni, each affixed with a cowbell. Accompaniment and solo figures are played on the djembe. The music is sometimes enhanced by the use of the kirin, a slotted cylindrical instrument and the djabara, a gourd shaker.
During some of our songs, a bandmember performs the corresponding West African traditional dance.

West Africam women have usually participated only as dancers and singers, not drummers, in their societies, and it has only been just over a decade since women were permitted to play the djembe and other drums in Guinea, so we feel honored to be able to explore the beautiful instruments and rich musical stories of the African people and share them with our audiences.

femaleafrobeat are:


Janinka: djembe, basové bubny (djembe, bass drums)

Martina: djembe, basové bubny, tanec, yabara (djembe, bass drums, dance, yabara)

Linda: basové bubny (bass drums)

Janina: djembe, basové bubny (djembe, bass drums)

Šklíba: basové bubny, djembe, tanec, kirin, yabara (bass drums, djembe, dance, kirin,
yabara)

Dominika: djembe, basové bubny, yabara (djembe, bass drums, yabara)

Glynis: djembe, basové bubny (djembe, bass drums)

Šárka: djembe, basové bubny, tanec, yabara (djembe, bass drums, dance, yabara)

Frédéric C. MARTEL is mainly a French writer and a book critic, even though he has had, and still has, some academic and government positions. His background is multidisciplinary: he holds a PhD in sociology and several graduate degrees in philosophy, political science and law.
After a position at the ministry of culture in France, then as advisor to former Prime Minister Michel Rocard on cultural policy, intellectual life and civil-unions legislation for gay people, he served as a senior advisor to the Deputy-Prime Minister, Minister of Labor and Social Affairs, Martine Aubry as a head speech writer and senior adviser for ideas and new legislations such as “parity” for women in politics and civil-union legislation for gay, lesbian and unmarried couples, PACS, for which he was a key architect.

He is the author of five books in sociology, including a best seller on the sixties and sexual liberation: The Pink and the Black, Homosexuals in France since 1968 (Le Seuil, 1996 ; trans. into English : Stanford University Press, 1999). He wrote a book on theater in America, Theater (La Découverte, 2006) and a large study on culture and the arts in the US, De la Culture en Amérique (Gallimard, 2006 ; to be published in Poland, Japan, and in Germany).
A writer, journalist and professor at Sciences-Po Paris, and at the MBA of the n°1 business school in France, HEC, Frédéric Martel is currently working on a book on the Entertainment industry across the world.