Dream Mandé: Djata

Dream Mandé: Djata is a masterpiece of oral history using wordsmiths and musicians in the Mandinka tradition. The show melds together traditional griot structures with Traoré’s own narrative, to tell the age-old epic of Mandinka civilisation, using parts of the legend of Soundiata Keïta – the powerful founding father to the Malian empire. 

The result is a delicate, intimate, profoundly moving musical story of this ancient and underappreciated culture. It is a reinterpretation that celebrates the flexible style and solid structure of handed down oral and written history, music and community of the Mandinka people.

Accompanied by a fina – a bard or cultural master of the word, the kora, the n’goni and a djéli – a musical master, Traoré preserves the dramatics, original essence and meaning of a griot story in a foreign language