Sankofa Ensemble Brings African Drum Traditions Back to Brockport Stage

Sankofa African Dance and Drum Ensemble returned to Hartwell Dance Theater with a spring run built around more than a performance. Its program, Our Legacy, ran April 30 through May 3, with Thursday, Friday and Saturday shows at 7:30 p.m. and a Sunday matinee at 2 p.m., and it carried the weight of a campus tradition that SUNY Brockport says has delivered more than 25 years of artistic excellence.

The title fit the ensemble’s name and mission. Brockport’s Department of Dance describes Sankofa as a symbolic Ghanaian expression, represented by a bird looking back toward the past, and says the group retrieves the cultural essences of that past and brings them into the present. Under artistic director Jenise Akilah Anthony and musical director Mohamed Diaby, the ensemble continues to honor Africa and the African Diaspora through music, dance and storytelling that connect history and lived experience. In this production, the drum was not background decoration. It drove the motion, carried the memory and shaped the communal pulse of the stage.

Our Legacy also brought that continuity into focus by putting alumni and guest artists back in Hartwell Dance Theater alongside current students. That mix gave the run the feel of a living archive, with generations sharing the same floor rather than treating tradition as something sealed off behind glass. Brockport’s spring arts announcement framed the production as part of a broader campus pattern of return and renewal, alongside TheatreBrockport’s Superior Donuts, but Sankofa’s place in that mix was distinct because its history is audible as much as it is visible.

The ensemble’s recent history shows how wide that reach has been. Brockport’s Sankofa Production 2026 profile said the 2025 production featured Ivory Coast guest performer Samba Diallo, included in-house international natives from Nigeria, Ghana and Guinea, and brought in live guest drummers from Guinea and Nigeria. That same profile noted the 2025 concert lasted three nights and one matinee, a format that now reads like part of the ensemble’s rhythm as much as its schedule.

Earlier Brockport coverage pointed to the same cross-border energy. In 2021, Sankofa’s virtual production included a guest performance live from Guinea, West Africa. A 2023 campus story singled out the djembe, the traditional West African drum whose sound it linked to Sankofa in Hartwell Hall. Together, those moments show why this ensemble matters on a drumming beat: it treats percussion as heritage in motion, carried from one generation to the next through students, alumni, guest artists and the steady return of the drum.