“Then, all of a sudden, the tempo picks up and people start bending their knees and start getting down. Then, someone moves into the middle of the circle and they start doing, like, a – at first, I said, “That kind of looks like a modern-day Funky Chicken kind of thing.” I’m standing there, and I’m trying to get my hips and my knees to move the same way that everybody else’s is, but it’s not happening the same way everybody else’s is, and I’m hearing the music the wrong way. I’m thinking about how I hear it here in the States, which is like emphasizing the two and the four, and it’s really more about the one and three. As soon as I stop thinking about that and stop thinking about “there has to be one” – like one, two, three, four; like you just always think about “there’s got to be a one in music” – and just move my body along with the cycles and the rhythms and the patterns, I start dancing.

I start doing my own thing — well, I mixed it a little bit with what was going on there – but when I started doing my own thing and fitting in, then I started to get inside the pocket, what they call “yaangy ci biir.” I was inside the music at that moment. I was still dancing very much like an American, but I was inside the pocket. ”
Timothy Mangin
*note :: listen close to Mbaye Dieye Faye and you will hear him call yaangy ci biir ALL THE TIME! 🙂
“its traditional style and rhythm yet free in its “freestyle” …. the age old rhythm’s eternal begging for a new bakk, a new layer upon layer…. the begging for a dancers movement, to hit it, to slip inside of it, hold it there and then end it; to write a piece in those moments. To make people smile, to laugh, to stand up and scream or maybe just to enter the groove for ones own sake until you are healed.” Lynette Wich