Batuku!

So I hope this will be a real treat for everyone at home. This is a short clip from a video I shot a while back, but should give you a pretty good idea of what the Cape Verdian batuku style of music and dance is all about. As you can see, it's pretty spicey. This is a "semi-professional group, so they've got real drums, but in most of the rural villages, they use plastic sacs filled with clothes. The thing tied around the waste of the dancer is called Pano d'Terra and is a holdover from WAY back in the day. (Excuse the watermark...in order to get this down to a size that wouldn't break me trying to upload it, I had to use some demo software.)