The last entry ended with sand flying to the beat of drums and singing on a dark beach in Accra. This one features sweat flying to the same beats in a long one-room rectangular cement building on a dusty lot on a sweltering Wednesday evening. Attracted by rumors of group meditation and a yoga session led by a Tantric monk before their usual rehearsal, I left work early and went to the headquarters of the Africana dance troupe (the same people who were at the beach Sunday night). The rumors were true, kind of. Raghuviir, the monk, led a short meditation and then handed the floor over to Adams, one of the lead dancers, who led about 20 minutes of casual yoga. Actually, they both seemed like good instructors; but the participants were not the serene, focused lotus flowers of my Eastern imagination. The 20-or-so people in attendance were the inhabitants of a different dream: sinewy black men all bones and muscle and smooth, tightly-stretched skin, with fiery eyes and white, white teeth; and full-figured women with lighter skin and softer features. And we all had a case of the giggles. In the middle of “fish pose” one Ghanaian would poke another, and inside ten seconds everyone was literally on the floor laughing hysterically.

Diagnosis: too much energy. Treatment: give the drummers drums, give the dancers space, and take a seat.

The next two hours were a continuous eruption of kinetic energy. The sound of the drums was indistinguishable from the pounding of feet on the small wooden stage at one end of the building, and the violent flailing of the drummers’ arms was a dance in itself. The music is so polyrhythmic that one finds the backbeat by watching the dancers, not by listening to the instruments. But the dances, tightly choreographed and executed in perfect unison by groups of 4-10 dancers (depending on the song), are so viscerally controlled by the drums that they are one and the same. The dancers don’t appear to hear the rhythms—they are the rhythms. The long cement building is one big drum with myriad faces, played by a maniac octopal African whose limbs are somehow themselves drums with myriad faces, which are played by…

The point is that the eruption, even with its distinct components, was so organic that it was synesthetic; and it was so powerful that, even sitting on the floor against a side wall, I couldn’t separate myself from it. Couldn’t even look away, because it was an entire universe inside that room, and every point in space was connected to every drum was connected to every dancer’s whipping limbs was connected to the stifling heat and flying sweat and howling and sachets of water violently squeezed into gaping, panting mouths. Then promptly at 6pm, right on schedule, the power went out; and the tempest continued in the pitch dark for about a minute, during which the energetic elements of this exploding universe came untethered from their visual sources and wheeled chaotically around the space in their frenzied death throes—even louder and louder than before, voice, drum, grunt, stomp, until three nearly deafening reports from all the drums in unison and it was over, spontaneously and completely. There were a few seconds of just heavy breathing in the impossible silence, and then people began talking and laughing in the dark and soon people switched on flashlights and again there were individuals, etc. etc.

So to me it was lightning in a bottle; or cosmology in a long cement building.