A Bird Dance Near Saturday City: Sidi Ball and the Art of West African Masquerade is the culmination of 30 years of involvement by Patrick R. McNaughton in this unique Mande art form. He first watched Sidi Ball perform the bird dance in Dogoduman in 1978. He is now the Chancellor's Professor of African Art at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. McNaughton went to Mali to study blacksmiths. His first book is The Mande Blacksmiths: Knowledge, Power and Art in West Africa (1988). He has also written Secret Sculptures of Komo: Art and Power in Bomana Initiation Associations.
A Bird Dance Near Saturday City is a remarkable book. Many others before McNaughton have studied Mande art and he clearly recognises their contributions. One scholar of these giant dancing masks is Pascal Imperato, a physician who began working in Mali in 1966 and studied the Mande youth association and their art forms. Charles Bird worked with the great artist Seyodu Camara. Others studied the Bamana youth association's rural theatre north of Bamako, especially the anthropologist James Brink who has explored Mande aesthetics over many years.
