Imagine flying nonstop from New York to San Francisco and back: that’s the distance between South Africa and Senegal. Yet the premise of this joint venture is that the continent evaporates when two icons of African contemporary dance meet. The Sowetan choreographer Gregory Maqoma and the Senegalese dance matriarch Germaine Acogny both trained in the West but returned home to make their mark. Maqoma and Acogny suffuse their work with traditional tribal forms, from their respective corners of the continent, at least as much as they respond to the protocols of Western experimental theater and postmodern dance. “As We Are,” which is currently touring Europe and will eventually make its way to New York, is about the struggle and joyous necessity of making room onstage for their long-sidelined Black heritage. In Joséphine, a solo with significant costume changes, the 82-year-old Acogny channels and disputes the Jazz Age African-American dancer-celebrity Josephine Baker. For the rousing, loose-jointed, deliriously crowded Bantu, Maqoma unites dancers from Acogny’s École des Sables (School of Sands) and his own Johannesburg-based Vuyani Dance Theatre. —Apollinaire Scherr