Alicia Alonso contended that the musicality of Cuban ballet dancers contributed to a distinctive national style in their performance of European classics such as Giselle, ou Les Wilis and Lebedinoe ozero (Swan lake), op. 20. A highly developed sense of musicality distinguished Alonso's own dancing. For the ballerina, this was more than just an element of her individual style: it was an expression of the Cuban cultural environment and a common feature among ballet dancers from that island. In addition to elucidating the physical manifestations of musicality in Alonso's dancing, this article examines how the ballerina's frequent references to music in connection to both her individual identity and the Cuban ballet aesthetics fit into a national discourse of self-representation that deems Cubans an exceptionally musical people. This analysis also problematizes the Cuban ballet's brand of musicality by underscoring the tension between its possible explanations—from being the result of the dancers' socialization into a rich Afro-Caribbean musical culture to being a stylistic element that Alonso developed through her training with foreign teachers and, in turn, transmitted to her Cuban disciples.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Explores the vexed relationship between popular dance and value. In a critique of the Western art canon, it traces the shifting value systems that underpin popular dance scholarship and considers how different dancing communities articulate multiple and often paradoxical expressions of judgment, significance, and worth through their embodied practice. Employing a cultural theory approach, it focuses on the choreographic content of neo-burlesque striptease in London and New York, the dance styles of British punk, metal, and ska fans, and the vernacular dances of a British-Caribbean dancehall to interrogate how value is produced, negotiated, and reimagined. Yet this is not to assume that they are autonomous values untouched by the social frameworks in which they exist. Rather, the corporeal enunciations of value constructed by those engaged in popular dance forms are informed by a complex matrix of aesthetic, economic, political, and social values that are already in circulation
With questions of identity and multiculturalism remaining at the center of debates in the press, political, and academia arenas, a dance production tackles these issues head on in a surprisingly humorous and accessible way. Birmingham-based Sonia Sabri Company's Kathakbox is a collaborative production exploring the theme of ticking boxes, which sets out to challenge preconceptions about identity. Four specialists in kathak, hip-hop, African Caribbean, and contemporary dance are joined by three musician-vocalists who eschew instruments, utilizing their voices and bodies to create a vibrant rhythmic score influenced by a cosmopolitan mix of styles. Aesthetic and ideological meeting points occur onstage in the hour-long show, while counter-hegemonic possibilities emerge in associated workshops. The article explores how the narrative potential of kathak opens the way for Muslim women participants to delve into movement possibilities and improvisational potential of both the South Asian dance form and hip-hop.
Katherine Dunham (1909-2006) is revered as one of the great pillars of American dance history. Her world-renowned modern dance company exposed audiences to the diversity of dance, and her schools brought dance training and education to a variety of populations sharing her passion and commitment to dance as a medium of cultural communication. Often recognized for her research in the Caribbean and on African dance traditions, Dunham's research also extended to black dance traditions of America. her research in American black dance traditions unearthed and contributed to the foundations of jazz dance and black vernacular movement vocabularies.
Like many other phenomena, the history of the tango is steeped in the notion of a progressive evolution at once social, sexualized, and racial, a sort of three-fold whitening which is accompanied by the contemporary tendency to valorize its 'black roots'. One can only be amazed at the studies which strain to drag in blackness, although the historiography of Argentina is primarily one of whitening, and the growing international adoption and adaptation of the tango leave little room for minorities. These strange hybridizations provide useful illustrations for exploring the questions of identity surrounding the tango (dance) known as 'Argentinean' in the context of its globalization., unedited non–English abstract received by RILM] Comme bien d’autres expressions, l’histoire de la danse tango est imprégnée par l’idée d’une évolution progressiste à la fois sociale, sexuée et raciale, un triple blanchiment en quelque sorte, qui s’accompagne d’une tendance contemporaine consistant à valoriser ses « origines noires ». On ne peut que s’étonner des travaux qui s’efforcent de rapatrier de la négritude, alors que l’historiographie dominante de l’Argentine est dominée par le blanchiment et que les conditions d’actualisation de cette danse de par le monde offrent peu de place aux minorités. C’est à la faveur de ces curieux croisements que sont examinées les questions identitaires qui gravitent autour du tango dansé que l’on dit « argentin » dans le contexte de sa mondialisation.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Unedited] Shows how community music-makers and dancers take in all that is around them socially and globally, and publicly and bodily unfold their memories, sentiments, and raw responses within open spaces designated or commandeered for local popular dance. The book reveals a rarely discussed perspective on contemporary Cuban society during the 1990s, the peak decade of timba, and beyond, as the Cuban leadership transferred from Fidel Castro to his brother. Simultaneously, it reveals popular dance music in the context of a young and astutely educated Cuban generation of fierce and creative performers. By looking at the experiences of black Cubans and exploring the notion of 'Afro Cuba', the book explains timba's evolution and achieved significance in the larger context of Cuban culture. It discusses a maroon aesthetic extended beyond the colonial era to the context of contemporary society; describes the dance spaces of Cuba; and examines the performance of identity and desire through the character of the 'especulador'.
The dance-music complexes known as salsa and bhangra have not been subjected to any comparative academic scrutiny, despite clear parallels in their respective histories as cultural processes born out of multiple ruptures and conjunctions, including European colonialism, migrations during the postcolonial period, and transnational cultural and commodity flows. While salsa has resulted from the movement of people, music, and rhythmic cultures across Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, bhangra evinces their movement across the partitioned space of Punjab, the United Kingdom, and the post-Partition nations of India and Pakistan. Both salsa and bhangra have, moreover, moved beyond original regional ambits to become cultural signifiers (albeit often contested as much as claimed) of wider Latino/a and Desi (pan-South Asian) identities respectively. Undoubtedly, it is the academic and cultural embedding of salsa within a Hispanophone postcolonial paradigm, and of bhangra within its Anglophone counterpart, that has prevented serious comparative work between these two musical expressive cultures which are equally but differently exemplary of the complex relationship between music and migration. Yet across the world, from Delhi to San Francisco, the two dance-music complexes increasingly meet each other in the same space, particularly that of the dance floor. Drawing on such evidence as well as on personal experience of dancing both salsa and bhangra, I will advance in this article a theoretical framework for their comparison as transnational musics, suggesting ways in which such a framework can illuminate the circuits of pleasure and politics that traverse each of these dance musics as embodied histories of a traumatic yet life-affirming postcolonial modernity.
