The concept of limping is widespread in various forms of music and dance in the northern Cibao region of the Dominican Republic. A limp is said to characterize the way in which accordion and percussion instruments interpret rhythms in merengue típico music, and some consider it a feature distinguishing the típico style of merengue from other styles around the country. Traditionally, merengue típico is also danced with a limping movement. Moreover, the typical Carnival characters of the Cibaeño cities Santiago and La Vega are also meant to move with limps. Musicians, dancers, and Carnival celebrants give various verbal explanations to explain the limp’s history and importance, and many of these tie it to stories about devils or other amoral characters. The limp is, however, not only a local stylistic feature, but one that connects Cibaeño culture with other expressions involving limps around the Caribbean region, from blues rhythms to zydeco dancing to the so-called pimp walk. The connective tissue between all these diverse cultural expressions might be Esu, Elegguá, or Papa Legba, the deity of the crossroads who limps, is sometimes syncretized with the Christian devil, and is invoked at the beginning and end of vodou and santería ceremonies. This article uses data collected through interviews with merengue típico musicians and dancers, four years’ participation in Santiago Carnival, and the theories of Henry Louis Gates and Paul Gilroy to explore Black Atlantic expressions in a Dominican context, while explaining the connections between dance and music from a Cibaeño perspective., unedited non–English abstract received by RILM] El concepto de “cojear” está muy extendido en diversos géneros de música y de baile en la región norteña de la República Dominicana denominada el Cibao. Se dice que el “cojo” caracteriza la forma en que el acordeón y los instrumentos de percusión interpretan los ritmos del merengue típico, y algunos lo consideran una característica que distingue el estilo típico cibaeño del merengue de los merengues de otras regiones el país. El merengue típico tradicional también se bailaba “cojeando.” Por otra parte, los personajes típicos del carnaval cibaeño en las ciudades de Santiago y La Vega también avanzan, según se dice, con un “cojo.” Músicos, bailarines, y carnavaleros dan varias explicaciones verbales sobre la historia y la importancia del cojo, y muchas se lo atan a historias sobre diablos y otros personajes amorales. Sin embargo, el cojo no es solamente una característica estilística local, sino una que conecta la cultura cibaeña con otras expresiones del “cojo” en toda la región caribeña, desde los ritmos blues hasta el baile del zydeco y el “pimp walk.” El tejido conectivo entre todas estas diversas expresiones culturales podría ser Esu, Eleguá, o Papa Legba, el dios de las encrucijadas que cojea, que a veces se sincretiza con el diablo cristiano, y a quien se invoca al comienzo y al final de las ceremonias de vudú y de la santería. El presente artículo utiliza los datos recogidos a través de entrevistas con músicos y bailarines del merengue típico, cuatro años de participación en el carnaval santiaguero, y las teorías de Henry Louis Gates y Paul Gilroy para explorar las expresiones del Atlántico Negro en un contexto dominicano, mientras explique las conexiones entre la danza y la música desde una perspectiva cibaeña.
The benefit features Dr. Raul Ruiz Miyares, a professor of Afro-Cuban culture and history at Casa del Caribe, Santiago de Cuba. His lecture, "Cuba & Africanismo: The Making of Revolutionary Culture", will include slides and a video. The benefit also includes: spoken word, an Afro-Cuban folkloric performance, a Caribbean dinner, and a Latin, World Beat dance party, all on Friday, May 2.6 p.m.
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:
Focuses on cultural manifestations of pan-Americanism through the development of Haitian folkloric dance by the Haitian-born dance director Jean-Léon Destiné and the U.S. African American dance educator Lavinia Williams. As early as the mid-1930s, the Haitian government began to support the advancement and consumption of Haitian cultural arts to increase tourism to the country. In fact, many Caribbean administrations encouraged similar investments in tourism during this time to complement industrialization and to answer the dilemmas of debt, unemployment, and failing economies. The work of Destiné and Williams sought to modernize Haitian dance or, rather, to discipline it, classify it, and theatricalize it so Haiti’s original art form could be exhibited on the world stage and educate audiences about Haitian history and culture. The establishment of cultural institutions and the training of Haitian dancers by a U.S. African American choreographer affirmed not only the spirit of pan-Americanism’s cultural exchange programs, but also the creation of an alternative world by black dancers in which African-based art forms were celebrated and in consistent dialogue with Western culture.
Addresses the socially controversial issue of the public expression of sexuality in dance in the Caribbean. Of particular interest is the phenomenon of 'wining' or 'wukkin' up', dancing involving pelvic gyrations.
Gonzalez,Anita, (Author), Jackson,George O. (Photography), and Pellicer,Jose Manuel (Photography)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2010
Published:
Austin: University of Texas Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
163 p, rticulates African ethnicity and artistry within the broader panorama of Mexican culture by featuring dance events that are performed either by Afro-Mexicans or by other ethnic Mexican groups about Afro-Mexicans. She illustrates how dance reflects upon social histories and relationships and documents how residents of some sectors of Mexico construct their histories through performance.
Research on Caribbean dance has revealed consistent ongoing contredanse-related practices since the 17th c. in the Spanish islands and since the 18th c. in the French, British, Dutch, and former Danish islands. The Caribbean forms that emerged do not stand together in an obvious manner because of diverse names for similar configurations and different forms. The discussion, based on comparative fieldwork and a survey of Caribbean dance practices, attempts to overcome some of these difficulties and to show pointedly that Caribbean quadrilles by many names express the ongoing but submerged agency of African-descended performers, that Caribbean dance history and categorization are lacking, and that the royal pageantry that is associated with quadrille performance is significant.
The Philadelphia region was the site of a rare, artistic treat when Balé Folclórico, Brazil's premiere professional folk dance company made a special Black History Month visit. Formed in 1988, the 33-member troupe of dancers, musicians, and singers perform a repertory based on various Bahian folkloric dances of African origin, including: capoeira (a form of martial arts), samba and other cultural traditions celebrated during Carnival. Hailing from Salvador, in the northeastern state of Bahia, Balé Folclòrico represents Bahia's most important cultural manifestations under a contemporary theatrical vision that reflects its popular origins.
78 p., Examines the ways in which the African American identity articulates and constructs itself through dance. Norman Bryson, an art historian, suggests that approaches from art history, film and comparative literature are as well applicable to the field of dance research. Therefore, as his main critical lens and a theoretical foundation, the author adopts the analytical approach developed by Erwin Panofsky, an art historian and a proponent of integrated critical approach, much like the one suggested by Bryson. Demonstrates that Erwin Panofsky's iconology, when applied as a research method, can make valuable contributions to the field of Dance Studies. Uses Katherine Dunham's original recordings of diaspora dances of the Caribbean and her modern dance choreography titled L'Ag'Ya to look for evidence for the paradigm shift from "primitive" to "diaspora" in representation of Black identity in dance also with the aim of detecting the elements that produce cultural difference in dance.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
266 p, This study spans several linguistic areas of the Caribbean and parts of the Atlantic coast of the U.S., Mexico, and South America; it examines historical, national, popular, parading, sacred, and combat dances to reveal both meanings and consequences of performance. Beyond unfolding important physical and cultural significances of each genre, the analyses deepen to understand core motivations for African diaspora performance; the results are transcendence, resilience, and citizenship among dancing and music-making participants. The study repeatedly acknowledges Katherine Dunham, who began teaching the citizenship of Caribbean dance/music practices and reviews the literature since her original trilogy on Caribbean dance practices. Analyses also place local Caribbean dances as viable commodities within crucial Caribbean tourism and both cultural and economic globalization.
221 p., Carmen (Mérimée 1845, Bizet 1875), the story about the (in)famous Gypsy dancer from Spain, is the second most adapted narrative in the history of world cinema, with over eighty global versions officially recognized to date. Despite the global reach of the Carmen phenomenon, many scholars claim that this tale has hardly been reworked in Spanish America and never in the Caribbean. Following Carmen from Spain to Spanish America, the author shows how the template of Carmen (a love story that reveals the racio-ethnic and gender stratification in Spain) has been artfully but unsuspectingly reappropriated and "creolized" in postcolonial Cuba in the controversial film María Antonia (1991) by Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sergio Giral, based on the landmark play María Antonia (1964) by Afro-Cuban playwright Eugenio Hernández Espinosa.
The Caribbean coastal region of Colombia is called the costa, and its inhabitants are referred to as costeños. The müsica costeña (coastal music) is a product of tri-ethnic syncretic cultural traditions including Amerindian, Spanish, and African elements, a merging that begins with the colonial period and continues into the republican period on the Caribbean Coast. Traditional music from the Colombian Caribbean coast expresses its tri-ethnic costeño identity in various vocal styles and musical forms and through its types of instruments and the way they are played. This essay describes the aspects and circumstances under which cumbia, a coastal musical genre and dance form of peasant origins characterized by an African-derived style, has spread from its local origins in the valley of the Magdalena River to acquire a Colombian national identity, becoming in a few years a transnational musical phenomenon.
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.
The recent performance featured five of the pieces from their repertoire. Three of the pieces, 'Sankofa-Ja' (choreographed by Professor Kariamu Welsh Asante), 'Evolution' (choreographed by Abeldo 'Tokie' [Monika Lawrence]) and 'African Nite' (choreographed by Monica Lawrence assisted by Orville Hall) were added to the ensemble's repertoire this year. '[Liza]' weaves together the stories and music from 'Linstead Market', 'Mout-a-Massie Liza' and 'Every time me Memba Liza' to tell the story of a young girl who becomes disaffected with country life and goes off to the city.
Inspired by the African Diaspora in the Caribbean, Katherine Dunham spearheaded an American dance revolution, breaking down social barriers and prejudice
Through an examination of the recording Gargalhada (pega na chaleira), a chansonnette sung by Eduardo das Neves, the origin of the expression 'pegar na chaleira' (bootlicking) is traced, while some inconsistencies in the online catalogue of the Instituto Moreira Salles are revealed. Probably recorded in 1906, six years before the establishment of the Odeon plant in Rio, the piece was labeled a lundu, a paradigmatically Afro-Brazilian genre, in the 1915–26 catalogues. The music and laughter that Neves appropriates for himself were created by George Washington Johnson, the first black star of early sound recording, and reused in other Casa Edison (Brazilian Odeon) recordings on sale from 1913 to 1919. But while the former North American slave ridicules himself in accordance with white stereotypes, the self-designated Creole stages a satire on the behavior of upperclass men in Rio de Janeiro. In this process, the coon song turns into its antithesis., unedited non–English abstract received by RILM] Um exame do fonograma Gargalhada (pega na chaleira), cançoneta por Eduardo das Neves, expõe a origem da expressão “pegar na chaleira” e revela incongruências nos critérios de catalogação online do Instituto Moreira Salles. Provavelmente datada de 1906, a gravação aparece como um “lundu” em catálogos comerciais de 1915–1926, e as mesmas ideias musicais foram reaproveitadas em outros registros sonoros da Casa Edison comercializados entre 1913 e 1919. A música e o gargalhar que Neves reaproveita foram criados por George Washington Johnson, o primeiro astro negro da gravação mecânica. Mas enquanto o ex-escravo norte-americano se auto-ridiculariza de acordo com estereótipos brancos, o autodenominado “crioulo” encena uma sátira ao comportamento masculino das classes dominantes do Rio. Neste processo, a coon song transforma-se na antítese do gênero.
