Abstract
In the 1960s-70s, the Ballet Nacional de Cuba (BNC) produced dozens of works that integrated Afro-Cuban dance and music. I analyze how that choreographic output sought to cultivate a national ballet aesthetic while advancing the Cuban Revolution’s antiracist program. The ballets conformed to the state’s cultural policy of valorizing and institutionalizing the Afro-Cuban heritage. Since the island’s rich dance history had long been emblematic of the transculturation of European and African traditions, dance spectacles served as convenient pedagogical tools for the government to promote social acceptance of an afrodiasporic definition of Cuban culture. I propose that the choreographies not merely visualized such an afrodiasporic narrative of the nation but enacted the very process of transculturation by hybridizing ballet and Afro-Cuban expressions such as rumba and the ritual dances from the santería religion. Under the Revolution, the concept of transculturation (coined by the influential Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz two decades earlier) became a state-sanctioned paradigm of cultural production. I argue that choreographers, dancers, and institutions such as the BNC were instrumental in making transculturation part of official discourse. Integrating oral history, archival research, and performance analysis, I detail the compositional strategies of juxtaposition, counterpoint, and fusion through which choreographers operated transculturation of ballet and Afro-Cuban dance. Simultaneously, I probe the limits of representation in those choreographic experiments, which, reflecting Ortiz’s ambiguous ideology of transculturation, could obscure conflict in racial relations and underscore, instead, images of racial reconciliation in line with the Revolution’s political priorities.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Ballet, AfroCubanCulture, Cuba, Revolution, Transculturation, Choreography, Narrative, StateIdeology
