Abstract
On 25 March 2007 the Teatro América in Havana hosted the closing ceremony of the 2007 Habana Danzôn Festival. The event, a space to honor the winners of that year’s annual danzôn competition, started with a stylized, ballet-like choreography set to a jazz composition loosely based on some of the most basic stylistic musical features of the danzôn. However, neither the dancing bodies on the stage nor the sounds coming out of the theater’s loudspeakers resembled the everyday danzôn practices the event meant to honor. The music, displaying many virtuoso solo improvisatory sections, did not lend itself to the sensual but restrained dance steps of regular danzôn aficionados, while the dancers on stage soon departed from the close-work couple dancing that characterizes social danzôn, and went on to perform elaborate contortions that seemed to combine elements from both ballet, contemporary dance, and ballroom dancing. The event continued with danzôn choreographies presented by some of the Cuban and Mexican dancers who had participated at the festival’s danzôn competition during the previous week, and reached its climax with, after the winners of the competition were announced, a jam dance session where Mexicans and Cubans danced together.
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Notes
Bernardo García Díaz and Sergio Guerra Vilaboy, “Introduction,” in La Habana, Veracruz, Veracruz, La Habana. Las dos orillas, ed. Bernardo García Díaz and Sergio Guerra Vilaboy (Xalapa, Mexico: Universidad Veracruzana, 2002 ), 14.
Sergio Guerra Vilaboy, “PresentaciÓn,” in Carlos E. BojÓrquez Urzaiz, La emigración cubana en Yucatân, 1868–1898 (Merida, Mexico: Imagen Contemporânea, 2000 ), 7.
See Bernardo García Díaz, “La migraciôn cubana a Veracruz,” in La Habana,Veracruz, Veracruz, La Habana. Las dos orillas, ed. Díaz and Vilaboy, 297–319; and Urzaiz, La emigración cubana en Yucatân, 1868–1898.
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Argeliers León, Del canto y el tiempo (Havana: Editorial Pueblo y Educación, 1974), 257 and 262.
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Alejo Carpentier, La música en Cuba ( Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2004 ), 237–8.
John Charles Chasteen, National Rhythms, African Roots: The Deep History of Latin American Popular Dance ( Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004 ), 75.
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Robin Moore, Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920–1940 ( Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997 ), 25.
For an account of how these dances were adopted in other Latin American countries, see Juan Pablo Gonzâlez and Claudio Rolle, Historia social de la mûsica popular chilena, 1890–1950 ( Santiago de Chile and Havana: Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile-Casa de las Américas, 2004 ).
Clementina Díazy de Ovando, Invitaciôn al baile. Arte, espectâculo y rito en la sociedad mexicana (1825–1910), vol. II (Mexico City: UNAM, 2006 ), 506.
Ignacio M. Altamirano, Crônicas de la semana (Mexico City: Ediciones de Bellas Artes, 1969 [first published in 1869]), 141.
José E. Limón, American Encounters: Greater Mexico, the United States, and the Erotics of Culture (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1998), 211. Limón argues that these processes of eroticization are dialogic as the individuals subjected to them find ways to reverse and take advantage of them (19).
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Marco Polo Hernández Cuevas, African Mexicans and the Discourse on Modern Nation ( Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2004 ), 12.
Simón Jara Gâmez, Aurelio Rodríguez “Yeyo,” and Antonio Zedillo Castillo, De Cuba con amor… el danzôn en México ( Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 2001 ), 41.
Frances R. Aparicio, Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latino Popular Culture and Puerto Rican Cultures ( Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998 ), 8.
Marilyn Grace Miller, Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race: The Cult of Mestizaje in Latin America ( Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004 ), 94.
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Osvaldo Castillo Faílde, Miguel Faílde, creador musical del danzôn ( Havana: Editora del Consejo Nacional de Cultura, 1964 ), 252.
For an in-depth study of music and tourism during the periodo especial in Cuba, see Vincenzo Perna, Timba: The Sound of the Cuban Crisis (Adershot: Ashgate, 2005).
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© 2011 Alejandro L. Madrid
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Madrid, A.L. (2011). Transnational Cultural Translations and the Meaning of Danzôn across Borders1. In: Rivera-Servera, R.H., Young, H. (eds) Performance in the Borderlands. Performance Interventions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230294554_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230294554_3
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