Cuerpo y Cultura: Las músicas “mulatas” y la subversión del baile (review)

Cuerpo y cultura is a dance music analysis, a music investigation first and foremost, and one that seriously considers not only the dance movement, but also the implications of dancing male and female bodies. Cuerpo y cultura’s full title suggests “subversion,” the undermining or destruction of el baile. This subversión is not the turning away or overthrow of dance, but the revolution or challenge that the dance and its music ultimately promote. “The music that constitutes a dialogue between musical agents and the dancing body” is what this book examines and explains (p. 55).

Ángel Quintero Rivera attributes the mulata dancing body that surfaced from historical European and African interchanges and cultural mixtures across the Americas, as the source of resistance to European and North American preoccupations with the Cartesian mind/body dichotomy. This dancing body is not of little consequence. Its dance music presents, projects, and underscores the critical interconnectedness of music and dance movement and of the mind and the body. In fact, and more in keeping with what Quintero Rivera states inside the book rather than what the title might first suggest, the mission of mulata dance music is to confront and disrupt the high/low dichotomies of previous eras that insinuate mind/body and music/dance as polarized, separated, and usually unequal entities, and to profess and indicate body and music-making understandings and their consequent contributions, which are pervasive within integrated, yet distinct cultural segments of the Americas.

It was a pleasure in the end, but a daunting challenge linguistically, to read Cuerpo y cultura. Quintero Rivera’s preface put me face to face with work that penetrated the dancing body as I had attempted in my book, Dancing Wisdom—his book, an investment in popular dance as opposed to my book, an investment in sacred dance. Ever since 1986 when I discovered Quintero Rivera’s rigorous analysis of danza within the context of Puerto Rican colonial and nationalist struggles, I have admired this British-trained sociologist, using this article in my courses on dance and cultures, choreography and music, and the anthropology of dance. My first impressions of the present work surrounded total admiration for the seasoned thought and apparent commitment he exercised in discussing his subject so thoroughly. His book made synthesizing use of Caribbean dance form, in that he cleverly employed Puerto Rican danza form as the outline and organizing principle that allowed chapters to unfold and with them, detailed social and music history.

In dance history, Pan-Caribbean danza was a nineteenth and early twentieth century dance that had two or three sections. The first section, a somewhat formal or stately paseo, was the introduction in which gentlemen asked ladies to dance and the dancing couple promenaded within the dance space, greeted other dance couples, perhaps attended to the musical instrumentation and melody, and generally “oriented” themselves for the actual dancing that followed. The second section, called merengue, presented the dance steps and sequences, which countered earlier exceedingly formulaic floor patterns and bodily gestures from sixteenth through eighteenth century court imitations. This section flagrantly promoted the danced response to European form and style that developed in and eventually permeated the Americas. In its heyday, this two-part danza maintained face-to-face body positioning while dancing, and featured the African-derived and Haitian-influenced rhythms (e.g., cinquillo or quintolet, habanera, use of tresillos elásticos, and polyrhythm) that forever overwhelmed previous rhythmic standards in dance music of the Americas. In Puerto Rico (the home of Quintero Rivera), danza acquired a third section: jaleo, where both dancers and musicians expanded elaboration and creativity; where thick, loud, and complex textures of both sound and movement went to extreme fullness and long-lasting development. With the addition of this third section, Puerto Rican danza form not only framed the organization of the book, but also shaped the presentation of substantive Puerto Rican findings...