Caribbean and Atlantic Diaspora Dance: Igniting Citizenship

Chapter 4. Creole Dances in National Rhythms

chapter four Creole Dances in National Rhythms Creole dance creations have become synonymous with island identity: Cuban danzón or rumba, Jamaican reggae, Trinidadian calypso, Dominican merengue, and French Caribbean zouk are some examples.These and other social dances have come to light first as popular community dances and often thereafter as endeared folk or ballroom forms that have permeated the region and sometimes the world. In their sites of origin, the dances became popular because of their capacity to generate contagious pleasure and their close alignment with both local conditions and island values.1 This chapter focuses first on several Caribbean national dances and then examines national dance formation through the Cuban case, since Cuba has a unique but representative dance history. Mereng/Merengue, Danza/Bomba, Gwoka/Biguine, Calypso, and Reggae While historian John Chasteen cites the first closed-couple dancing with the earliest of European and African mixing off the coast of Africa on Chart 10. Caribbean National Dances Cuba: danzón [son, rumba, conga/comparsa, salsa/casino] Puerto Rico: danza [bomba, plena, salsa] Dominican Republic: merengue [bachata] Haiti: mereng [konpa] Martinique: bele, biguine Guadeloupe: gwoka/lewoz, biguine Trinidad: calypso Jamaica: reggae [dancehall] Circum-Caribbean Brazil: samba [unofficial national dances are in square brackets] 78 chapter 4 Portuguese São Tomé and Cape Verde in the 1500s,2 it is closed-couple form that delineates social dance types after the 1840s in the Caribbean. Mereng/Merengue origins are ambiguous in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico (along with related Venezuela and Colombia), but their style is characteristically lively and historically sensual. Haitian mereng and Dominican merengue have reiterated the same form and have embodied the values of one island with two distinct nations since the end of the eighteenth century.When Saint Domingue became Haiti at the end of the Haitian Revolution , méringue/mereng had already emerged as a musical rhythm from within popular contredanse sets and as a popular social dance first called carabinier (“rifleman dance”).3 Music historian Jean Fouchard proposed that from the merging of African drum/dances (like chica and calenda) and European salon or ballroom contredanse imitations (like congo minuet and quadrille), carabinier emerged as a new dance in Haiti. He asserted that Haitians were so touched by the Creole rendering of a Mozambican song and dance called “mouringue” that they appropriated the name and attached it to Haitian carabinier as “méringue” (French, later spelled mereng in Kreyol).4 Regardless of origins, with the island’s division into Haiti and the Dominican Republic after 1844, mereng and merengue developed certain distinctions, received their Kreyol and Spanish biases, and became sources of bitter rivalry. The longevity of the dances as national phenomena is connected to values and social circumstances that remain: foremost, a desired detachment from European centers and colonial ways, and later from U.S. American dominance , which was first imposed by the United States’ Marine occupation of Haiti from 1915–34 and of the Dominican Republic from 1916–24. An engaging, independent couple form first distinguished its style by favoring duple-metered, free-directional danza form over triple-metered, circling waltz form. As a result of sustained colonization and occupation, some of the African elements within mereng/merengue were minimized and some prejudice was suspended or submerged in order to promote national identity and distinct Caribbean performance in the presence of foreign domination. Even the most elite-oriented of Haitians and Dominicans eventually embraced a fully creolized dance.5 By the mid-twentieth century, mereng in Haiti was a moderate-tempo dance that featured hip isolation with an accent on one of two alternating steps (either RIGHT, L, RL, RL, or RLEFT, RL, RL, etc.). Couples spontaneously crisscrossed the dance space or danced steadily in place with this two-step pattern. In the Dominican Republic, a more accelerated tempo was attached to merengue, which accentuated side-to-side alternation of creole dances in national rhythms 79 hip thrusts and favored an extremely close body-to-body position. Both nations displayed the very basic foot pattern of a “danced walk,” mostly to tambora or bass drum, gourd shaker or scrapper, and acordeón sounds. Mereng/Merengue necessitates only the most common denominator of dancing—movement accessibility—and perhaps that makes it one of the most contagious dance forms, since almost all community participants are able to perform it. At times, couples dance pasted together (kole kole), hips moving...