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KENNETH M. BILBY and DANIEL T. NEELY 7 / The English-Speaking Caribbean Re-embodying the Colonial Ballroom Suddenly the hush into which we were rapidly falling was ruptured by a series of disharmonic chords and squeaks and loud thumps of the game leg and the bow on the floor. There was a moment of tension, a sigh, a violent expectoration over the pavilion railing, and the fiddler had “cum round.” First he warmed up a bit of this and that: improvisations, snatches of old English airs and Creole melodies. Meanwhile two lines formed, one of men, one of women. The men vied for partners, the women modestly looked down and fingered their dresses, and then as if by silent agreement, fiddler and dancers were under way. There was a great flourish of curtsies, and gradually it dawned on me that this was the Maroon version of the quadrille. —Katherine Dunham, Journey to Accompong T he relationship between people of African descent in the Anglophone Caribbean and Western dance reaches back into the eighteenth century , if not earlier. At any rate, this is when colonial writers first began taking note of slaves adopting the music and dances of European society. Since that time, European dances in this part of the Caribbean have received considerable attention, and perhaps none as much as the quadrille. In the literature of the Anglophone Caribbean, the quadrille is treated more frequently than any other colonial social dance as an index of European influence. However, its popularity—like that of any other expressive form—has ebbed and flowed with shifts in taste; one of the things most often overlooked by writers is that the quadrille was but one of a number of dances originally associated with the European ballroom that were popular among the colonists in the Caribbean by the late eighteenth century. In view of this fact, it is misleading to treat the quadrille as if it existed in isolation. In the following sections, we attempt to take this broader picture into consideration while placing the quadrille in the Anglophone Caribbean in historical perspective and providing some idea of the contexts with which it has been associated in more recent times. 232 Kenneth M. Bilby and Daniel T. Neely The Ballroom Complex Throughout the nineteenth century, a range of social dances originally associated with the European ballroom found favor in the colonies and became the basis for subaltern adaptations.1 These included round dances, such as the polka, the mazurka, the polka-mazurka, the varsovienne, the two-step, and the gallop; circle dances, such as the maypole; longways dances, such as the contradance and the country dance; solo dances, such as jigs and clogs; and square dances, such as the cotillion, the quadrille, and the Lancers.2 Many of these included steps that functioned as interchangeable parts of dance suites; others , such as particular longways and square dances, were themselves suites that included as few as four (but generally more) individual “figures.” On the continent, individual and figure dances were highly prescribed affairs, characterized in their original forms by a lack of physical intimacy, though this eventually changed, particularly through the international popularity of the waltz.3 In the colonies, not only did these dances become the bases for local and sometimes idiosyncratic choreographic interpretation but they were also sometimes reconfigured, recontextualized, and resignified to such an extent that the only obvious remaining connection to their Continental forebears was their names. As John Szwed and Morton Marks (1988: 29) state, “a European dance name may refer to an entirely different dance; or a native New World term may disguise a well-known European form; and the European name for a step may label a complex dance in its own right.” This terminological slippage can lead to some confusion, since, as is shown below, specific creolized varieties often ended up displaying little real resemblance to their European namesakes. Jennifer Post’s work on music and dance in New England demonstrates that similar processes occurred in North America, where common European ballroom styles also became the basis for creative local developments (2004: 93). Despite certain similarities with the North American case, however, Caribbean choreography tended to rely less strictly on Continental models—a fact that may help explain the relative paucity of scholarly work comparing the two. It has been suggested that much music in the Caribbean represents a creolized fusion of European and African elements, and that this is one reason the Caribbean might be thought of...

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