Embodied Knowledge as Revolutionary Dance: Representations of Cuban Modern Dance in Alma Guillermoprieto’s Dancing with Cuba

Alma Guillermoprieto’s memoir, Dancing with Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution (2004), emphasizes the ways in which socialist rhetoric affected the Cuban modern dance community by focusing on embodied knowledge, that is a knowledge of, and produced through, the body. The memoir is about Guillermoprieto’s stay in Cuba during the last six months of 1970 when she was invited to teach modern dance at Cuba’s famed Escuelas Nacionales de Arte (ENA). On her first day of class, the 20-year-old Guillermoprieto learns from the director of the program, Elfriede Mahler, that there will be no mirrors in the dance studios. Shocked, Guillermoprieto wonders how the students are supposed to adjust their bodies during rehearsal:

The mirror is the most valuable tool a dancer has—even more important, perhaps, than the best teacher. From the teacher’s voice alone one can, in theory, understand the correction “lengthen the leg from the inner part of the thigh, not from the knee”; but when that same teacher grabs your leg with one hand, pats the knee, and strokes or pinches the muscle that is to be worked while holding your back straight with the other hand, then, having achieved the desired effect, exclaims, “Look!” and raises your eyes to the mirror, you can almost feel a kind of gear that links gaze, body, and memory clicking into place.

(Guillermoprieto 2004, 50)

This excerpt is an example of the careful attention the memoir gives to the role of sensory perception in the development of dance knowledge. It urges the reader to imagine not only the movement of dance technique, but also the ways in which the dancer connects the correction of the dance teacher’s hands on the body, along with the command to gaze at her own reflection. In the memoir, this mirror scene is significant because it identifies how the young Guillermoprieto conceptualizes the components of dance making, at least until she arrives in Cuba.

Dancing with Cuba (2004) showcases the influential role embodied knowledge plays in the development of Guillermoprieto as a dancer, dance teacher, and later, as a dance memoirist. In doing so, I argue that this memoir articulates language as a vital component of the embodied knowledge process and underscores the role language plays in relationship to embodied knowledge—whether it is used to activate the kinesthetic imagination or to archive dance narratives. Moreover, I show that these arguments have important implications for the broader understanding of the Cuban New Man. The power of language to move bodies and develop embodied knowledge was also realized by the designers of the Revolution, and I contend that Guillermoprieto’s memoir calls for the reader to reconsider the intersections of embodied knowledge, modern dance, and the utopian vision of the Cuban Revolution.

First Reflections

To understand how Guillermoprieto’s memoir uses language to articulate an embodied knowledge of dance, it is useful to know the embodied knowledge traditions she brings to revolutionary Cuba in 1970. Guillermoprieto’s training is informed primarily by American modern dance. She first learns modern dance in Mexico City with the Ballet Nacional, where their form was based mostly upon the Martha Graham technique.¹ At the age of sixteen, Guillermoprieto moves to New York City, where she trains at the Martha Graham dance studio and then with Merce Cunningham. Graham, who is described on the first page of the memoir, is positioned as a goddess of modern dance: Graham’s “quest for a body language that reflected the deepest inner conflicts, and the way she used gestures and movements to stage great myths, centering them on the internal universe of a single woman .. . brought her admirers and disciples from all the arts” (Guillermoprieto 2004, 5). Guillermoprieto praises Graham’s work and influence, and the memoir highlights the magnitude of this influential choreographer with words like “quest,” “myths,” and “universe.” Yet, Guillermoprieto remembers Graham’s classes being extremely demanding and focused on improvement through pain. She simultaneously describes Graham as a groundbreaking figure and as an aged drama queen who...