Making Caribbean Dance: Continuity and Creativity in Island Cultures

3. Rumba Encounters: Transculturation of Cuban Rumba in American and European Ballrooms

Rumba Encounters Transculturation of Cuban Rumba in American and European Ballrooms Juliet McMains While teaching an undergraduate ballroom dance class, I asked my students to read Yvonne Daniel’s description of Cuban rumba published in the first volume of Caribbean Dance (Daniel 2002, 47–51). Her depiction of the rumba guaguancó as an improvisational polyrhythmic dance in which an assertive man attempts to sexually possess a flirtatious woman who easily foils his pelvic thrusts (vacunaos) departed so sharply from the ballroom dance of the same name they were learning, they felt duped. Watching videos of the Cuban rumbas only heightened their confusion. The Cuban styles feature dancers with bent knees, torsos pitched forward, and buttocks thrust behind, in contrast to the straight-legged vertical posture of ballroom dancers . The basic foot patterns and rhythmical structures appear completely unrelated, as does the music, which consists only of percussive instruments and human voice in the Cuban videos and European melodic instruments in the ballroom dance styles. The Cuban dancers do not even touch each other (and as a result the female dancer can lead the timing and direction of movements as the man chases after her), whereas the female ballroom dancer moves only where she is guided by a physical lead from her male partner, whose hands are almost always in contact with her body. The subtle, sudden movements of Cuban dancers in which limbs, shoulders, and ribs constantly contract inward after sharp outward thrusts contrast directly with the long, languid movements of ballroom rumba dancers whose extensions of limbs and torsos carve out expansive shapes that stretch and melt into space. Differences among Afro- 38 Juliet McMains Cuban rumbas (including yambú, guaguancó, and columbia) and among ballroom rumbas (including American and international social and competitive styles) not withstanding, the differences between the Afro-Cuban and ballroom styles are so startling as to leave any viewer astonished that they could share the same name. Aside from an emphasis on hip movement and a narrative of courtship, other similarities are difficult to find. Most histories of ballroom dance account for the stark divergence between ballroom and Afro-Cuban rumba by clarifying that rumba as practiced by ballroom dancers is actually based on the Cuban son (American Rumba Committee 1943; Buckman 1978; Leymarie 2001; Murray 1938, 1942; Stephenson and Iccarino 1980; Veloz and Yolanda 1938). Admittedly, much of this discrepancy can be explained by the once common usage of the word rumba as a general term for any Cuban dance or music, resulting in the exportation of sones, boleros, and guarachas under the name rumba. According to ethnomusicologist Robin Moore, the troubled history of appropriation and reinterpretation of the Afro-Cuban rumba began on the island of Cuba itself in the late nineteenth century when white Cuban Figure 3.1. Belkis Quintana and Annier Sanchez of Rumba Morena performing guaguancó at the Callejon de Hamel in Havana, August 2007. Photograph by Grete Viddal; used by permission. Rumba Encounters 39 performers imitated and mocked black rumba musicians and dancers in teatro vernáculo, a theatrical genre similar to American blackface minstrelsy (Moore 1995, 1997). The subsequent exportation of this “commercial rumba” to Paris in the 1920s and the United States in the 1930s led to an international “rumba craze,” in which a wide range of Cuban (or more generally Latin American) music and dance styles were performed under the name rumba. Even these early exports departed drastically from the rumba music and dance styles developed by poor, primarily black Cubans in the late nineteenth century. Capitalizing on an international fashion for consumption of black culture (reflected in white fascination with the concept of négritude in France and with the Harlem Renaissance in the United States), many white Cuban musicians with little direct experience of Afro-Cuban rumba became international rumba ambassadors, creating a new genre of music and dance born from a mix of popular Cuban music and dance styles and international exotic fantasy. Although Cuban hotel and cabaret owners had previously considered rumba too low class to be included in their floor shows, pressure from international tourists compelled Havana’s nightlife establishments to stage rumba shows by the 1930s. For the first time, mulatto and black performers entered the commercial rumba sector, although their shows included little Afro-Cuban street rumba but were instead based on the hybridized, some might say bastardized, commercial rumba their audiences had seen in European cabarets...