Making Caribbean Dance: Continuity and Creativity in Island Cultures

18. Dance in Barbados: Reclaiming, Preserving, and Creating National Identities

Dance in Barbados Reclaiming, Preserving, and Creating National Identities Susan Harewood and John Hunte As the first volume of Caribbean Dance demonstrated, dance is an extremely fruitful site at which to explore the dynamic ways in which Caribbean identities are constructed. The essays in the earlier book, together with this present collection, clearly show that this cluster of islands and territories, famously described as “a musical region” (Bilby 1985), can just as easily be described as “a dance region.” In this chapter our interest is in providing a broad overview of social and concert dance practices in Barbados. Very little has been written on dance in Barbados; thus we offer this chapter as a contribution to the tiny body of literature that currently exists and as an invitation for more work. As we make clear in the following pages, Barbadian dance practices reveal a great deal about the complex processes through which Barbadians construct their identities. We begin by exploring the faint traces of traditional dances in Barbados. This examination permits us to consider the ways in which reclamation and preservation of those traditional dances were an important part of the contribution of dance performance to nation-building projects in Barbados in the 1970s and 1980s, though constructing new forms of movement, drawing particularly on the Martha Graham modern school, was also important . We show that the desire to reclaim, preserve, and create continues in dance practices today and that the present landscape of dance in Barbados is characterized by dance companies that have clear identities and draw on different sources to construct Barbadian styles of movement while also making strategic interconnections. These interconnections, we argue, make clear the multifaceted and dialogic nature of Barbadian national identities, 266 Susan Harewood and John Hunte as opposed to a singular Barbadian identity. In our research we found that an overriding discourse that shapes and directs the Barbadian body in motion is a discourse of “decency.” Questions as to what is decent and what is indecent are never far from the dancing body on the stage, in the dancehall, or in the street. We show that this binary of decent/indecent is deployed as a means of social control, but is also a rallying point around which Barbadians offer various forms of self-assertion. Dance Traditions Only traces remain of the dances performed during the slave period. In many instances those traces exist only in the very limited literature available on early aesthetic practices in Barbados. Jerome Handler and Charlotte Frisbie ’s extremely important examination of the music practices of the slaves also demonstrates the significance of dances in the social and political life of slaves in Barbados. Handler and Frisbie describe the weekend and holiday dances as “perhaps one of the most important organized social diversions for slaves throughout most of the slave period” (1972, 13). Drawing from the writings of travelers to Barbados and colonial officials, we find that slaves frequently held dances on their few days off; these days off included special holidays such as Harvest Home, which marked the end of the harvest of the sugar crop. The dances were large group events where slaves would gather in a large circle; though everyone would move to the music, those who wished to dance entered the circle created by the crowd. Army doctor George Pinckard’s 1796 description is the most often quoted as it is the most detailed account of the dances: Forming a ring in the centre of the throng (the slaves) dance to the sound of their beloved music. The dance consists of stamping of the feet, twistings of the body, and a number of strange indecent attitudes. It is a severe body exertion, for the limbs have little to do in it. The head is held erect, or occasionally, inclined a little forward—the hands nearly meet before—the elbows are fixed, pointing from the sides— and the lower extremities being held rigid, the whole person is moved without lifting the feet from the ground. Making the head and limbs fixed pointes, they writhe and turn the body on its own axis, slowly advancing toward each other, or retreating to the outer parts of the ring. Their approaches, with the figure of the dance and the attitudes Dance in Barbados 267 and inflexions in which they are made are highly indecent: but of this they seem to be wholly unconscious for the gravity—I...