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20. Tradition Reaffirming Itself in New Forms: An Overview of Trinidad and Tobago Folk Dances
- University Press of Florida
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Tradition Reaffirming Itself in New Forms An Overview of Trinidad and Tobago Folk Dances Hazel Franco An underlying African presence coupled with the influence of Spanish, French, and British cultures accounts for the aesthetic attributes of the folk dances of Trinidad and Tobago and the wider Caribbean. The evidence is in the style, manner, movement, and body articulation of the region. What are considered folk dances are dances that originate with ordinary people who were driven to move, to sing. There are dances specific to religious or spiritual worship, including funerary dances such as the bongo and limbo, nation dances, and Orisha worship; dances for social events such as the traditional wedding, celebrated on Tobago with the jig and reel, and work dances that show the nuances of the predominant life skill peculiar to a village or community. Choreographed movements designed for the stage as work dances can be associated with fishing, the growing of crops, and harvesting. They may grow out of work movements that are themselves a kind of dance. Spending my early impressionable years in a village, on a cocoa estate in Tortuga, I remember the process beginning the transformation of cocoa beans to chocolate. The cocoa pod is picked when it is ripened and spread out for a number of days in an open space or cocoa house for the beans to “sweat.” After this sweating process, it is cleaned and left to dry in the sun. The women of the village then proceed to “dance” the cocoa seeds to remove the shell encasing the bean: with the feet flat they do a shuffling step, alternating right and left, backward and forward. This is done for hours until the goal of cleaning the cocoa bean is accomplished. 298 Hazel Franco In this way dance is everywhere in Trinidad and Tobago. In this chapter I will introduce the islands and then discuss religion, ritual, and dance among Trinidadians of African descent, Trinidad’s Carnival and its historic dances, other historic folkloric forms, the legacy of Beryl McBurnie and her Little Carib Dance Theatre, my own experience with dance and Cyril St. Lewis’s Humming Bird Dance Theatre Company, the changes brought by independence and their impact on folk dance, and the continuing era of innovation with the emergence of the Astor Johnson Repertory Dance Company. Introduction The twin island state of Trinidad and Tobago is at the southern tip of the archipelago of islands situated between North and South America, bordered by the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. The Amerindians already inhabited our country when Christopher Columbus claimed it in 1498. He sighted land with three hills protruding high in the sky and named this land the Trinity: Trinidad. This celebratory time for the Spanish government was to be remembered as full of disease and slavery in the destruction of the Amerindian peoples and the beginning of a new life for European conquerors and their slaves. For three hundred years the Spaniards claimed the land described by the late Dr. Eric Williams as “poor, underdeveloped, a showpiece of metropolitan incompetence and indifference” (1993, 27). Luring French plantation owners to the lightly populated island of Trinidad with the promise of freedom to own plots of land accounts for the cultural changes in social behavior, dress, and style that took root and flourished and left an indelible legacy dating back to November 20, 1783, when the king of Spain issued the famous Cedula of Population. The plan was to transfer as many Catholic planters as possible and their African slaves from the French-colonized islands of Martinique, Guadeloupe, Dominica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Grenada. In 1797 the British captured Trinidad and became well entrenched in conducting the affairs of the island; the Spanish officially ceded Trinidad to them in 1802. The British were debating the profitability of slavery in and out of Parliament . The result was the eventual abolition of slavery by 1838 and the introduction of indentured labor, primarily from India. Although plantation owners sought indentured workers from China and elsewhere to fill the [3.91.19.28] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 11:38 GMT) Tradition Reaffirming Itself in New Forms 299 void in sugarcane harvesting after emancipation of the slaves, it was when they turned to India that they found a large, continuing source of labor, beginning in 1845. The Indians tried to maintain their cultural and religious forms; music and dance played a very important role in preserving and perpetuating their cultural heritage...