My Reflection
I have always had a strong
interest in identity and culture, particularly any place where cultures meet
either through migration, conquest, or slavery. I have equally been interested
in how those cultures survive by preserving some part of their past while
simultaneously reinventing some part of their present and future. Since as
early as my sophomore year in high school, I have been interested in how art
(both visual and performance) informs us about the transmission of culture and
identity through political, social, and individual modes of interpretation.
Particularly, I have been interested in music and dance as vehicles for the
transmission of culture through not only space, but also through time.
This
summer I was given the opportunity to research with the guidance of Performance
Studies professor Diana Taylor through a summer program called the Leadership
Alliance. I was introduced to the whole world of Performance Studies a
discipline that I had danced around for years but until this June never really
knew existed. When I first started my analytical quest of culture and identity,
I wanted to see if Latin American influences in culture could be traced back to
absolute sources. In particular, I wanted to see if African influences brought
to Latin America and the Caribbean via the slave trade did in fact exist, and
if they did, I wanted to know how they were acknowledged and/or remembered.
Now
I know that such a path is nearly impossible to follow. Even if such a linear
path of cultural influence in music or dance exists, it does not necessarily
carry with it the same meaning or significance that it had when the movement
was originated in another region or time. Now my questions are how do context
and location alter the meaning of certain rhythms or movements in a significant
way? If syncretism is acknowledged by a particular country then to what degree
is origin realized? And, what do all of these interpretations mean to social,
ethnic, racial, and personal identity in the present?
Negotiating
these questions only led me to more complex questions like if we do decide to
interpret through Performance Studies than who has the authority to do so? Will
their ethnic origin or even race matter? And if so, why? There is no question
that various foreign and indigenous influences become inculcated into one
culture, the real question is how and in what capacity do they survive.
As
the fourth annual Encuentro approached I focused on how I could answer these
questions best through dialogues and through workshops with people who had been
grappling with these similar questions for longer and in more informed avenues
than myself. While the scholars Joseph Roach, Paul Connerton, Fernando Ortiz,
Barbara Browning and Diana Taylor all informed me on their theories and
experiences with of cultural transmission through literature, I wanted to
experience this phenomenon first hand.
I
looked specifically at the experiences of the scholar Berta Jottar who
specializes in the Rumba in Cuba and New York and Susana Baca who is an
Afro-Peruvian performer. They were integral sources of information that gave me
a better way of interpreting the many questions I had already accumulated
through researching theories of authenticity, memory, and cultural
transmission.
I
interviewed Berta Jottar as evident in the roundtable project Angeline and I
created. What doesn't necessarily come through is that Berta has been
investigating rumba and rumberos since 1988. She travels back and forth between
Cuba and New York developing her own understanding of rumba and archiving it in
repertoire fashion for the rest of the world. She interested me because she was
able to make the connection between the source of rumba in Cuba to its
transculturated form in the United States. Her physical movement between these
worlds represented a cultural migration of rumba that occurred when the first
rumba was played in the U.S. This was a big part of my understanding of how the
present affects those practices that are developed in the past. And it made me
aware (although I had read it in books) that circuitous routes of cultural
transmission do occur and that it is much more subtle then I had ever imagined.
This
subtly was evident in the soft spoken voice of Susana Baca who to me embodies
cultural transmission and the forces of social and political movement, but who
expresses herself in a medium often overlooked as time-locked tradition. Her
presence alone during her sponsored workshop was enough to help me see that
despite language barriers or the inexperience of participants that certain
elements can be transmitted. They can be taught or mimicked and sometimes even
felt by people who have never even imagined them before.
I would
have to say that the workshops best helped me to understand the idea of collaboration
when it came to overlapping various music and dance forms. Understanding this
process first through the rhythm and then through the movement of my own body,
as well as the bodies around me, was what solidified my understanding of the
theories like Roach's Geneologies of Performance[1]
and Ortiz's definition of Transculturation[2]
that I had been trying to understand
for a month. This in no way means that now I've got it or that I'm done with my
investigation. All it means is that a light bulb went off when I was clapping
out basic Afro-Peruvian rhythm with Susana Baca or when I was moving my hips
and feet in a traditional Afro-Dominican style with members of la Division 21.
What I kept finding through these
workshops was that culture is not something you can put in a glass case and
preserve forever. I had romanticized some perfect recipe of African,
Indigenous, and European influence that was caught like a black and white photo
in my head unable to change form for hundreds of years. I think that after
reading several pages, engaging in numerous conversations, and letting my body
move to the unlimited rhythms and melodies I kept hearing throughout the
Encuentro I was able to understand what Barbara Browning meant when she wrote,
“There are things I learned in Brazil with my body, and some of these things it
has taken me years to learn to articulate in writing. But that is not to say
that they were without meaning when I could only speak them through dance.”[3]
There
is something very significant in the rhythms, songs, and movements of music and
dance in Latin America. There is a story somewhere inside the spectacle of
performance that develops its own narrative and chooses to incorporate or
negate the influence of various cultures that have invented and reinvented it
over time. What I kept sensing was a feeling of familiarity with certain sounds
or movements. I do not know if this is because I had seen them somewhere out
there in the global market or because they shared something with my own mixed
cultures, but either way it illuminated for me the wonder rather than the
complexity of tracing cultural roots.
So,
when Angeline and I decided to interview various scholars (and at that time we
had planned on interviewing artists as well) we thought that we would ask their
opinions on the value of tracing routes of cultural transmission and the issues
of authenticity that were inherent in this investigation. These were questions
that I was unable to develop to my satisfaction in my own research with the
Leadership Alliance and I was glad to be able to continue my investigation in
another arena.
I
found it interesting to see how the scholars would go back and forth between
the issues of origin and ownership by in one breath saying that there was no
way to give any one group ownership over the music or dance form and in the
next breath saying that certain groups deserved to be compensated over others
for their creative work. it showed how even those who were most informed still
wrestled with these issues.
Both
Berta and Josh specifically mentioned how the market influences the production
and circulation of music and dance. This one aspect breeds so many insights on
where we as a 21st society global society place our values. We all
know that once an art form is mass marketed, that it becomes a commodity like
any other product or merchandise. While this means that millions of people are
experiencing something that once only hundreds experienced, it also means that
there are millions of people who are not necessarily understanding that art
form as it was meant to be understood. Context and history are rarely if ever
part of the package that is sold
Part
of me wants to grumble at a capitalist society that has adulterated the
artistic world of music and dance while part of me understands that capitalism's connection is as natural as any connection between society and art that has
ever existed. If certain forms were born out of the tensions of slavery or the
celebration of religion, then why wouldn't music and dance's path follow the
social, political, and economic culture that we have today?
This
mass marketing of “traditional” or “cultural” music used to bother me. I cannot
say that it still doesn't. But, what I can say is that it is not as startling
or disturbing as it used to be. A rumba that I pay thirty dollars to see versus
one that I happen to discover in Central Park for free are equally valid
representations of rumbas ongoing evolution. Just because someone hears a song
about the Orisha spirit Elegua without knowing anything about that Yoruba
religious tradition does not mean that they get nothing from that listening
experience.
I
think this is much of what Berta, Josh and Daniel have all come to understand,
but it doesn't mean that when other representations hit too close to my
personal home that I will not be offended. This will be nothing more than a
challenge in my ongoing attempt to understand what is lost and gained through
the cultural syncretism that forms a “New World.”
I
will just have to take a deep breath and remember that culture is not a black
and white photo, even if I'm the one taking the picture.
[1] Genealogies of Performance draw on the idea of expressive movements as mnemonic reserves, including patterned movements made and remembered by bodies, residual movements retained implicitly in images or words (or in the silences between them), and imaginary movements dreamed in minds not prior to language but constitutive of it (26).
[2] A three stage process consisting of the acquisition of new cultural material from a foreign culture, the loss and displacement of one's own, and the creation of a new cultural phenomena.
[3] Barbara Browning. Samba:Resistance in Motion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995, ppxi.