Ruxandra Ana

In this collaborative piece, an anthropologist specialized in dance and migration and a choreographer and performer reflect upon Afro-Cuban dance and its agentive powers in the global dance business. The international ‘salsa/Latin’ scene is characterized on the one hand by the public’s appetite for novelty and exoticism and on the other hand by performers’ precarity and uncertainty. Cuban dancers formulate understandings of dance-as-labor and dance-as-education, as counterpoints to the dominant frame of dance-as-entertainment functioning in the European countries where they live and work. As dancers reimagine Afro-Cuban dance in diasporic contexts, they challenge Eurocentric pedagogical models, exercising their agency vis-à-vis aesthetic shifts and codification patterns, while centring African roots of music and dance as a response to daily experiences of racism. We start from a series of ethnographic observations rooted in over a decade of research on Cuban dance and its dissemination on the island in touristic settings as well as in different European contexts (with a particular focus on Italy and Germany). We then move on to a movement intervention modelled on a recurring workshop taught in Berlin and titled ‘Decolonize your dance’, which explores the African roots of Cuban popular dances.