Dancers are often thought to move their muscles, yet neglect to develop their brains. Dance is absent from most academic studies. Perhaps this is because dance takes place in the flight of a moment. It cannot be placed on a wall, filmed for television or recorded for later listening pleasures. It is something alive and vivid—something that can show national identity or its evolution in history. Cuban choreographer and dancer Ramiro …
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We hurried along the slim embankment on the bohemian side of the river as night fell in the city, nervously evaluating our distance from the dimly lit bridge that would carry us to a more cosmopolitan borough. Imagining the theater’s great gilded doors slammed closed before our arrival in the famed sixth district, we struggled to increase our pace, forsaking many sidewalk cafés en route to the night’s festivities but our stiff, …
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In 1955, the prolific Cuban scholar and ethnologist, Fernando Ortiz, claimed “dance is the principal and most enthusiastic diversion of the Cuban people, it is their most genuinely indigenous production and universal exportation.” Dance may not be the Cuban diversion, but the identification of Cuba with dance certainly surfaces in the popular imagination—most recently in Hollywood’s Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, and decades …
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I arrive at Santiago de Cuba’s Teatro Oriente to see a small crowd of locals and tourists waiting in front to buy tickets. We are here to see a performance by Ballet Folklórico Cutumba, one of eastern Cuba’s premier folkloric dance troupes. Although the theater is run down and no longer has electricity or running water, its former elegance is apparent. As we enter, we see lush but tattered velvet drapes flank the stage and ornate architectural …
Read MoreSince the David Rockefeller Center first opened its doors in 1994, it has played host to over 60 Cuban visiting scholars for extended periods of work and collaboration in fields as diverse as archival preservation and indexing, economics, history, tropical medicine, political science, public administration, and public health. This March, the Center was hoping to host three Cuban scholars who would visit Harvard following the XXVI …
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