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Ramiro Guerra, the fountainhead of Cuban modern dance, looks back on this life and work, from his childhood in Havana in the 1930s, to becoming a dancer and beginning to transcend the conventions of dance and theater, to his innovative work as the founder of Cuba's national modern dance company, Conjunto Nacional de Danza Moderna, now called Danza Contemporánea de Cuba. After a daring site-specific piece of his was suspended by the government in 1971, Guerra left the company to explore Cuban folklore, gesture, and humor, to choreograph for other companies such as Danza Voluminosa and Danza Libre, and to write about dance. He continued to choreograph highly experimental works such as “De la Memoria Fragmentada” and “Ordalias,” which used unusual spaces, including his own apartment tower.

The author of this poem demonstrates the artistic, living power of empathetic imagination. “Soy Mujer Cuando . . . A Collective Poem” is a poetic excerpt from the theatre work Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders. Bilingual in its conception and written in collaboration with the acting company known as Mujeres en Ritual Danza-Teatro, the author composed the poem in a community-based process with women on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border in 2004. Conceptually, Soy Mujer Cuando comprises three parts as a recurrent thread throughout the poem. The first two parts incorporate the multiple voices of women from the community and the ensemble of collaborating artists.

This chapter relates the life and times of the rebellious member of the Palm Dynasty Jan Gerard Palm who flew straight in the face of the Catholic Church and Dutch colonial authorities and Edgar Palm, both of whom composed pieces in the tumba rhythm, an offshoot of the tambú and often with lyrics that offered gossip and the latest news on public events.

This chapter opens with a lengthy discussion of the musical relations between Cuba and Curacao and ends introducing Izaline Calister, one of the younger generation of Curacaoan musicians who had gone to conservatory in Holland, adding jazz/ classical elements to traditional Curacoan rhythms.

The introduction first considers the movement for a National Dance Law (2008–), which aims to establish infrastructure and federal funding for all genres of dance in Buenos Aires and throughout the Argentine provinces. It introduces the book’s central concept of “moving otherwise,” outlining the kinds of political engagement it encompasses, as well as how it dialogues with conversations in dance and performance studies. It then explains how the category of “contemporary” dance functions in the text, and argues for an approach to contemporary dance history that decenters the United States and Europe as the original sites and ongoing loci of production. Additionally, it offers a brief overview of the transnational history of modern and contemporary dance in Buenos Aires through examination of the work of Miriam Winslow; Susana Tambutti; and Luciana Acuña and Alejo Moguillansky. Finally, it details the archival, ethnographic, and embodied research methodologies that Moving Otherwise employs.

This chapter examines how contemporary dance enabled intersecting forms of artistic, social, and political mobility in the midst of rapid change that marked 1960s Buenos Aires. It demonstrates how influential choreographers Ana Kamien and Susana Zimmermann translated the artistic and social mobilities that dance afforded in the first half of the decade into critique of de facto president Juan Carlos Onganía’s repressive military government in their concert works and innovative creation processes in the late 1960s. The chapter first focuses on how these choreographers developed their early careers through new cultural organizations and institutions that emerged in the early 1960s, including the Friends of Dance Association (Asociación Amigos de la Danza) and the Torcuato Di Tella Institute (Instituto Torcuato Di Tella). The second half of the chapter examines two works that responded to the climate of repression under Onganía: Zimmermann’s Polymorphias (1969) and Kamien’s eponymous Ana Kamien (1970).

This chapter demonstrates how contemporary dance moved otherwise as a strategy of survival during the last military dictatorship (1976–83), a period synonymous with the forced disappearance of an estimated 30,000 people (desaparecidos) accused of political “subversion.” During this period, contemporary dance offered protected spaces in studios, schools, and professional companies for negotiating bodily autonomy as dictatorial terror restricted quotidian movement. The chapter also examines expresión corporal (corporeal expression), a movement practice that expanded during the dictatorship. Outside of the studio, it considers how the Danza Abierta festival staged community, cohesion, and endurance during the waning years of the dictatorship. Lastly, the chapter examines Renate Schottelius’s Paisaje de gritos (Landscape of Screams, 1981) and Alejandro Cervera’s Dirección obligatoria (One Way, 1983), works that premiered at the San Martín Theater in the later years of the dictatorship and addressed the experience and violence of the military dictatorship.

This chapter examines how contemporary dance embraced cooperative politics following Argentina’s 2001 economic crisis. It begins with the 2007–8 labor dispute at the San Martín Theater that gave rise to the Bailarines Organizados (Organized Dancers) labor movement and the Compañía Nacional de Danza Contemporánea (National Contemporary Dance Company, CNDC 2009–), whose repertory initially focused on social justice issues generally and the last military dictatorship specifically. It analyzes Daniel Payero Zaragoza’s 2010 Retazos pequeños de nuestra historia más reciente (Small Pieces of Our Recent History). The chapter then considers Bailarines Toda la Vida (Dancers for Life 2002-), a community dance group that rehearsed for fifteen years in the cooperatively run “Grissinopoli” factory. Like the CNDC, the group’s repertory emphasizes memory of the last military dictatorship. This chapter examines the works . . . Y el mar (. . . And the Sea, 2011) and La oscuridad (The Darkness, 2006).

The epilogue examines the 2011 human rights march in Buenos Aires on the National Day of Memory for Truth and Justice (Día Nacional de la Memoria por la Verdad y la Justicia), the anniversary of the start of the last military dictatorship (1976–83). It analyzes the author’s participation with Oduduwá Danza Afroamericana (Oduduwá Afro-American Dance), a group that brought together scores of volunteers to perform choreography based in Orishá dance. Orishá dance’s Yoruban origins and connection to the African diaspora made it an unexpected addition to the demonstration given the construction of Argentina as exceptionally white among Latin American nations. The group strove to connect Orishá dance’s link to the violence of the trans-Atlantic slave trade with Argentina’s history of political disappearance, as well as the country’s own violence against Afro-Argentines. Oduduwá’s project reiterates the importance of dance as both a political practice and one linked to memory.

In early modern Spain, raza (race) signified the stain of Blackness, while casta (chaste, caste) signified purity of blood—Whiteness. But with its empire in decline, eighteenth-century Spain enacted its dreams of sovereignty and autonomy by impersonating a dark Other, whose Semitic and south-Saharan African antecedents were now wrapped within an imaginary Gitano. Majismo, emulating the fashions of the urban underclass, adopted the fandango, an American dance of slaves and outlaws, as an emblem of pure-blooded Spanishness. Adopting fandango dances such as the profane Mexican panaderos, an Africanist belly-to-belly dance incorporated into the bolero school repertoire, majismo figured the deeply political dissonance between the determinism of Christian blood purity and the possibility of redemption implicit in the bobo’s equivocal confusion. Ironically, the fandango was adopted throughout the Western world as a symbol of freedom and class mobility, a metaphor that soon inflected every aspect of the world’s perception of Spain.