Classic Cuba. La Contradanza Cubana

Sheet of Music for La Matilde, composed by Manuel Sumell in 1817

Jorge Luis Morejon choreographed and performed a night of contradanzas for Classic Cuba, a spectacle which took place at Florida International University's Student Union's Ball Room. This work involved the exploration of Cuban Classic Danza and the Contradanza, a 19th-century Cuban salon, popular dance and music genre. In this ocassion, Jorge Luis Morejon danced to the Danzas composed by Manuel Saumell with an emsemble of young Cuban-American and Latin-American dancers such as Cathy Horta-Hayden, Stella and Lisbeth, among others. No pictures are available of this event in Jorge Luis Morejon's personal archive.

Jorge Luis Morejon's Notes

Contradanza is a Spanish line dance popular in the 18th and early 19th centuries thought to come from an older English "country dance" (thus the Spanish corruption of the name). However, some researchers reveal that it was the Franco-Haitian slaves seeking refuge in the Oriente province in the 1790s, and not the Spanish, who introduced the genre to the island of Cuba, in the form of the French contredanse. Although rhythmically tame by contemporary Afro-Cuban standards, the contradanza was scandalously syncopated for its time because it represented one of the earliest obvious entrances of African rhythm into Cuban music salons which had until then been a venue for strictly European forms like waltzes, quadrilles and schottisches. Previously, European instruments, melodies and harmonies had worked their way into the musical practices of Cuban slaves, but no such reversal of musical influence had been so strong until the appearance of the contradanza. While the Cuban contradanza was well-established by the turn of the 19th centurty, the earliest surviving example is "San Pascual Bailón," which dates fron 1803.