Miami Dade College, Wolfson Campus and the Little Haiti Cultural Art Center.
Miami, Florida. August 17th, 2013.
Paper Title: Dance as an Agent of Change: Dance Traditions in a Global Community.
By Jorge Luis Morejon
Department of Creative and Festival Arts
The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine
Trinidad and Tobago
Abstract: This essay discusses the adaptation
of dance, primarily oriented towards the development of an aesthetic product to
be consumed by the audience, into an agent of change for communities and
individuals increasingly displaced, disenfranchised and isolated by
disembodied, deculturized and thus homogenized social-political structures. In the
midst of global despair, here dance is looked at as a medium for recovery of
healthy, empowering and self-educating strategies that aim at the restoration
of dances that could aid communities and individuals to reconnect with the core of their own traditions, cultures and mores. Dance
is treated here as a relevant tool not only in the recovery of these
communities and individuals but in their assessment. Therefore, this study
establishes the links between scientific research in dance, dance styles and
mass communication to arrive at dance models able to influence the academic
shift needed to stimulate cultural crosspollination at an institutional level.
The study references the areitos, the
palenques and carnavales as forms of documentation that can inform new dance narratives
able to link the institutional academic fields to communities in need of
rescue.
LINK: http://www.mdc.edu/main/news/articles/2013/08/mdcto_host_ifeile_afro_cuban_dance_festi.aspx
