Errol Barrow Centre for Creative Imagination. The University of the West
Indies,
Cave Hill Campus, Bridgetown, Barbados. March 6 - 8, 2014.
Paper Title: Caribbean Dance: Ecology of Our Sensory Environment
Jorge Luis Morejón
Creative and Festival Arts Department
University of the West Indies,
Saint Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, West Indies
Abstract: This study considers dance ecology as a key concept in
analyzing the sustainability of dance in the Caribbean. Dance can be looked at from
two distant positions; from an economic stand or from a communicative,
efficient and transcendental point of view. Economically, a generalized tendency is
to consider dance as an ephemeral cultural manifestation with limited market
value. There is also the view that dance is an art form whose value, in terms
of economics, relays on the trade or sales generated around the performance
event. This is, however, somewhat a myopic view of dance as art. It ignores the
relationship between dance’s use value, dance’s exchange value, and dance’s
inherent value as it blurs definitions of artistic individuality and artistic nonconformity
as opposed to an ever increasing systematization of information. As energy and
information become our most exchangeable natural resources, dance, as an art
form, needs to find a relevant position within the newly emerging economic
structure without resigning from its role as a container of freedom and of aesthetic
and intellectual vision and pursuit. This is precisely why I argue that dance production
has to be conceptualized as a model for sustaining cultural ecology as it
prevents society from contaminating people’s perceptual environments. Although
dance is not a standard concept in economics, there are some elements such as investment
value and rates of return, which, once compared to more tangible art forms
contribute to the understanding of dance beyond the quantitative impositions of
formulaic art markets.
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