Symposium: 15TH Annual IFE-ILE Afro-Cuban Dance Festival on Traditions and Contemporaneity, Cross-cultural Constructs and Mass Communication Relations

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