The Rumba Dance Essay examples -- Afro-Cuban, Cuba

The rumba is a dance that rivets its image on the mind. Holding much history, it has been and is a dance of oppositions: love and hate, hostility and harmony, sensuality and prudence. Musically, it taps into the realms of technicality and improvisation. The dance and music is a marvel, leaving a lusty taste in its trail so that a natural tendency towards it never fades. The origins of the rumba stem from Africa. The steps and song of traditional rumba may have begun as remembered pieces of dance from the Ganga or Kisi people in Cuba, generalized groups of West Central African descent. Some prospect that the Sara peoples of northern Nigeria are the originators of rumba, a similar dance is of rows of boys in front of rows of girls, approaching one another in movement and then separating. In present-day Zaire, a traditional BaKongo dance called vane samba appears to directly link to rumba’s progenitors. A characteristic highlight occurs when the bodies of a dancing pair meet, or almost meet at the navel. This movement mirrors the rumba’s vacunao, a prominent feature in some forms of rumba. The name rumba possibly derives from the Spanish language, the word rumbo translates to route, rumba translates to heap pile, and rum is of course the liquor popular in the Caribbean. Any of these words might have been used descriptively when the dance was being formed. The name has most often been claimed to be derived from the Spanish word for carousel, or festival. Rumba developed in the 1850s and 1860s among free black slaves gathered to express their struggles with one another. Following the abolition of slavery in Cuba in 1886, poor Cubans dealt with a society still emphasizing color and class, by... ...national dance. As a native Afro-Cuban simply put, â€Å"This will never die. Nothing can stop it† (Farr 80). Works Cited Pà ©rez Jr., Louis A. On Becoming Cuban. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Daniel, Yvonne. Rumba: Dance and Social Change in Contemporary Cuba. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Farr, Jory. Rites of Rhythm. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2003. Shepherd, Verene A., and Hilary McD. Beckles., ed Caribbean slavery in the Atlantic world. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, Oxford: James Currey, Princeton, NJ: M. Weiner, 2000. Moore, Robin Dale. Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920-1935. Diss. U of Texas at Austin, 1995. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1995. 9534899. Roy, Maya. Cuban Music. Trans. Denise Asfar and Gabriel Asfar. London: Latin America Bureau, 2002.