A show which has opened in London goes far to prove there is more to Cuban music than simply the evocative rhythms of Buena Vista Social Club
Buena Vista Social Club may have been the album which kick-started Western pop fans’ most recent love affair with Cuban music, but a dazzling new dance show in London promises to prove there is a lot more to the island’s repertoire.
Indeed, Havana Rakatan, which opened this week, traces the story of the island’s myriad music and dance forms back over 500 years – from the ancient African rituals of the slaves forced to work the sugar cane fields, to the nightclub sounds of pre-revolutionary Havana and on to the development of modern salsa.
Havana Rakatan, which opened this week, traces the story of Cuba's myriad music and dance forms back over 500 years
At the heart of Cuban music – and the dances performed by Havana Rakatan – is 'son’, which has its roots in the West African sounds imported by the thousands of slaves brought across the Atlantic from the mid-16th century until the trade’s abolition in 1886.
It was son – thought to be one of the first musical styles in which drums were played with bare hands – which provided the foundations for modern salsa.
Along the way the Caribbean island gave birth to mambo, the dance form which married European dances, particularly Spanish contradanza, with African folk rhythms and syncopation. When it first emerged during the 1930s and 40s, the effect of mambo's sinuous and sexual movements was to create a social scandal.
Out of 'son' also came cha-cha-cha, introduced in the Fifties by Enrique Jorri, a violinist and songwriter, and seized on by Havana’s fashionable clubgoers, along with rumba - meaning “party”.
Rumba, as danced not in the ballroom, but in Havana’s poorer districts, is a loose term for the rhythms influenced by the Bantu folkdances brought to Cuba by slaves from Central African.
Havana Rakatan was the brainchild of Nilda Guerra, the Cuban coreographer and dancer, who founded the company in 2001 after recruiting some of the island’s top dancers.
For Guerra her production “expresses the roots of Cuban culture”.
She said: “We go from the folk dances of the Spanish and African settlers to the kind of dance you see here in Havana in the street, which expresses the freshness, the excitement of Cuban life as it is now.
“Here you see the basic stories at the root of all Cuban dance – there are dances of sexual attraction, dances of war and dances of celebration.”
Although she initially devised contemporary dance routines, Guerra was encouraged by the Cuban government to explore the country’s dance history as a way of promoting its appeal overseas, and Havana Rakatan have toured extensively in Europe since their formation.
The show features live music from Turquino, an eight-piece son band founded in the early 1980s by a group of students who wanted to see traditional Cuban sounds survive and flourish.
Taking their name from Cuba’s highest mountain Turquino use traditional instruments such as the 'tres’ guitar and the guiro, a hollow gourd played by rubbing a stick along parallel notches cut into its side, along with horns and bongos.
The show, which depicts dancers improvising on the Malecón, Havana’s famous walled seafront, is a staged recreation of the Cuban tradition of small bands of dancers and instrumentalists playing claves, maracas and guitars, performing in dance salons, nightclubs and on the streets.
With its dazzling variety of styles Havana Rakatan’s performers have to be adept at switching from one to the other. Perhaps, after centuries of tumult and turbulence, this flexibility has become a national characteristic.
“It reflects the way that, however little we have, we have always managed to enjoy ourselves,” says Guerra.
