AN ENLIGHTENING KEYNOTE SPEECH
Our Artist Spotlight series continues with a look at Dr. Celeste Landeros, Keynote Speaker for Havana Habibi Festival 2018, and co-presenter for the "Havana Habibi" documentary presentation at the Library of Congress Popular Culture Conference in April 2019, in Washington, DC.
Celeste Landeros is associate professor of English at Barry University in Miami, FL, as well as the academic coordinator of arts and humanities statewide, and academic coordinator of English in central and north Florida for Barry. An award-winning arts critic and editor, she is a contributor to the Knight Arts Blog, and formerly music editor and Latin music critic for the Miami New Times. She is co-editor of Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/o America (Duke University Press, 1997) and is currently conducting research on Caribbean Carnival traditions in the United States. Landeros directs Carnival Arts, a collaborative service project with Florida youth crisis shelters through which PACE students join local artists in teaching drumming, dancing, and maskmaking to youth in crisis.
In 2018, Celeste was the Keynote Speaker for Havana Habibi Festival. We invite you to revisit her enlightening talk (in English and Spanish) for a deeper understanding of the history and impact of Middle Eastern dance in Cuba and the Caribbean.
CLICK THE IMAGE BELOW TO VIEW THE SPEECH ON YOUTUBE. The full text of her Keynote Speech is below.
Why Bellydance in Cuba?
by Celeste Landeros for Havana Habibi 2018
Spending these last few nights in the Hotel Seville, brings to mind how, in the early years of the 8th century, a Muslim army invaded Spain, establishing Andalucia as a province of the Umayyad empire and making Seville its capital.
As Tamalyn Dallal recounted on Friday morning, Islamic culture flourished in Seville until 1609, when Muslims were expelled from Spain. Even though, as Tamalyn noted, we do not know anything about the dances of Anda-lus, the historical record shows that Spaniards brought Muslims as slaves to Cuba. In the centuries that followed, many tradespeople migrated from the Middle East, but most renounced their faith when they settled here. (Of course, this census omits the US military prison in Guantanamo there languish still those accused of terrorism, with or without proof, from all corners of the Muslim world).
As Doctor Meiver de la Cruz asserted, we cannot conflate Arab cultures with the Islamic faith. The Moorish presence can be felt in Cuba in other ways. For example, it can be seen in the design of the Hotel Sevilla, among other buildings, which was inaugurated in 1908 and copied from the Patio of the Lions in the Alhambra Palace in another former Islamic city in Spain, Granada. The Sevillean tiles in the mosaics on the hotel walls represent the lines and repetitions that Meiver reconstructed with our bodies and our pathways across the floor in her workshop last Thursday.
How was Andalusian dance, that dance that we now can never know, integrated into other movements brought by the Spaniards and by the many other peoples they enslaved? What part does Middle Eastern dance play in the transculturation written about by the famous Cuban musicologist Fernando Ortiz? According the late Cuban short story writer and theorist, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, we can see the same arabesque in the design of certain buildings in Havana that we see in the way a rumbera moves her arms. Maybe. But we will never know this for certain either.
What we do know is that in 2003, Tiffany “Hanan” Madera, daughter of Cuban exiles and student of Tamalyn Dalal, returned to Havana for the first time since her childhood and here met Gretel Llabre as well as other dancers and musicians who were exploring forms foreign to the Cuban tradition.
We can think of the rupture among the Cuban people after the revolution in 1959 as something akin to the expulsion of the Moors from Spain 350 years earlier. Even though the exiles were not expelled for religious reasons, it is clear that the Cuban people were divided by questions of faith: in communism; in capitalism; in the solidarity offered by the Soviet Union; in the freedom promised by the United States.
So Tiffany arrived, not looking for her roots in Cuban dances, exactly, but instead offering other movements from other lands. So Gretel and her circle accepted her, not suturing the rupture between revolution and exile, exactly, but instead exploring the fusion of Cuban dances with Middle Eastern dances that for all we know were already integrated into the grand fusion that is all Cuban culture. The Cuban diaspora confronting the Arab diaspora in an always improvised dance.
Gretel and Tiffany invited us to an encounter not only between dancers from Cuba and the United States, but also from neighboring countries like Jamaica, Guadeloupe, and Panam and friends from faroff places like China and Japan. Our collaborators from the Middle East have not yet arrived. Perhaps they will be part of a Havana Habibi encounter in the future.
For now, our encounter is triangulated: dancers from many non-Arab countries finding themselves and each other through the Middle Eastern music and dance in Havana.
All of the teachers who offered workshops at the festival insisted on the essential connection between movement and culture. They taught not only steps and gestures, but also context. So how are we to understand the context of Havana Habibi?
Why add Middle Eastern dance to the Cuban dancescape, when that terrain is already so vast, so diverse, and so rich?
And what responsibility is implied by the appropriantion of Middle Eastern dance? What new relationship is indicated between the Cuban dancers, the international dancers, and the peoples who originated the dances?
Maybe, if it is not a relationship of cultural legacy, it could be a relationship of solidarity.
For 33 years, until 2015, Cuba was included on the US State Department’s official list of state sponsors of terrorism, along with Iran, Sudan, and Syria. Now North Korea has taken Cuba’s place.
Perhaps our Cuban collaborators show solidarity with the people of Iran, Sudan, and Syria through Middle Eastern dance. And perhaps in the same way our international collaborators show solidarity with the Cuban people too.
For more than 30 years, Russia supported Cuba, from the Revolution to the fall of the Soviet Union. Now Russia props up Bashir Assad, maintaining the Syrian dictator in power by helping him bomb and poison his own people.
Perhaps we show solidarity with the Syrian people through Middle Eastern dance?
And so we are in solidarity with all of the people of the Middle East and other Muslim countries, which are now seen as enemies of the state by the US, just as Cuba has been seen as an enemy for more than 50 years.
Or, it might be that these official international relations that, lamentably, have and continue to be established by men, have nothing to do with the international relations that we create through dance.
As Miriam Cooke observes in her book, War’s Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War, male writers present characters as heroes seeking vengeance on enemies, while women writers “reject the heroics of individual sacrifice because they consider themselves responsible for the collective survival.” We can find and take on this same responsibility for collective survival in dance, and particularly in Middle Eastern Dance.
During the panel of Friday called Transnational Feminism and Transformation, Lizette Vila, director of Project Palomas, suggested this possibility when she spoke to us about the tenderness transmitted by dance and that serves as a resource for surviving the violence directed at women. This may be especially true of Middle Eastern dance, since it has developed among women.
As a resource for survival, dance transcends words. As choreographer Rosario Cardenas said in the same panel, “I say more through my work than through my words.” As Dr. Maiver reminded us then, there are things that can only be learned by dancing.
In Middle Eastern dance, the woman’s body communicates with the music. In her Thursday workshop, teacher Aubre Hill demonstrated the relationship between the dancers’ movements and the drum. We responded to the tec crisp gestures and to the dum with juicy resonance.
In the next workshop, Tamlyn made us feel in our feet and in our hearts the poetry of the oud, the instrument that the musician Ziryab brought from Baghdad to Seville during Muslim rule. We appreciated the tranquility of unrushed undulations and so, as the festival program promised, we “softened our movements and embraced our femininity.”
Immediately afterward, teacher Valerick Molinary blew us away with what she called the “hurricane” of her take on the Lebanese style with “Puerto Rican spice.” We could feel the “bellicose” politics swirling around Lebanon due to its neighbors in the constant advance of her chasses and in her whiplash turns. The hurricane continued on Saturday morning when Aubre returned to show us how the drum solo can push in every direction the hips, the chest, the butt, the shoulders, the feet and the head.
On Saturday afternoon, teacher Myra Krien invoked the names of a few stars: Samia Gamal (1924-1994), Nadia Gamal (1937-1990), Soheir Zaki (1945-), and Fifi Abdou (1954-). She could have put at the head of this matrilineage the name of Badiaa Masabni. Born in Damascus in 1892, Badiaa opened a series of clubs in Cairo in the 1920s, where she presented dancers like Samia Gamal onstage, making her the mother of modern belly dance.
Myra shared with us the signature hip circles of each star, teaching us for example how Fifi focuses on the shimmies while Samia shows off her long legs. Even though Myra notes that the style of each woman is so unique as to constitute a new style of belly dance, she insists that belly dance is not specific to these women, nor to Egypt, where they danced, and not even to the Arab world. Instead she claims that scientifically, belly dance is universal, because the figure eight of the hips literally forms part of the fabric of the universe. According to her, belly dance is sacred geometry.
When the women in the workshop searched for their own way to make hip circles the result was one of the most beautiful moments of the festival. Each dancer, in her own space, rose and fell, drawing figures in the air with hip, shoulder, and chest, and filled the universe with her being.
This beauty lingered in the hall during the final workshop, when Hanan offered us an originary point in the matrilineage of bellydance: the beledi woman. According to what she told us, this country woman’s authority and majesty come from the connection between her feet and the earth. She taught us to aspire to move like the Beledi woman, who occupies a vast space by making minimal movements and maintaining a focused gaze.
So we arrive at the truth: Middle Eastern dance is not transmitted by nations, but by bodies, from woman to woman. From the beledi woman to Badiaa Masabni to Samia Gamal. From Dallal to Hanan to Gretel to Lianet, Olivia, Jennifer, and all the women of Cuban Soho.
In teacher Gretel’s workshop, we saw how Middle Eastern dance coincides with Afro-cuban dance. In one hybrid movement, she taught us how the hips swing Middle Eastern style while the chest rises and falls to the clave, the fundamental pulse of Afro-Cuban music.
I cannot do both things at once yet. To learn any style of dance requires time and discipline. To master distinct dance complexes – such as Middle Eastern and Afro-cuban dance -- and then to fuse them and disseminate this new fusion to the rest of the world requires even more: time, discipline, creativity, and generosity. Why not just say it: it requires love.
The gala last night showed us how we can see the Cuban Soho fusion within the panorama of Middle Eastern dance. We saw the profound emotion of classic dance in the solos by Meiver, Myra, and Dallal and the pyrotechnics of the style in the solos by Aubre and Valernick. Hanan and the Qabila Folkdance Company showed the folkloric context, while Dallal and Cuban Soho in other pieces explored the Sufi presence.
Maysabel Pintado conveyed the energy of the Yoruba Orisha of the sea, Yemaya, through Middle Eastern movements. The Cuban Soho choreography, that Gretel created for the opening and the closing of the show is proof of the power of the fusion she has invented of rhythms, movement vocabularly, and spectacular presentation style of Cuban and Middle Eastern dance.
When Gretel came on stage to greet the audience, her belly undulating with new life, there could have been no better symbol for bellydance as a strand in the fabric of the universe. This biological fertility coincides with the artistic fertility that burst forth from Gretel’s encounter with Hanan. Middle Eastern dance is transmitted by the body from woman to woman.
And so we see in its nascent stages the development of a Cuban-style Middle Eastern dance. Middle Eastern dance is a transnational dance form like ballet, contemporary concert dance, and the popular international studio dances like tango, salsa, bachata, and zouk. There are Cuban masters of these forms, such as the legendary Alicia Alonso, whose home, the National School of Ballet, served as the venue for our workshops and the many salseras who teach and win competitions from Beirut to Berlin to Beijing. So one day we will find Gretel and the dancers from Cuban Soho in far-off countries, representing and disseminating Cuban-style Middle Eastern dance. Dancing together we share tenderness and insure our collective survival.