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

The rumba is a dance that rivets its image on the mind. place 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 bask in its trail so that a natural tendency towards it neer fades. The origins of the rumba stem from Africa. The steps and song of traditional rumba may mother 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 sympathetic 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 leaf blade samba appears to directly link to rumbas progenitors. A characteristic highlight occurs when the bodies of a dancing pair meet, or al close to meet at the navel. This movement mirrors the rumbas 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 bargain 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 abolishment 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, This will never die. Nothing can stop it (Farr 80).Works CitedPrez Jr., Louis A. On Becoming Cuban. Chapel Hill The University of North Carolina Press, 1999.Danie l, 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.