Preview
¡BULLA! A LOUD CUBAN JAZZ EXPERIMENT
Decidedly Jazz Danceworks
Runs May 31 to June 5
Jack Singer Concert Hall
North American jazz music and dance forms are relatively new in the history of cultural expression. But, like Cuban music and dance, jazz has also been heavily influenced by ancient African culture. Fuse elements and artists of the two together, and the result is Decidedly Jazz Danceworks’ ¡BULLA! A Loud Cuban Jazz Experiment.
The Calgary dance troupe’s major new show, making its local debut at the Jack Singer Concert Hall following a well-received Canadian tour, has been fermenting for more than a decade. DJD began researching the connections between jazz and Cuban musical and dance forms back in 1994. That led to a visit to Cuba in 1999, where company members did an intensive study of Cuban and Afro-Cuban dance forms. It astonished the artists that Cubans were skilled at jazz music, yet unaware of jazz dance.
"In all the years I’ve been in Cuba, whenever people say, ‘What do you do?’ and I explain to them I’m a jazz dancer, they say, ‘Really? How do you dance to jazz?’" says ¡BULLA! choreographer, dancer and co-artistic director Hannah Stilwell. "It’s not done there."
While jazz dance, per se, is unknown in Cuba, the Caribbean island is famous for its jazz-like musical and dance forms, including salsa, rumba, mambo and Afro-Cuban (folkloric and religious) traditions. Stilwell calls it one of the fruitful branches of the great jazz tree.
"The slave trade brought Africans to North America, they mixed and collided with the European cultures here, and jazz was the result," she notes. But that same African-European collision happened in other parts of the New World, too. "You have a manifestation of that cultural mix in Cuba, in Haiti, in Brazil" as well, she says. "So we’re kindred souls. There’s a recognition. Although it’s not specifically the same, the roots are the same – it’s a different branch of the tree."
Between November and December last year, DJD made another trip to Cuba, to live, work and do more research. The five-week cultural immersion included three appearances at the Havana Jazz Festival, starting with a piece at the opening gala performance. It also engendered one of the biggest undertakings in the company’s 20-year history with ¡BULLA!, a "loud" collaboration between the troupe and six Cuba-based dancers and musicians.
¡BULLA!, pronounced "boo-ya," translates as making a racket or a fuss. The show, featuring original music and dance by a cast of 19 Canadian and Cuban artists, offers a vibrant blend of North American and Cuban jazz music as well as the result of DJD's 10-year research into the roots shared by jazz dance and Afro-Cuban dance. And, like the company’s past work, it explores the energy created between jazz musicians and dancers.
"Everybody came (to the project) with such a rich amount of knowledge from their world, and then such big eyes for the other world," says Stilwell’s fellow artistic director, choreographer and dancer, Kimberley Cooper. The result has been a bigger movement vocabulary and response to the music for the dancers.
"I think the nice thing, even for the musicians on both fronts – Canadian and Cuban – is that (the project) was full of challenge, and everyone is just outside of their comfort zone," says Cooper. "We’re having to learn to move our bodies in certain new ways. It’s kind of like we’re keeping our jazz legs and adding an Afro-Cuban torso."
"From the beginning, the idea has been to not ask Cubans to dance Cuban and Canadians to dance the DJD style of jazz," adds Stilwell.
Having lived in Cuba herself, Stilwell says it was necessary for the company to absorb the Cuban style on its home turf, rather than simply import the choreography. "You can learn movement out of context, but it becomes meaningless. The dance grows out of culture," she says. "Dancing people move their bodies the way they do because of the culture that they live in. So we needed our dancers to experience that culture – the rhythm of life, the language, the noise, the different ideas about sexuality, sensuality in the streets, all of that. We brought them there in order to study some Cuban dance, but really (to) hang out in Cuba, get a taste of it, smell it. And conversely for the Cubans, we wanted them to be here, in winter, working nine to five and in the cold, so they would play the music like we do."
When the company came to Cuba last winter, it didn’t set out to create ¡BULLA! right away. "We wanted it to grow out of what we were doing," says Stilwell, noting that the interchange between Canadian and Cuban artists was the whole point of the project. They began with a 13-minute experiment in Cuba, which was completely changed by the time they’d finished the show back in Canada. ¡BULLA! had its première at the end of March in St. Albert, Alberta, the first stop on a 13-city tour that culminated late last month when the show was one of the featured presentations at Ottawa’s Alberta Scene.
For at least one of the dancers, ¡BULLA! has been a chance to straddle both his home and adopted cultures. DJD company member Ahmed Fernandez Hodelin is a former soloist with Conjunto Folklorico Nacional de Cuba and trained at the National School of Arts in Havana. He came to Canada as part of a cultural exchange with DJD in 1999 and has been dancing with the troupe ever since.
Fernandez Hodelin says the similarities between North American and Cuban jazz music and dance outweigh the differences. "It’s not hard to make a fusion (between) Afro-Cuban and jazz. If you know some styles of Afro-Cuban, or if you have been in Cuba and you know a little about jazz, you can do (this mixture)."
For others, ¡BULLA! has been an exciting process of discovery. DJD dancer Sarisa Figueroa has some Cuban blood (her mother’s from the island), but it wasn’t until this trip that she had the opportunity to go to Cuba and learn its style of dance.
"It has opened doors," she says. "It has opened my ear to different rhythms, it has opened my eyes to different ways of moving my body.
"It’s always so nice, when you’ve been dancing your whole life, to try something brand new," she adds. "It’s so humbling and so good to be put in a beginner’s shoes again." |
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