Latin American dance

The Indigenous heritage

On their arrival in the Western Hemisphere in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, explorers from the Iberian kingdoms of Portugal and Castile (Spain) encountered peoples—even entire empires—previously unknown to Europeans. A few of the Europeans wrote about the music and dance practices they observed during ritual festivals among the local populations. The Indigenous populations were decimated by disease, forced labor, and warfare, and their history was disrupted. In the Caribbean very few Indigenous people survived, but on the mainland significant populations managed to preserve their communities.

Some early dance history can be inferred from the archives and from what seem to be continuous practices. For example, creation stories were a common aspect of Indigenous spiritual practice, and their telling often incorporated dance as a vital element. Natural forces (i.e., gods and goddesses) and animal spirits were honored or represented as dramatic actors; dance rituals were often meant to forestall or explain cataclysmic events. The great civilizations of the Aztec and Inca (like the Roman Catholic Church of their conquerors) organized time according to complex ritual calendars, and dance was essential in their communal ritual life.

The dances of the Aztec were precisely structured and executed. Priests trained young people in the movements of the ritual dances and organized the ceremonies into massive arrangements of dancers who moved in symbolic geometric patterns. Combat was a major theme that featured male dancers: weapons in hand, individuals or groups of dancers enacted struggles between gods or between military units such as eagle warriors and jaguar warriors. Dances could last more than a day to test the warrior-dancers’ endurance and commitment. In some ceremonies dancers moved in columns to represent revolving astral bodies in their annual and millennial circuits; in others they represented planters working in looping zurcos (furrows). In the danza de los voladores (“dance of the fliers”), one of the few surviving preconquest dances of Mesoamerica, traditionally four fliers (dancers) who are suspended upside down from the top of a tall pole make 13 revolutions for a combined total of 52; in the Nahuatl belief system of the Aztec and Toltec peoples, 52 years make a “year-binding,” or xiuhmolpilli.

Ritual contexts

The institution of the Roman Catholic Church—with its rituals, doctrines, and ways of looking at the world—accompanied the Iberians to the New World and was integral to the functioning of the viceroyalties in New Spain (based in Mexico; 1535–1821) and Peru (1542–1824), which between them administered the colonial territories of the Spanish. After the military conquest, religious music, dance, processions, and festivals became tools of cultural transformation and social control. Catholic priests and monks—Jesuits, Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, Augustinians—allowed, even encouraged, Indigenous dancers to continue their rituals, modified to incorporate Catholic saints and ideas in place of their own. The Indigenous peoples adapted their own rich calendar of public festivals to new uses and new places. Into the present day, ancient ritual dances echo in the yearly observances that take place in front of churches and at other sacred sites, especially as part of the patronal fiestas, the festivals in honor of a town’s (or country’s) patron saint.

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In Roman Catholic countries around the world, nonliturgical Carnival celebrations mark the last-chance merrymaking that occurs during the weeks before Ash Wednesday, the day that begins the austere 40-day period of Lent; in many parts of Latin America, Carnival parades feature exuberant group dances. As in the religious pageants, fantasy and elaborate costuming allow the Carnival dancers to become the “other” and to use dance as a means of escaping the anxieties of everyday life.

Perhaps the most widespread dance ritual of Latin America derives from the dance of Moors and Christians (la danza de Moros y Cristianos), which was performed at major religious festivals in medieval Spain. The dance was based on an older form of religious street theatre, autos sacramentales (“mystery plays”), portrayals of the competition of forces of good and evil. In the 8th century Moors had brought Islam to Spain from North Africa, and Christians in Spain fought to regain ground until 1492, when the houses of Aragon and Castile expelled the remaining Muslims. (For more on that period, see Spain: Christian Spain from the Muslim invasion to about 1260.) After the dance-drama was imported to Mesoamerica and Peru in the 16th century, the oppositional forces in it were refashioned to cast the Spanish (good) against the Indians (bad). Although the danza de los Moros y Cristianos exists throughout Latin America, it is known by a variety of names, including danza de la conquista, danza de los Moros, marujada (in Brazil), and danza de Santiago.

Blended rituals such as la danza de la conquista became part of colonial religious festivals. Theatrical enactments of the conquest, or farsas de guerra (“war farces”), played a prominent role in entertaining and enculturating colonial populations. In Mexico the entertainments became known as mitotes (from the Nahuatl mitotia, “to make dances”). Mitotes drew upon both Spanish dramatic action, which featured lengthy sections of dialogue, and the Aztec and Chichimec Indian tradition of using divided bands of enemies to represent the central theme of battle.

The conquest dances were taken to Spain and performed for elite audiences. Although their popularity faded in Spain during the 17th century, these spectacles became models for further ritual dances in the New World. July 25 marks the feast day of St. James (Santiago, Spain’s patron saint) throughout Spanish-speaking Latin America. For this major festival, many local traditions included dances to commemorate ancient battles between opposing forces. Dances of los vejigantes in Puerto Rico and los tastoanes in Mexico are prominent examples. In both festivals there are representations of Spanish horsemen and masked figures representing enslaved Africans or members of the Indigenous resistance.

Social dances

Upper-class immigrants from Europe brought with them their fashionable social dances (los bailes de salón). The aristocracy of the viceroyalties kept up with a succession of popular European dances. These included open-couple dances, in which couples generally did not touch—such as minuet, allemande, sarabande (zarabande in Spanish), chaconne, galliard, pavane, and volta. The interdependent-couple contredanse (contradanza in Spanish) and its variations (quadrille, lancer, and cotillion) were developing during the 17th century. Such choreographed dances of intricate geometries originated in Europe before sweeping quickly through Latin American ballrooms and dance salons during the 18th century. The fashion caught on across the social spectrum; for example, Indigenous dancers in northeast Mexico adopted the contradanza into their ritual expression of the matlachines dance.

Contradanzas and quadrilles remained common throughout Latin America and the Caribbean in the early 21st century. Their characteristic interlacing lines, bridges, circles, and grand right-and-left patterns are easily recognized in hundreds of dances. In the Caribbean, contradanzas and quadrilles included the bélè, belair, and belén, as well as kadril and numerous other variants of quadrille. In northeastern Brazil they became quadrilhas, the traditional dances for the festival of St. John the Baptist (São João) on June 24; the dances remained popular in the Northeast, and into the 21st century quadrilha competitions occurred on the state and national level.

As struggles for independence roiled Latin America during the 19th century, closed-couple dances, specifically the waltz, schottische, and polka, became fashionable in elite society. In closed-couple dances the partners touch most of the time; as a result, these dances were considered rebellious acts of sexual immorality. In addition the new couple dances were distinctive because each couple could choose steps from a range of possibilities. With the passage of time, these social dances became commonplace and their intimacy more accepted. The dances migrated to the countryside, where most of the people of African heritage lived. African-influenced hip movements—which could be seen as sexually suggestive—were incorporated into the dances, and they again transgressed the Roman Catholic Church’s standards of morality.