By Valerio Cesio

PROFILING THE BEGINNING OF THE 21st CENTURY

 

The first two decades of this century brought new characteristics to the evolutionary format of Latin American dance

On one hand, the acceleration in the circulation of information about choreographic productions in more developed countries fostered the direct influence of more cosmopolitan dances on local creation, production, and circulation processes.

Many initiatives were prematurely pasteurized, giving rise to a transgenic dance, without certainty of origin and with a profuse plurality of aesthetic facets. The postmodern pastiche takes shape in independent productions with more frivolity than conviction.

On the other hand, official institutions, which historically guard the choreographic heritage of yesteryear, advanced upon new trends, appropriating much of the avant-garde.

Finally, creators and performers of Latin American dance abandoned their own projects to dedicate themselves to building an international career.

Adding to all this the endemic lack of resources in the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, independent groups of different styles dissolved and gave way to so-called production casts, assembled just for one project.

One of the most important market niches for dancers in the major Latin American capitals has been musical comedies. Local versions of great Broadway titles have been produced since the last three decades of the 20th century, but never with the frequency and commercial acceptance they achieved in the first two decades of the 21st century in large cities like São Paulo, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City, for example.

Folklore is the style that remained most encapsulated; its groups persisted, its training processes remained practically the same, and its repertoire has barely been renewed.

Festivals were the showcase par excellence of the last two decades of the 20th century, but the proliferation of events diminished their impact. What were once great showcases giving visibility to emerging talents are now a profusion of displays with confusing quality criteria, where it is difficult to find consistent artistic patterns.

In compensation, this pause in the processes of creation, production, and circulation granted more time for research, thus promising a better understanding of the period and its real significance in the general history of dance in the near future.

Dances that are apprehended differ from those that are learned not only by the absence of a trained body but also by everything proposed by the leading role of the citizen-dancer, who, without academic training, lends themselves to reflecting the dance sensation of the common man; a sensation that, not passing through technical filters, documents the simple being-body-in-movement of each community. A good example of the absorption of new ways of moving is found in popular dances throughout Latin America.

 

It is difficult to pinpoint since when and exactly “how” people danced in each place of Latin America and the Caribbean five centuries ago. Colonization wiped out a good part of native body habits, and time continued to drive an inevitable transformation; folklore is the choreographic heritage of a people, and peoples change. The preservation of popular dances of different origins is a determined action by an important sector of the population. Not losing the “steps” of the grandparents has always been a matter of pride.

From the 16th century onwards, Latin American bodies changed because their way of life, their diet, and their ethnic “purity” were modified. Dances that once served to give thanks for a good harvest, invoke rain, or for a myriad of social instances, crystallized into small sequences that influenced and inserted themselves into the popular dances of the 18th and 19th centuries. Of the dances of “yesterday,” only some allegories remain, decorating the dances of “today.”

 

For example, between 1609 and 1767, in the Jesuit missions, some dances of Guarani origin were performed, elements of which are preserved in traditional Paraguayan dances. On the other hand, there were many cases where Spanish, French, and Portuguese court dances came to exert some influence on their formats and formal developments. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in Paraguay, dances followed by interludes or pantomimes were performed, interpreted by natives, with influence from old Spanish dances. Local popular dances of the 19th century like El cielito, El Pericón, and La Media Caña were influenced by the contradanza, which arrived via the Río de la Plata and appeared almost simultaneously in Uruguay, Argentina, and Paraguay. Other dances, like the waltz, galop, polka, mazurka, schottische, and habanera, quickly passed from salons to rural environments. This process occurred, simultaneously and similarly, in almost all of South America and Mexico.

Dances of African origin were the most impermeable to European influence, both in Brazil (with the greatest richness and variety of dances of such provenance), as in the Caribbean and even in Uruguay, with its traditional candombe.

 

Many of these popular dances have curious maps of influence: one can see the Caribbean presence “continentalizing” itself through its dance. Thus, the joropo, tamunangue, san Juan, san Bento, diablo de Yare, and calypso belong to both Venezuela and some regions of Central America, Colombia, and Ecuador.

The term “folklore” (first enunciated by the English antiquary William John Thoms in 1846) grouped diverse traditional choreographic manifestations in the first half of the 20th century, and in the second half it was the appropriate label for all traditional dances of a given ethnic group, regardless of the degree of purity they displayed. The concept of authenticity in the reproduction of these traditional dances came into question in the mid-20th century. Thus, national folklores branched out, and stylized folklore emerged, projection folklore, which takes the basis of a traditional dance and transforms it into a scenic product.

 

The prominence achieved by folkloric dances in the second half of the 20th century is not comparable to any other type of dance in the regions of Latin America and the Caribbean. Most countries have several official folkloric dance companies, meaning companies funded totally or partially by federal, state, provincial, municipal, or departmental governments. To this are added innumerable private groups, from various associations or institutions, and groups that supply the needs of the tourist market.

There are currently over a thousand professional and semi-professional folkloric and popular dance companies in Latin America and the Caribbean. Hundreds of them with international trajectories and one, particularly famous: the Ballet Folklórico de México by Amalia Hernández, an example of professionalism and international projection.

Brazil has the most varied popular dances in Latin America. In its folklore, there is a strong mark of the different ethnicities, which attribute a continental dimension to it.

In the North region, carimbó, retumbão, maracaibo, and batuque; in the Northeast, frevo, xaxado, maracatu, ciranda, and capoeira; in the Central-West, catira, chupim, cururu, and siriri; in the Southeast, samba, ticumbí, congos (or congadas), and moçambique and catopês; and in the South, chimarrita, pezinho, rancheira, and chula; to name just a few.

These dances find stages in great popular festivals like the Boi-Bumbá of Parintins and the Círio de Nazaré of Belém, in the North; the Bumba-meu-boi of Maranhão and the Lavagem da Igreja do Bonfim of Bahia, in the Northeast; and the monumental Rio Carnival, in the Southeast. In these festivals, millions of citizen-dancers circulate, adorning the dances that their tradition and context taught them.

New Bodies for Old Ballets

Although the beginning of a certain theatrical dance in Latin America can be recorded in the 16th century, in public festivities like Corpus Christi and the first “comedy houses,” it was in the 17th century that professional dancers began to be mentioned in theater, like the Spaniards Melchor de los Reyes Palacios and his son, who worked in Mexico and Peru. In the 18th century, the presence of dancers became more notable, and even without great academic training, they began to show more physical skills. The first stage dance that developed and gained credibility in the new continent was ballet. In 1796, the choreographer and premier dancer Juan Medina arrived in Mexico – brother of the famous Austrian dancer María Medina Vigano, portrayed in engravings of the time as the muse of dance, and brother-in-law of the Italian choreographer Salvatore Viganò – to direct the Compañía del Coliseo de México, where he remained until 1816. He was responsible for the choreographic restaging of the first ballets by Noverre, Angioloni, and Jean Dauberval, seen in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Those who made Latin American ballet knew it would be artistically naive to pretend to absorb, in the short term, what Europeans had been elaborating for over three centuries. Classical and romantic ballet belongs to the very foundations of European choreographic culture and is also the inducer of the essential characteristics of the choreographic production of much of the 20th century on that continent. The challenge of ballet in the new world was to manage to say what Europe said, even though biotypes and lack of tradition were consciously insurmountable obstacles. Ballet in the Americas, like opera, was a consequence of mimesis more than a need to express own values, and that mimesis had its price: the natural evolution of the regional academic dancing body took a back seat, Latin American bodies forced their own nature to resemble Europeans. In summary, they forged a new body to dance old ballets. The model on which those who reread ballet based on training that did not contain the body was traced implied that each signifier of that difficult academic code was quickly assimilated or readapted to fulfill its function.

The Decades of Choreographic Colonization

The first visits of “great stage dance” to Latin America were decisive for the assimilation of these codes and for the construction of the paradigms that sustained the pioneers.

These dances, coming from other contexts, had a trickle presence for three centuries and, in the 20th century, achieved a deep insertion in the imagination and technical languages of the creators of each generating pole of Latin America and the Caribbean. Ethnic dances, ballet, and modern dance landed with a gallery of aesthetic interests that would germinate quickly in the new soil, in a fusion between the erudite forms of the Old World and Latin American bodies and sensibilities.

From the long list of visits in the first half of the 20th century, some were true milestones, like that of Anna Pavlova, who showed her repertoire in extensive tours of Latin America in 1917, 1919, 1924-1925, and 1928, and who was the inspiring muse of hundreds of latent artists in the field of dance; among them an Ecuadorian adolescent who, upon seeing her dance, decided his career and later became one of the most important choreographers in the history of British academic ballet: Sir Frederick Ashton.

Pavlova’s counterpoint was Isadora Duncan, whose passage through Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Rio de Janeiro in 1916 was not as significant as expected. Isadora ended up doing her shows in a peripheral circuit of spaces that were not up to her deserved publicity.

The most transcendent visit for the stylistic evolution of Latin American ballet was that of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1913, repeated in 1916. The company performed joint functions with the Ballet Estable del Teatro Colón of Buenos Aires and imposed an aesthetic that would remain valid for more than half a century.

Other companies and artists exerted a notable influence on Latin American creators and directors, like the Ballets Russes de Montecarlo (headed by Leonide Massine) in 1940; the American Ballet (formerly Ballet Caravan) of George Balanchine in 1941; the Ballet Russe du Colonel de Basil (headed by Tamara Grigorieva, Tatiana Leskova, and Yurek Shaboevsky, who would be an important part of the development of ballet in Latin America) in 1942 and 1944; and the Ballet of Alicia Alonso (later Ballet de Cuba) in 1949, 1954, and 1959.

The visits of Serge Lifar and George Balanchine also contributed to the formation of a certain taste for ballet technique, applied to a wider universe of themes than that proposed by the known classical and romantic repertoire up to that point.

Popular dances received their first great influence of the century with the successive visits, from 1917 to 1935, of the Spanish dancer Antonia Mercé, “La Argentina.” She performed throughout South America, Mexico, and part of Central America with her celebrated El amor brujo. Carmen Amaya’s tour in 1953 also left marks.

Modern dance – which had its first presence in Latin America with Loie Fuller’s visit to Mexico in 1897 – received in the first half of the 20th century two tours of great impact on local production: in 1940, the Ballet Jooss (Dance Theatre Darlington Hall, England) with two mixed programs that included its celebrated The Green Table (1932), which left indelible stylistic marks on several choreographers; and, in 1942 and 1946, the Sakharoff brothers (Clotilde and Alexander). As a result of these tours, both were hired by Ernst Uthoff (from Ballet Jooss) of the University of Chile to create a dance school, and the dance company of Clotilde and Alexander Sakharoff was founded in Buenos Aires – which lasted only one year.

In 1950, Katherine Dunham and, in 1959, Harald Kreutzberg made a great impression. The same happened with Dore Hoyer, who performed in several countries in 1951 and 1953 and ended up creating her dance company in La Plata (Argentina) in 1960.

In that same year, the Ballet of the 20th Century by Maurice Béjart performed for the first time in Latin America, visiting only Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, Peru, and Mexico. Its influence impacted both the field of ballet and modern dance. In 1963, the company returned on a more extensive tour, showing two works that would become icons in Latin American choreographic culture: The Rite of Spring and Bolero. Béjart’s progressive ballet was one of the strongest aesthetic models that can be appreciated in the Latin American choreographic production of the 70s, a model as representative as the tours of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in the first half of the century.

Other visits that marked creators in the 1970s were those of Martha Graham, Alwin Nikolais, and finally, already in 1980, the first tour of Pina Bausch with her Tanztheater Wuppertal, who printed a strong influence on two generations of choreographers with her celebrated Café Müller.

The permeability of a large part of local creators meant that these visits became a living part of the evolution of dance in these latitudes.

The Latin Americanized Ballet

The development of so-called classical ballet remained in the hands of the great official theaters that established resident companies, functioning parallel to symphony and philharmonic orchestras, but with a lesser status. The first resident ballet in this mold in Latin America was that of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires (1925), followed by the Teatro Municipal in Rio de Janeiro (1936). In the second half of the 20th century, their companies were established in: Havana (Ballet Nacional de Cuba), Mexico City (Compañía Nacional de Danza), Montevideo (Servicio Oficial de Difusión, Radiotelevisión y Espectáculos, initially Servicio Oficial de Difusión Radioeléctrica, SODRE), Santiago (Teatro Municipal), La Plata (Teatro Argentino), and finally, other Latin American capitals and some cities in the interior of Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. These institutions, with very irregular performances, were responsible for bringing the art of ballet to their communities and found in the urban bourgeoisie an important consumer.

 

Parallel to the activities of restaging various versions of the most traditional titles of 19th-century romantic ballet, like La Sylphide, Giselle, The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, and The Sleeping Beauty, these companies promoted the staging of creations by numerous Latin American choreographers interested in the academic language of this genre, whether to tell the same story of the old ballets with other steps, or to tell new stories in the old language. In the universe of this scenic craftsmanship shines the name of the Venezuelan choreographer Vicente Nebreda, who elaborated a personal and formally rich choreographic discourse without excessively extrapolating the limits of academic ballet.

In the last quarter of the 20th century, Latin America, already with four generations of expert dancers, began to present its first export products.

Representatives of ballets from Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil, and Cuba occupied important places on the international stage, beginning with the famous Cuban Alicia Alonso, the Brazilian Márcia Haydée (as a star of Cranko’s Stuttgart Ballet), the Argentine Jorge Donn (as a star of Béjart’s Ballet of the 20th Century), and the Venezuelan Zhandra Rodriguez (American Ballet Theatre – Hamburg Ballet). Later followed the Argentines Julio Bocca (American Ballet Theatre), Maximiliano Guerra (Balleto del Teatro alla Scala di Milano), Paloma Herrera (American Ballet Theatre), Iñaki Urlezaga (Royal Ballet), Marianela Núñez (Royal Ballet), and Herman Cornejo (American Ballet Theatre). Also notable were the Brazilians Cecilia Kerche (Teatro Municipal do Rio de Janeiro), Marcelo Gomes (American Ballet Theatre), Thiago Soares (Royal Ballet), and Roberta Marques (Royal Ballet). In Cuba, which exported a large number of dancers, the name of Carlos Acosta (Royal Ballet) stood out among all his countrymen.

The structures that contain and maintain dance companies capable of having an active ballet repertoire suffered, in addition to the usual disregard for culture characteristic of the Third World, the gradual aging of their operational dynamics; these are organs and institutions with heavy bureaucracy, and the level of their productions stopped growing more than a decade ago. Even so, ballet occupies an important place in the idearium of Latin American dance. There are thousands of public and private institutions that teach it and a numerous public that appreciates it. Mestizo ballet consolidated, not without effort, its own circuit of operation and legitimation.

The Builders

The 1940s were the decade of discovery. Although ballet and variety shows with local production had been presented since the 1920s, it was in the 1940s that Latin American dance began to be made, with certainty of origin and diverse perspectives.

Both the pioneers of ballet and those of modern dance were beginning their professional careers, almost always monitored by experienced European professionals, immigrants that the war would scatter everywhere and who were decisive for the condensation of regional erudite dances. There was a dance to be built. It was the sowing period, of a generation that would initiate the construction of national dances from Mexico to Argentina.

In Mexico, strongly marked by the American modern dance immigrants Anna Sokolow and Waldeen since the 1930s, Nellie and Gloria Campobello adapted Mexican images and themes to ballet, both in their folkloric aspects and in the adaptation of literary works. But the great artistic event was the foundation, in 1948, of the Ballet Nacional de México, an independent entity driven by Guillermina Bravo, the most relevant choreographer of 20th-century Mexican dance, with a defined ideological stance and active artistic presence for over fifty years at the head of a company that lasted into the 21st century.

In the 1950s, Guillermo Arriaga emerged, choreographer of the famous Zapata (1953), Josefina Lavalle, and Raúl Flores Canelo, with a modern language and strong national colors. Simultaneously, Sonia Castañeda, Felipe Segura, Nellie Happee, and Gloria Contreras, choreographer of Huapango (1959), chose ballet technique to shape their ideas.

In Argentina, the Austrian Margaret Wallman (former disciple and partner of Mary Wigman) took over the direction of the Cuerpo de Baile of the Teatro Colón, and the Bostonian Miriam Winslow (former disciple of Ted Shawn) created her first company in Buenos Aires. The city also received the dancers and teachers Otto Werberg and Francisco Pinter, who came from Ballet Jooss, and the brothers Clotilde and Alexander Sakharoff.

German Expressionism was the main stylistic current that spread in Argentine modern dance. The German Renate Schottelius, the Argentines Paulina Ossona, Luisa Grimberg, Cecilia Ingenieros, and María Fux, and the Chilean Ana Itelman integrated the first generation of modern dance in the Río de la Plata and were decisive for its development.

In Brazil, although Eros Volúsia composed solo dance pieces with regional themes since the 1930s, it was the Russian Nina Verchinina, coming from ballet, who introduced a more modern dance, where expression was sought more than technique. The world of ballet had its center in Rio de Janeiro, where the Cuerpo de Baile of the Teatro Municipal existed and where the Russians María Olenewa, Tatiana Leskova, and Eugenia Feodorova and the Czechoslovak Vaslav Veltchek carried out intense pedagogical work. São Paulo, which would also host Olenewa and Veltchek for the creation of its Municipal School of Dance, had the important presence of the Polish Halina Biernacka.

Venezuela had its pioneers of continental immigration: the Mexican Grishka Holguin (with Conchita Crededio) and the Argentines Luz and Harry Thompson (former members of the Original Ballet Russe du Colonel de Basil). In Central America and the Caribbean, the pioneers were natives, as was the case of Margarita Esquivel (and later Mireya Barboza) in Costa Rica and the Cuban Alberto Alonso.

In Cuba, only the language of academic ballet flourished. Returning from his experiences with the Ballet Russe de Montecarlo and Original Ballet Russe du Colonel de Basil, the country’s first professional choreographer, Alberto Alonso, began his activities in 1942. The famous trilogy Alicia, Fernando, and Alberto was born, which starred in Before Dawn (1947), the first work of social connotation premiered in the region. Already at the head of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba, Alberto Alonso was, between 1948 and 1959, the most active choreographer in his country.

In the 1950s, the Ballet of the IV Centenary (of ephemeral existence) in São Paulo, under the direction of the Hungarian Aurelio Milloss, would try to promote a Diaghilevian phenomenon of productions that included great names of music and visual arts, opting for a more Brazilian theme. Also in that decade, Klauss Vianna emerged, who proposed a modern dance, tangentially national, erudite, and distant from ballet.

Companies and independent groups from Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Cuba led a movement that would include Chile, Venezuela, Peru, Uruguay, and finally, Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador, Colombia, and all of Central America, a movement that would give its first visible face to the dance of Latin America.

National choreographers made their first stagings with scarce academic preparation in terms of choreographic composition but with a strong ideological drive and an instinct tuned to the modern/national world that defined their creations. In the 1950s, although the academic structures of dance were still precarious for the production of great professionals, the first generation of Latin American choreographers achieved visibility.

 

Modernity in Effervescence

Creators, performers, and promoters of Latin American dance lived, in the 1960s and 70s, the most fertile period of the 20th century, which would prepare them for the great leap of the 1980s. Not only did groups, companies, and schools multiply, but the number of spaces and encounters for dance also grew.

Already in the 1960s, the first great instructors of Latin American dance, fully trained in their countries, with their own methodological research and plural experience, appeared. These first regional “masters” would drive the most successful generations of dancers in each country.

The profile of the “master” generally accumulated the roles of teacher, choreographer, and director and functioned as a taste maker. They were also the cultivators of a discipline, sculpted the way dance would be performed in Latin America, propagated ideas, and directed projects.

In Mexico, the influence of Anna Sokolow still endured; Guillermina Bravo reached the peak of her career as a choreographer, and new companies emerged like the Ballet Independiente of Raúl Flores Canelo in 1966 and the Ballet Teatro del Espacio of Michel Descombey and Gladiola Orozco in 1979, which would end up being subsidized by the State.

The Ballet Folklórico of Amalia Hernández reached its peak of projection, and Gloria Contreras stood out among the choreographers dedicated to academic ballet as the most productive. In 1971, she founded her company, the Taller Coreográfico (Choreographic Workshop) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

In Argentina, the Ballet Contemporáneo of the Teatro General San Martín (1968) began its activities highlighting the choreographic work of Oscar Araiz. For her part, Iris Scaccheri was the first Latin American modern dance soloist to conquer the world with her solo shows of singular aesthetics and strong technical demand. Both Scaccheri and Araiz belonged to the modern dance ensemble that Dore Hoyer had founded in La Plata in 1960.

Two unprecedented production spaces also opened in Buenos Aires: Amigos de la Danza (in the 1960s), which brought together prestigious choreographers and dancers for specific productions, and Expo Danza (also Danza Confrontación) in the following decade, a cycle of weekly performances that gathered much of the emerging activity of the local independent dance scene.

In Brazil, Décio Otero and Marika Gidali founded, in 1971, the Ballet Stagium, a symbol of choreographic modernity with national identity and ideological stance. The Grupo Corpo (1975) and the Cisne Negro Companhia de Dança (1978) were also born.

In Venezuela, Sonia Sanoja emerged, whose Fundación de la Danza Contemporánea nucleated José Ledezma, Juan Monzón, Rodolfo Varela, and other important names of Caracas modern dance.

In Costa Rica, the university hosted the dance project of Rogelio López, a disciple of the pioneer Mireya Barboza, while Jorge Ramírez and Nandayure Harley were at the head of a second university company: an unprecedented fact in Central America.

Cuba, despite also having received visits from the fairy of light, Loie Fuller, in 1897, and Isadora Duncan, in 1916, was slow to have contact with the new forms of dance that were spreading around the world. In the 1930s, the performances of Alexander and Clotilde Sakharoff (1935), Ted Shawn and his group of dancers (1937), and Harald Kreutzberg (1938) had good repercussion on the island; the same happened, in the following decade, with Ballet Jooss (1940), Martha Graham (1941), and Miriam Winslow (1943). But it was in the 1950s that modern dance was timidly introduced in the country, led by Ramiro Guerra, who founded the first group of Cuban modern dance in 1959.

In this period, encounters, cycles, and various mixed seasons proliferated, seeds of what would be the festivals in the 1980s. This was also the moment of creation and foundation of innumerable collectivities in the form of associations, councils, commissions, etc.

Dance assumed a more visible civil space in society, and the motto was to bet on the future.

Open Dances in Latin America

The effervescence and aesthetic restlessness of the 1960s and 70s remained vibrating in the dance of the 1980s and began to sediment in the middle of the decade.

What had been search began to transform into cohesive scenic results, with a show format and an audience in gestation. It was the beginning of the boom of Latin American dance, and it was not exclusively a choreographic boom: interpreters trained or initiated in Latin America also began to gain notoriety in the market. This phenomenon, allied with the local medium-sized productions that were then gaining visibility in Europe, constituted the driving force of this new dance, with a defined profile and multiplicity of brief biographies.

Collectives set out in search of developing their own lines, personality marks, which during the 1990s would begin their categorization into styles and transform into author dances.

Against the closed codes that preceded them, the new Latin American dances sought new degrees of openness, interdisciplinarity, and interaction. A renewed dance was born from its contact with other modes of movement and with other disciplines of artistic creation.

Brazil was one of the most active laboratories of choreographic postmodernity, and Argentina, one of the poles exporting the most recognized dancers, in a period when Mexico and Venezuela also had marked expansions of their new dance.

In Brazil, Grupo Corpo became, in the 1980s, what Ballet Stagium was in the 1970s: a strong reference in which much of dance was reflected. Based in Belo Horizonte, capital of the state of Minas Gerais, the group was also the first great example of the decentralization of Brazilian dance, which began to have important poles of creation and production outside the traditional Rio de Janeiro-São Paulo axis. Thus, diverse aesthetics coexist nationally with creators of chamber works, like Lía Rodriguez, or large spectacles like Déborah Colker; choreographers who reached contemporary dance through jazz, like Roseli Rodriguez with her group Raça, choreographers with more radical poetics like Alejandro Ahmed with his group Cena 11 from Florianópolis, and those with more personal languages like Henrique Rodovalho with his group Quasar from Goiânia. The universe of soloists was equally diverse, ranging from deeply popular inspiration, like Carlinhos de Jesus from Rio de Janeiro, local themes in the north, like Antonio Nóbrega from Recife, to more international aesthetics in the South, like Rosito di Carmine from Porto Alegre, all three with strong national presence and active ambassadors of Brazilian dances in the world.

This stylistic proliferation is also clearly perceived in Mexico, where quite diverse choreographic lines sprout, like the gay dance of José Rivera with his group La Cebra, the bizarre dance of Raúl Parrao, and the weightless dance of Juan Manuel Ramos.

With almost a hundred independent groups in full operation, Mexico reached the end of the 20th century with a significant positive balance. Without stars, but with copious activity and growing international presence. Names like Vicente Silva, Gerardo Delgado, Alicia Sánchez, and Tania Pérez Salas joined creators with more than two decades of experience like Lidia Romero and Cecilia Lugo to testify to the diversity of its language.

The decentralization of dance production and promotion also manifested in this period, as shown by groups like Antares in Hermosillo, Delfos in Mazatlán, and the Ballet Nacional de México itself, which in the early 1990s moved to Querétaro. National festival networks also collaborated to nationalize dance production, previously confined to Mexico City.

Argentina had greater visibility for its stars than for the intensity of its choreographic production. Although some collectives with personal aesthetic presence and continuous activity emerged, like Descueve, potentially competitive companies in a more demanding or updated market did not consolidate in this period. There are two great stars of Argentine dance at the end of the century, both consumed and exported vigorously: the classical dancer Julio Bocca and the tango.

The popular genre of traditional Porteño dance not only had unexpected growth but also infiltrated other choreographic and scenic languages in general. So-called contemporary dance and ballet also absorbed it as motivation, form, and environment. Within this fusion movement, the work of Tango x 2 and Tangokinesis by Ana María Stekelman gained projection, which, like dozens of groups and companies, found in tango a passport to participate in the international dance market.

In Venezuela, independent companies had a marked boom; groups like Danzahoy, Contradanza, Acción Colectiva, or Rajatabla showed strong scenic presence, with influence in other Latin American and Caribbean countries. Groups from other South American countries like Colombia (Danza Concerto and L’explose), Ecuador (Ballet Ecuatoriano de Cámara), Peru (Ballet Nacional), Bolivia (Ballet Municipal de La Paz), Paraguay (Ballet Nacional and Ballet Municipal de Asunción), Chile (Espiral), and Uruguay (Coringa) struggle to find their own line of work. In Central America and the Caribbean, on the other hand, the effort still resides in implanting groups and companies capable of absorbing and driving local dancers towards professionalization.

Stage dance in Latin America and the Caribbean underwent an accelerated process of formation and sedimentation. Mestizo, it oriented its contents in diverse formal expressions; it created, adapted, and stylized signifiers that currently belong to it and define it aesthetically and ideologically in the space of realizations, contradictions, and aporias.

The effervescence and aesthetic restlessness of the 1960s and 70s remained vibrating in the dance of the 1980s and began to sediment in the middle of the decade.

What had been search began to transform into cohesive scenic results, with a show format and an audience in gestation. It was the beginning of the boom of Latin American dance, and it was not exclusively a choreographic boom: interpreters trained or initiated in Latin America also began to gain notoriety in the market. This phenomenon, allied with the local medium-sized productions that were then gaining visibility in Europe, constituted the driving force of this new dance, with a defined profile and multiplicity of brief biographies.

Collectives set out in search of developing their own lines, personality marks, which during the 1990s would begin their categorization into styles and transform into author dances.

Against the closed codes that preceded them, the new Latin American dances sought new degrees of openness, interdisciplinarity, and interaction. A renewed dance was born from its contact with other modes of movement and with other disciplines of artistic creation.

Brazil was one of the most active laboratories of choreographic postmodernity, and Argentina, one of the poles exporting the most recognized dancers, in a period when Mexico and Venezuela also had marked expansions of their new dance.

In Brazil, Grupo Corpo became, in the 1980s, what Ballet Stagium was in the 1970s: a strong reference in which much of dance was reflected. Based in Belo Horizonte, capital of the state of Minas Gerais, the group was also the first great example of the decentralization of Brazilian dance, which began to have important poles of creation and production outside the traditional Rio de Janeiro-São Paulo axis. Thus, diverse aesthetics coexist nationally with creators of chamber works, like Lía Rodriguez, or large spectacles like Déborah Colker; choreographers who reached contemporary dance through jazz, like Roseli Rodriguez with her group Raça, choreographers with more radical poetics like Alejandro Ahmed with his group Cena 11 from Florianópolis, and those with more personal languages like Henrique Rodovalho with his group Quasar from Goiânia. The universe of soloists was equally diverse, ranging from deeply popular inspiration, like Carlinhos de Jesus from Rio de Janeiro, local themes in the north, like Antonio Nóbrega from Recife, to more international aesthetics in the South, like Rosito di Carmine from Porto Alegre, all three with strong national presence and active ambassadors of Brazilian dances in the world.

This stylistic proliferation is also clearly perceived in Mexico, where quite diverse choreographic lines sprout, like the gay dance of José Rivera with his group La Cebra, the bizarre dance of Raúl Parrao, and the weightless dance of Juan Manuel Ramos.

With almost a hundred independent groups in full operation, Mexico reached the end of the 20th century with a significant positive balance. Without stars, but with copious activity and growing international presence. Names like Vicente Silva, Gerardo Delgado, Alicia Sánchez, and Tania Pérez Salas joined creators with more than two decades of experience like Lidia Romero and Cecilia Lugo to testify to the diversity of its language.

The decentralization of dance production and promotion also manifested in this period, as shown by groups like Antares in Hermosillo, Delfos in Mazatlán, and the Ballet Nacional de México itself, which in the early 1990s moved to Querétaro. National festival networks also collaborated to nationalize dance production, previously confined to Mexico City.

Argentina had greater visibility for its stars than for the intensity of its choreographic production. Although some collectives with personal aesthetic presence and continuous activity emerged, like Descueve, potentially competitive companies in a more demanding or updated market did not consolidate in this period. There are two great stars of Argentine dance at the end of the century, both consumed and exported vigorously: the classical dancer Julio Bocca and the tango.

The popular genre of traditional Porteño dance not only had unexpected growth but also infiltrated other choreographic and scenic languages in general. So-called contemporary dance and ballet also absorbed it as motivation, form, and environment. Within this fusion movement, the work of Tango x 2 and Tangokinesis by Ana María Stekelman gained projection, which, like dozens of groups and companies, found in tango a passport to participate in the international dance market.

In Venezuela, independent companies had a marked boom; groups like Danzahoy, Contradanza, Acción Colectiva, or Rajatabla showed strong scenic presence, with influence in other Latin American and Caribbean countries. Groups from other South American countries like Colombia (Danza Concerto and L’explose), Ecuador (Ballet Ecuatoriano de Cámara), Peru (Ballet Nacional), Bolivia (Ballet Municipal de La Paz), Paraguay (Ballet Nacional and Ballet Municipal de Asunción), Chile (Espiral), and Uruguay (Coringa) struggle to find their own line of work. In Central America and the Caribbean, on the other hand, the effort still resides in implanting groups and companies capable of absorbing and driving local dancers towards professionalization.

Stage dance in Latin America and the Caribbean underwent an accelerated process of formation and sedimentation. Mestizo, it oriented its contents in diverse formal expressions; it created, adapted, and stylized signifiers that currently belong to it and define it aesthetically and ideologically in the space of realizations, contradictions, and aporias.

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Content updated on 05/07/2017 19:29