First Reflections

To understand how Guillermoprieto's memoir uses language to articulate an embodied knowledge of dance, it is useful to know the embodied knowledge traditions she brings to revolutionary Cuba in 1970. Guillermoprieto's training is informed primarily by American modern dance. She first learns modern dance in Mexico City with the Ballet Nacional, where their form was based mostly upon the Martha Graham technique.Footnote ¹ At the age of sixteen, Guillermoprieto moves to New York City, where she trains at the Martha Graham dance studio and then with Merce Cunningham. Graham, who is described on the first page of the memoir, is positioned as a goddess of modern dance: Graham's “quest for a body language that reflected the deepest inner conflicts, and the way she used gestures and movements to stage great myths, centering them on the internal universe of a single woman … brought her admirers and disciples from all the arts” (Guillermoprieto Reference Guillermoprieto2004, 5). Guillermoprieto praises Graham's work and influence, and the memoir highlights the magnitude of this influential choreographer with words like “quest,” “myths,” and “universe.” Yet, Guillermoprieto remembers Graham's classes being extremely demanding and focused on improvement through pain. She simultaneously describes Graham as a groundbreaking figure and as an aged drama queen who enjoys yelling at the students. After a few years with Graham's company, Guillermoprieto transfers to the Cunningham studio. Guillermoprieto's training comes during what Mark Franko calls the “Cunningham revolution” (Reference Franko1995, 75). This revolution is the move Cunningham makes away from “the dancer as a transmitter of feelings to the movement itself” (80). Cunningham's goal was to experiment with the way bodily movement could be the focus of a performance, as opposed to a narrative or drama that prescribed the reactions of the audience. From Cunningham, Guillermoprieto learns to “pursue the meandering paths of abstraction, chance, and Zen philosophy” (Guillermoprieto Reference Guillermoprieto2004, 7). The juxtaposition of Graham and Cunningham as Guillermoprieto's mentors shows us that her training would reflect an embodied knowledge of modern dance that valued the individual body as an expressive agent but also as a valuable object itself.

In addition to her training in modern dance, Guillermoprieto is influenced by the avant-garde performing arts scene of 1960s New York City. The young Guillermoprieto and her dance friends (whom she calls “comrades in enchantment”) watch international films, attend the New York City Ballet under George Balanchine, and see prodigious performers in concert like James Brown and Janis Joplin (Guillermoprieto Reference Guillermoprieto2004, 9). One day, they “[hear] that the revolution was in Brooklyn” and attend the Living Theatre, a group of actors who stage unconventional and experimental plays in order to push the limits of political and social awareness (10). This group was well-known in the 1960s for a performance in which naked actors crawled around on stage and into the audience with insect-like movements. Guillermoprieto was thrilled to be a part of this type of “revolution.” She explains:

She places herself in this revolutionary movement because, as she states, “I too was part of this avant-garde, dancing here and there with choreographers who were getting their start” (11). Hence, the memoir shows that Guillermoprieto's modern dance training drew from this creative revolution, teaching her the value of disrupting expectations and practicing uninhibited movement.

The memoir's emphasis on this creative revolution also corresponds to Guillermoprieto's ability to sacrifice her body and economic stability for a higher calling. For example, she works with then-budding choreographers like Margaret Jenkins, Elaine Shipman, and Twyla Tharp. The latter has an impact on Guillermoprieto, as she was chosen to dance in Tharp's early piece, Medley, which used sixty dancers in Central Park's Great Lawn. Guillermoprieto interprets Tharp's goal as “want[ing] the dancers’ movements to be ‘natural,’ and though there was an obvious contradiction between this aesthetic ambition and her technical demands, she meant that she was seeking an antiformal language of movement,” not unlike Cunningham's revolution (Guillermoprieto Reference Guillermoprieto2004, 14). Participating in these “natural” and “antiformal” dance styles teaches Guillermoprieto the value of experimenting with the dancing body as an instrument of a transformational “language.” Using the body as a medium for the “antiformal” gives Guillermoprieto's life meaning: “For me, those bright mornings when we rehearsed Medley were the first irrefutable proof that being alive was worth it” (14). Even though Guillermoprieto and her friends are poor and overworked, they “felt divine” in dedicating their lives to dance (17). Ultimately, the memoir situates the 1960s dance scene in New York as a time of radicalization because “decency and modesty lost all connotation of elegance, and outlandishness, self-revelation, and fanatical sincerity were eroticized” (17). It is through this charged atmosphere that Guillermoprieto learns confidence through the embodiment of dance: “I'm poor, make something of it, said our clothes, and dressed in them we prepared to learn to dance in a language I called Twylish” (17; italics in original). All these elements of the artistic revolution in New York City should have made her an ideal candidate to teach at the ENA in Cuba, where creative expression had been given space to thrive.

Unfortunately, Guillermoprieto comes to Cuba not so much by choice, but rather after two of her mentors recommend that she leave modern dance as a performer. Cunningham is the one who approaches Guillermoprieto to let her know of two teaching openings, one in Venezuela and one in Cuba, and she interprets his suggestion as an evaluation of her merit as a dancer (Guillermoprieto Reference Guillermoprieto2004, 21). This cross in the road gives her great anxiety that affects the way she reads her body: “I felt that each one of the defects I took stock of every day in front of the mirror—the hips, legs, shoulders—was now exposed as if I were a side of beef hanging in the window of a butcher shop” (22). Again, the mirror becomes part of how Guillermoprieto evaluates her embodiment, and, given the discouraging suggestion by Cunningham, she can now only see herself in fragments. This view of herself is reaffirmed when she approaches Tharp about the opportunity in Cuba, and she recalls Tharp responding, “‘If I were you, I'd take it,’ she said. ‘You're not going to get anywhere hanging around here’” (23). Guillermoprieto decides to go to Cuba then, not because she is interested in the culture, people, or their revolution, but because she “had no doubt that we artists were the highest form of human life” and “that conviction justified my existence” (25). The stakes are quite high for her, and Cuba is her last option to stay connected to the dance world, a world that “justified” her life. Ironically, in Cuba she is exposed to a new justification of life through embodiment, which, at the time, emphasized government-imposed motivations rather than individual ones. As a result, Cuba requires Guillermoprieto to reconsider her understanding of how the embodied knowledge of modern dance uplifts humanity.

Forms of Embodied Knowledge

My use of the term “embodied knowledge” is in conversation with scholars who have already investigated the way bodily practices arise out of an awareness of movement. Scholars, like Didre Sklar (Reference Sklar1994), Ann Cooper Albright (Reference Albright1997), Yvonne Daniel (Reference Daniel2005), Susan Leigh Foster (Reference Foster2011), Susan Rethorst (Reference Rethorst2016), and Hiie Saumaa (Reference Saumaa2017), have all engaged with related ideas such as kinesthetic knowledge, kinesthetic empathy, bodily knowledge, somatic understanding, and embodied research, among others. These terms touch on similar ideas of body, perception, memory, and knowledge that are key components of how a body obtains the skill of dance. In order to investigate Guillermoprieto's memoir along these lines, I define “embodied knowledge” as knowledge that is of, and produced through, the body.

My use of “embodied knowledge” rests on the definition of the verb “to embody” meaning “to put into a body; to invest or clothe (a spirit) with a body.”Footnote ² This principal definition suggests that embodiment is often interested in making the nonphysical tangible, a transfer of existing information into bodily form. I rest on “embodied” precisely because it keeps the image of the physical body present. However, a subsequent definition is also fitting: “to give concrete form to (what is abstract or ideal); to express (principles, thoughts, intentions) in an institution, work of art, action, definite form of words.”Footnote ³ In other words, embodiment can refer to more than the existence of a body; it can also correspond to any kind of form that concretizes the abstract. In this way, a “form” could be the dancing body, but it could also be language, poetry, images, etc. My argument is that Dancing with Cuba follows along the lines of both definitions. Guillermoprieto spends considerable time articulating how her body learns and retains knowledge. Moreover, she shows us how language, especially poetic language, can also activate the experience of embodied knowledge through the kinesthetic imagination.Footnote ⁴ Thus, this section demonstrates how the mirror scene cultivates these definitions of embodied knowledge. First, it describes not just the whole body, but the parts of the body that are called on to perform a dance movement. In this way, the fragmenting of the body concretizes how the nonmaterial nature of dance is made tangible. Second, Guillermoprieto highlights the synchronization of the senses, like touch, sight, and sound, in creating embodied knowledge. In short, the scene emphasizes how bodily knowledge becomes realized, how it is more than the movement itself.

I foreground Susan Leigh Foster's research about the term “kinesthesia,” the sensory awareness of the body in movement, because she reveals that over time western societies have increasingly thought of the body in fragments. Most importantly, her investigation of the term reveals how the fragmented body was born out of a rise in epistemological systems of being throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe and the United States, like chorography (the systematic mapping of land or regions) and microscopy (the examination of small objects with a microscope), fields that render an object into quantifiable parts. This rise in a quantitative approach to the body led people in western societies to consider the body as a source of data, which could create a sense of self apart from individualized sensations. Foster uses Étienne Bonnot de Condillac's Treatise on the Sensations [(Reference Condillac and Carr1754) 1930] as an illustration of this connection. She recalls that in this treatise, Condillac describes a statue that realizes selfhood through touch. The statue, whose other senses are limited, gains subjectivity through the act of touching itself. For this statue, the act of touch allows it to distinguish its self from everything outside the body, which leads it to discover “that the body existed in space and could be extended through space” (Foster Reference Foster2011, 86). Once the statue realizes it can move, it then uses the body as a scientific instrument to assist “in the production of knowledge as a sequence of incremental, contiguous units, acquired through the action of moving and then registering the results” (Foster Reference Foster2011, 85–86). Foster uses Condillac's example to demonstrate how the body can be a source of quantifiable information that imbues the self with a sense of consciousness, not unlike the way the mirror scene in the memoir breaks down the dancing body into a synthesis of body parts.

Returning to the mirror scene, Guillermoprieto's description of the dance pupil in practice is similar to Foster's understanding of Condillac's statue as they both include the touching of body parts to help the subject “observe its body from a distance and evaluate impassively its appearance and actions” (Reference Guevara and Deutschmann2011, 86). Here the dancer, like the statue, learns how to propel her body through space one part at a time. In Guillermoprieto's illustration, she crafts the movement of the leg by describing the awareness her dancer needs to have about how the inner thigh and knee work together through the direction, “‘lengthen the leg from the inner part of the thigh, not from the knee’” (Reference Guillermoprieto2004, 50). The difference, of course, is that Guillermoprieto's dance pupil relies on the teacher's touch to produce the knowledge of the kinesthetic movement. Unlike the statue, Guillermoprieto's dancer is connected to, and somewhat dependent on, the teacher's touch for the development of embodied knowledge. Thus, the mirror scene emphasizes a dancer who finds the use of outside touch, along with reflection, necessary in order to produce kinesthetic awareness, which is part of what will frustrate Guillermoprieto's experience as a novice teacher.Footnote ⁵

In the same way, Guillermoprieto's representation of the mirror as “the most valuable tool” promotes an understanding of embodied knowledge that relies on the image of the dancer's body. Through the mirror, Guillermoprieto's dancer identifies which of her body parts are not in form, allowing her to correct what she feels in one body part in order to maintain the integrity of the entire body. In a 1949 essay on his theory of the mirror stage, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan discusses that the identification of self occurs when the body is not fragmented but recognized visually as a complete image of self: “I am led, therefore, to regard the function of the mirror stage as a particular case of the function of the imago, which is to establish a relation between the organism and its reality.…” (Lacan [Reference Lacan, Rivkin and Ryan1949] 1998, 180). In this way, the mirror in the memoir is an affirmation of the mirror stage, as the dancer is supposed to adjust singular body parts in order to then grasp the effect on the body as a whole. However, phenomenology philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty questions that one's own body can be treated as an object because it cannot be observed fully by the self: “My body itself is a thing which I do not observe: in order to be able to do so, I should need the use of a second body which itself would be unobservable” ([Reference Merleau-Ponty1945] 1962, 104). To Merleau-Ponty, an object needs to be observable from all sides, and that is impossible to do to one's own body. Furthermore, he identifies self-touch as a kind of “double-sensation,” a type of reflection that again reminds us that embodied knowledge can be a dual process of form and information, especially with knowledge created from our own perceptions (106). These theories point to the significant influence the image of the body has on the process of embodiment, in which the information of the mirror is made into a coherent form. Thus, the dancer's awareness of touch and image in the mirror scene fragment the body in a way that encourages this process of embodied knowledge.

Even though Merleau-Ponty and Lacan recognize the way in which touch and reflection create awareness of a distinct body through its parts, neither find fragmentation a promising idea. For Merleau-Ponty, one's own body cannot be understood sequentially: “I do not bring together one by one the parts of the body; this translation and this unification are performed once and for all within me: they are my body, itself” (Merleau-Ponty [Reference Merleau-Ponty1945] 1962, 173). Here, the focus is on the simultaneous exchange of embodiment and information. For Lacan, a fragmented body leads to “aggressive disintegration in the individual” as the imagination works to create the whole (Lacan [Reference Lacan, Rivkin and Ryan1949] 1998, 181). In contrast, Guillermoprieto's mirror scene makes the case that the fragmentation of body parts is necessary in creating embodied knowledge. For this dancer-in-training, the learned skill of focusing on different body parts, and how they work together, is how the embodied knowledge of dance is transmitted. The goal as a student is the achievement of the perfectly held position of the one body part, so that later the entire performance comes together down to the last detail. The goal of a dance teacher, then, is to teach students how the adjustment of the smaller parts adds to the effect of the larger movement. The absence of mirrors in ENA classrooms is such a shock for Guillermoprieto because gazing on one's body is the primary way she understands the embodied knowledge of dance. In other words, she is not yet thinking of how embodiment is taught, but rather only about how embodiment is learned. The mirror scene then raises important points not only about how embodied knowledge is made through fragmentation, but also how this perception is valued.Footnote ⁶

In essence, Guillermoprieto cannot shift into the teacher/choreographer position because she cannot yet bring the fragments into a whole without help. In this new role, she lacks the ability to transform her embodied knowledge into accessible pedagogy for her students. Choreographer and dancer Susan Rethorst discusses the creation of embodied knowledge as the essence of your self coming out in embodied form: “As much as you might feel out on a limb, working without a thought in your head, something has to be operating, leading you to make the decisions that result in the thing you make that is from you, of you, about you. Your choreographic mind is at work” (Rethorst Reference Rethorst2016, 13). Rethorst's descriptions of the “choreographic mind” are poetic, illustrating at the definition of embodied knowledge as the “something” intangible that comes through a bodily form. Moreover, Rethorst's words underscore how a dancer's embodied knowledge connects to her subjectivity. She associates the embodied practice of creating choreography with the self by using eight “you/r” words. This emphasis, that there is a whole “you” (dancer) from which this knowledge comes, is key. Rethorst articulates how the creative process of dance highlights the type of embodied knowledge Guillermoprieto's memoir describes—that through the movement of a part like the “limb,” the dancer is still in process of cultivating the identifiable, whole “you” (a type of reverse embodiment, in which the body and the spirit create each other). However, Rethorst's descriptions show how Guillermoprieto's sense of self is underdeveloped, and that is what causes her to struggle with her understanding of embodied knowledge.

This idea of the self, or “you,” is also implied in the commands from the spoken instruction described in the mirror scene: “‘lengthen the leg from the inner part of the thigh, not from the knee’” and “‘Look!’” The first direction supports my previous point about the fragmented body: the dance pupil is required to keep the body fragmented in order to achieve precise embodiment. The command is less about the contraction of muscle with bone, and more about the imagined movement of one muscle. The latter command imprints the three senses together much in the same way Louis Althusser describes the moment of ideological interpellation ([Reference Althusser and Brewster1971] 2001)—but by focusing attention on that dancer's body. (We could imagine the implied, “Hey you, Look!”) In the moment the dancer is hailed and raises her eyes to see her image in the mirror, her teacher's hands touch individual parts of her leg, and the imprint of the dancer as self and body come together. Or as Guillermoprieto describes, “You can almost feel a kind of gear that links gaze, body, and memory clicking into place.” The “link,” or synthesis of touch, sight, and sound, create the correct position in the body. Moreover, in this scene, embodied knowledge is not only about the synthesis of the fragmented body working as a whole, but also of the realized self as a dancer, an ability that leads to embodied knowledge.

Bodies of the New Man in Cuba

Although Guillermoprieto comes to Cuba with a fragmented sense of self, the memoir pays close attention to how this experience of embodied knowledge allows her to evaluate her Cuban students. When she enters the classroom for the first time, the students stand up and form ranks. This movement gives away how the Cuban Revolution has influenced the dancers’ embodied knowledge and it affects Guillermoprieto's impressions:

This description of the dancers compares them to ill-trained soldiers, not only from how they line up but also in how physically varied they seem to be. The passage highlights how the students’ bodies betray the military embodied knowledge they have been exposed to; yet, they seem unprepared to be either soldiers or dancers. In this moment, Guillermoprieto realizes that if her students are like soldiers, then she as teacher is their commander. They give her respect, not because they like her dance prowess, but because she is higher in command. This is a shift from the avant-garde dance environment of New York City, where she chose a dance teacher because they were inspiring and cutting edge. Here, the students have no other options, so Guillermoprieto's teaching becomes scrutinized, which makes her feel pressured to provide them with a coherent artistic vision of modern dance.

Therefore, Guillermoprieto begins with Martha Graham's floor sequence because it is a recognizable expression of embodied knowledge. She begins her first class with these codified floor exercises, which puts her and the students at ease because they find comfort in the embodied knowledge gained from years of training. Floor exercises are warm-up exercises, during which the teacher stands before the dancers and starts counting for the floor sequence: “And … one!” (Guillermoprieto Reference Guillermoprieto2004, 44). In this first class, they use the Graham technique which begins with the dancer seated on the floor, legs crossed, expanding and contracting the torso. Even though Guillermoprieto feels uncertain as the teacher, the floor exercises help her feel at home. She explains that “this repetition seemed as inevitable, comforting, and natural as breathing, and never more so than on the morning when, having crossed continents, seas, and cultural abysses to reach that dance studio” she finds as herself the teacher (Guillermoprieto Reference Guillermoprieto2004, 44). Guillermoprieto also relies on the knowledge of the Graham technique to evaluate her students’ bodies. Analyzing each student, Guillermoprieto concludes that “all of them were surprisingly weak in the torso” (45). This is a significant evaluation, as Graham technique is recognized by the abdominal contraction that creates the C-curve in the spine, followed by a release, and a spiral in the spine. Therefore, even though the class knows the technical movements of the Graham floor sequence, they cannot execute the intention of them accurately—implying they have not yet achieved embodied knowledge of these movements.

Now, it could be said that Guillermoprieto's lack of understanding about dance in Cuba does not allow her to accurately evaluate her students’ embodied knowledge. This is an understandable point of view, as the young Guillermoprieto does not in this moment consider other bodily practices from Cuba that might have influenced her students. For example, she observes that the Graham movements should have given the students more abdomen and inner thigh strength, “but once my students were on their feet, their lack of strength made them move spasmodically, as if they were mainly struggling not to fall down” (Reference Guillermoprieto2004, 46). As Graham technique is generally slower and not usually connected to a tempo, what Guillermoprieto may have been seeing was the students’ embodied knowledge of warming up with music, especially since they were trained in other dance styles that used Afro-Cuban beats. The “spasmodic” movement might just have been an attempt at rhythm.Footnote ⁷

Nonetheless, the effect of Guillermoprieto's evaluations shows that there was a disconnect between the embodied knowledge she thought she would teach and the one that had evolved over the past ten years in Cuba. There has been much scholarship discussing the revolutionary usefulness of Graham's choreography over her career. In particular, Mark Franko has written on whether Graham's strict approach to choreography and movement was relevant to revolutionary themes in the United States during the 1930s. As Franko notes, “Although Graham's technical command of movements was a model to be emulated, the vocabulary through which that command manifested itself was suspect” (Franko Reference Franko1995, 59). By this, Franko means that Graham's command of the body was remarkable, yet perhaps inhibiting for some dancers and critics who also wanted to see revolutionary ideas and emotion behind the movements. In the memoir, Guillermoprieto could be an example of how too close an adherence to Graham stifled the evaluation of modern dance in new contexts. In looking too close at technique, Guillermoprieto may have missed some emotional or political meaning in her new students’ movements. In effect, the memoir raises questions about the circulation of embodied knowledge across political borders, and the range of embodied knowledge modern dance can manifest. Despite this initial misapplication of embodied knowledge, Guillermoprieto concludes that although her students might lack technical prowess, mirrors, or proper attire, “they had dancers’ hearts” (Reference Guillermoprieto2004, 46). These endearing students will lead Guillermoprieto back to a place of familiarity after she is made to confront the embodied rhetoric of the Revolution's New Man.

Guillermoprieto's memoir merits careful attention because its emphasis of embodied knowledge critiques the 1960s rhetoric of the Cuban New Man: the idealized revolutionary, as envisioned by Ernesto “Che” Guevara during the first decade of the Revolution, who would spur on social change for the masses through physical labor and extreme sacrifice. The Revolution's emphasis on the New Man disrupts Guillermoprieto's previous understanding of embodied knowledge. While she had been taught how to use her body to communicate the transformative nature of modern dance, Guillermoprieto is unable to understand how physical labor could also uplift the masses. Thus, Guillermoprieto has a difficult time connecting the work of modern dance with issues in Cuba like food shortages, unemployment, or the embargo. This crux causes an existential crisis so great that Guillermoprieto even contemplates suicide.

The Revolution's rhetoric disrupts the method Guillermoprieto has for understanding how embodied knowledge is created, causing uncertainty about the forces that drive embodiment in and outside the classroom. For example, the lack of mirrors at the ENA is attributed to the revolutionary rejection of anything having to do with capitalist luxury. When Guillermoprieto shows shock at the absence of the mirrors, Mahler's rationale is, “¡Somos revolucionarios!” (We are revolutionaries!) (Guillermoprieto Reference Guillermoprieto2004, 51; italics in original). This reaction is based on the rhetoric of the Revolution because, as Guillermoprieto concludes, Mahler “thought mirrors were a symbol of vanity and of the decadence reflected in every tarnished looking glass in an ornate frame that survived on the walls of the old Country Club” (51).Footnote ⁸ It is in moments like this that Guillermoprieto becomes aware that her embodied knowledge may not translate to the Cuban dance environment. Even if the mirror is contested as a pedagogical tool for dance, it was the standard in her training in the United States. Guillermoprieto's shock when she learns there will be no mirrors in her studios leads to a crisis due to her dependence on the use of the mirror to create embodied knowledge of modern dance. This is a crisis because the New Man rhetoric is about the idealized spirit of the Revolution materialized in human form—the essence of revolutionary embodied knowledge.

The New Man, Guevara's concept of the ultimate revolutionary, is arguably born out of a written expression of bodily components. Guevara coined the term in a letter, later titled “Socialism and Man in Cuba” ([Reference Guevara and Deutschmann1965] 2005), wherein he addressed the fear that socialism threatened the individual—as exemplified by the artist. He argued that, in order to build a communist state, it was necessary to create “the new man and woman of the future” through a focus on education (213). Guevara's term reveals the careful, symbiotic relationship the revolutionary leaders saw between the individual and society. The goal was to establish a “society of communist human beings” (218). In this letter, Guevara explains how leaders are going to establish boundaries around how culture could—and could not—connect the New Man to the working class.Footnote ⁹ For Guevara, and many Cuban revolutionaries, work is the method by which the individual artist served the whole. He asserts that, in the engagement of work and life, “individuals start to see themselves reflected in their work and to understand their full stature as human beings through the object created, through the work accomplished” (220). In Guevara's conception of a socialist society, and in Guillermoprieto's mirror scene, there is a recognition that the whole is a combination of highly functioning parts. It is important, then, to consider how embodiment figures into the rhetoric of the New Man.Footnote ¹⁰

Guevara's letter emphasizes the synthesis of the individual and collective through metaphors of the body. According to Ana Serra, Guevara's New Man “refer[s] to the new person embodying the radical change that the Cuban regime was invested in promoting” (Serra Reference Serra2007, 1). Guevara uses Fidel Castro as the ultimate embodiment of the individual revolutionary. Castro is an example of how an “individual was a fundamental factor” in the Revolution's success (Guevara [Reference Guevara and Deutschmann1965] 2005, 212). Castro embodied the Revolution because he “interpreted the full meaning of the people's desires and aspirations” (214). However, there is only one Fidel Castro. For everyone else, emphasis is placed on “liberated labor” or work that can be traced back to physical movement: “We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity is transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force” (226). Guevara envisions the individual body producing physical work, “actual deeds” that act as a “moving force.” His metaphors that describe this work culminate in the movement of many people. For example, a metaphorical “march” toward a new society included “a solid structure of individual beings moving toward a common goal, men and women who have attained consciousness of what must be done” (227). He even describes the revolutionary cause in bodily fragments that work to become whole: “The skeleton of our complete freedom is already formed. The flesh and the clothing are lacking; we will create them” (227). It is not a far cry to suggest that dance can also, at times, be described as “a solid structure of individual beings moving toward a common goal” and as a literal “flesh[ing]” out of these visions. These excerpts show that Guevara's optimistic and lofty declarations about the concept of the New Man have bodily consequences. Cuban modern dance in the 1960s had to continually negotiate what the New Man looked like, how he moved, and how he danced.

It is no surprise that dancers at this time would have been open to this illustration of the New Man as a worker. Dance can be seen as a form of representation that seeks to fulfill Guevara's call for the “full stature as human beings through the object created” (220). For dancers, the “object created” can be the body in movement. Moreover, dance can be seen as revolutionary work because the dancer's embodied movements align well with the idea of the worker doing physical labor. Other intellectuals and artists, like writers, would often have a harder time proving that writing was in service of the Revolution—even if it produced a tangible object like a book—because the writing process does not mimic Guevara's conception of labor in the way that dance does. Dancers’ bodies and abilities are proof of physical labor, of repetitive and dedicated work. On the other hand, dance is often less about the “object created” and more about the ephemeral, performative nature of dance. Thus, there were often misunderstandings between revolutionaries and dancers in Cuba about the meaning of the work created. Guevara's letter reveals that, just a few short years after the 1959 triumph of the Revolution, a narrower understanding of work and culture was necessary. The New Man ideology established that the application of the body in work was crucial to the success of the Revolution.

In particular, ballet dancers were held up along Guevara's expectations that the New Man be hardworking but also committed to the socialist cause in body and spirit. Lester Tomé raises important points about the “centrality of physical labor” in the discourse of the New Man as applied to the ballet dancer in the 1960s as well (Tomé Reference Tomé2017, 5). Tomé contends ballet dancers provided idealized examples of the hard-working revolutionary for the working classes. He points out how Cuba is not unique in its use of ballet for communist purposes (as the Soviet Union did), but that Cuban propaganda is unique in utilizing the image of the ballet dancer as the ideal embodiment for the proletariat. For instance, Alicia Alonso, the famous Cuban ballerina, and her company made great efforts to perform for laborers and in rural settings so that a broader range of audiences could experience ballet. The idea to directly connect the workers to culture was so important that the performance stages were even lowered to the audiences’ eye level so they could see the physical exertion on the dancers’ bodies to showcase the physical labor involved in dancing. Tomé’s study illustrates that “this glimpse into balletic practice effectively allowed the audience to see dancers as fellow workers, as individuals who executed feats of strength and endurance as demanding as those in the manual occupations of agriculture and manufacturing” (Reference Tomé2017, 10). Tomé’s point is that the role of the ballet dancer in Cuban propaganda goes beyond being an example of a model worker—they embodied the spirit of the New Man. However, as Lillian Guerra has articulated in her research on gender in Cuba, women themselves were not the embodiment of this New Man, because “the state did not promote the equality of women but the centrality of women to the equality of men” (Reference Guerra2010, 277). Thus, it was less about the female ballet dancer, and more about the motivation she inspired toward New Man ideology. As Tomé stresses, “Without a question, a ballet dancer had come to symbolize the mythical revolutionary, the human engine of political and economic transformation, the New Man/Woman envisioned by the ideologues of the Revolution” (Reference Tomé2017, 19). At a time of increased maltreatment of intellectuals and artists, ballet dancers in the 1960s were idealized representations of the New Man because of their work ethic and passion for Revolutionary Cuba—but as Guillermoprieto's memoir evinces, this was not always the case for modern dancers.

In 1970, just as Guillermoprieto arrives in Cuba, revolutionary leaders were exerting more control over cultural productions because they saw it could lead to greater economic and political development. As Lillian Guerra has explained, “by the late 1960s [this rhetoric] increasingly meant one thing: surrendering one's body (and, therefore, one's will) to the state” (L. Guerra Reference Guerra2010, 275). Unfortunately, Cuban modern dancers were not always willing to surrender their bodies or visions like Alicia Alonso. The father of Cuban modern dance, Ramiro Guerra, famously had his work Décalogo canceled in April 1971, just two weeks before its premiere, even though he had state permission for over a year. After this, Guerra was removed as director of the Conjunto de Danza Contemporánea without clear cause. Although Guerra was later reinstated in good faith by officials, he never choreographed again and went on to become a prolific writer about the history and development of dance in Cuba. Under his direction, the early works of the Conjunto de Danza Contemporánea clearly articulated the presence of Afro-Cuban culture in Cuba, which was one of the early aims of the Revolution.Footnote ¹¹ Guerra created Mambí and Suite Yoruba in the first decade of the Revolution, which communicated with audiences through strong, recognizable Afro-Cuban themes and music. Yet, toward the end of the 1960s, Guerra's style of modern dance, or contemporary dance, was becoming more experimental. He has reflected on this approach: “Personally, I had always felt a great fascination for improvisation, even some of my dances were based on these principles” (R. Guerra Reference Guerra and Santiesteban2005, 26).Footnote ¹² Thus, the use of improvisation is part of what makes modern dance's relationship to the Revolution different from that of ballet.

Cuban modern dance chorographers and dancers may have had difficulty maintaining the creativity of modern dance, even when not bound by political rhetoric, due to the evolving work of blending US modern dance foundations with local Cuban movement traditions. While the early founders of Cuban modern dance, such as Lorna Burdsall, Waldeen, Elena Noriega, and Raúl Flores Canelo, in addition to Guerra, were accomplished dancers, the inexperience as a teaching staff in developing a Cuban modern dance technique showed through in the curriculum. As Susan V. Cashion's study “Educating the Dancer in Cuba” (Reference Cashion, Overby and Humphrey1989) shows, “Cuban modern dance is being taught in a highly prescribed manner (with techniques not unlike those of Martha Graham or ballet); by the time a dance student enters the seventh year of training in the Escuela Nacional, the technique class has been memorized” (176). Cashion understands that this “prescribed manner” may be the result of the “need to place a uniquely Cuban signature on the company” but from her US dance educator perspective, “the Cuban system seems rigid” (176). What Cashion's observations show is that, regardless of the political ideology or support of the government (which she sees as favorable), there was difficulty in balancing out the improvisation and invention that underlie much of modern dance philosophy with the need to pin down a specific Cuban form. As Dancing with Cuba demonstrates, Guillermoprieto is hampered by the call of New Man ideology, the need for a specific Cuban form of modern dance, and her limited ability to teach the dance she loved. Therefore, Guillermoprieto is distinctly underprepared to apply her embodied knowledge of modern dance to Cuban modern dance in 1970.

When the Words Start to Move

Although Guillermoprieto may resist the rhetoric of the New Man and Mahler's revolutionary extortions, she is intrigued by the passion and commitment her Cuban friends show to the Revolution. She begins to see Castro and Guevara more like saints than revolutionary heroes: “In any case, I read the lives of Fidel and Che as if that was what they were [saints]; I wanted intensely to believe in the beatitude. The revolutionary faith to which the two of them were referring was the faith I wanted to inhabit…” (Reference Guillermoprieto2004, 120). Yet she struggles to “inhabit” this faith, to embody this vision, because of Guevara's emphasis on extreme sacrifice: “The fact that [Che] chose precisely that death, so far removed from the beauty of human creation, kept me from wanting to be like Che” (119). Guillermoprieto's inability to fully commit to the Revolution's rhetoric surrounding the New Man is reflected in her inability to teach modern dance easily, as she cannot reconcile the aim of dance and politics in this new, socialist utopia. In this section I aim to demonstrate that Guillermoprieto learns to teach embodied knowledge, not by adhering to the call of the New Man, but rather through embracing the idea of the kinesthetic imagination—the activation of embodied knowledge through language. However, it will take severe depression and a suicide attempt to bring awareness back to her body and the knowledge it carries.

At first, Guillermoprieto relies on her New York influences to teach. In addition to using Graham technique for warm-ups, she had been given choreography by Sandra Neels, a dance teacher and friend from Cunningham's company. This gift was a set of notecards that included descriptions of original movement sequences, and Guillermoprieto tries to incorporate Neel's choreography into her classes. Guillermoprieto recounts that one card read,

Even though Guillermoprieto knows the basic dance concepts—plié, relevé, coupé— without the aid of a mirror and teacher, the memoir emphasizes that it is difficult for her to transfer this embodied knowledge to her body, let alone her students’ bodies, through words alone. Nonetheless, she has faith in her friend's instructions: “It was strange, dry, sterile work, but I was confident that if I read them enough times, the words would start to move” (92). The fact that this choreography strikes her as “strange, dry, sterile work” shows us that language is not enough yet. She trusts the words, and reads and rereads the instructions, but the language does not inspire her to imagine embodied movement. Words alone do not activate the kinesthetic imagination. Rather, the kinesthetic imagination requires a consciousness, or awareness, about the reason of embodiment to inspire the body in performance.

Guillermoprieto's New York City training taught her that modern dance performance, with its emphasis on experimentation and nontraditional dance spaces, was valuable in and of itself. However, while the dance environment in Cuba would also encourage untraditional and creative uses of dance, it was always in service of the utopian vision as overseen by the revolutionary government. This causes a crisis for Guillermoprieto, and she begins to question the “cultural abyss” between modern dance philosophy and the Cuban Revolution: “How to explain to a teenager raised in the Cuban Revolution that the most important word in Merce's vocabulary was still?” (Reference Guillermoprieto2004, 94; italics in original). Cunningham's emphasis on stillness values “the quiet that things and beings achieve when they have no consciousness of themselves,” but “in Cuba a human being without aim or intention was inconceivable” (Guillermoprieto Reference Guillermoprieto2004, 94). Instead, consciousness “was Fidel's key word—self-consciousness, class consciousness, revolutionary consciousness” (94). Guillermoprieto tries to learn about these forms of consciousness in an attempt to cross this cultural abyss but finds herself contemplating a new type of stillness.

At the cinema one day, she sees a news broadcast about the Vietnam War, from a Vietnamese perspective, which shows people being burned alive by napalm. Afterward, she is “incurably altered by the consciousness of living in an obscene world” (Reference Guillermoprieto2004, 103–104). This consciousness is not empowering or righteous as Castro insisted. Instead, the realization of evil in the world causes Guillermoprieto to have a breakdown during which she “simply lost the logic of things and their pleasure” (104). Even dance provides no relief. In trying to teach Neel's cards one day, she ends class early filled with anxiety: “What kind of dance was needed in Cuba? … If Cuba was so resolutely Cuban, what was I doing here with my abstract dances and aleatory ‘events’?” (104). The breakdown causes the words to become even more meaningless, and Guillermoprieto spends the end of her day laying “on the floor for some time, counting bricks, until the heavy silence that was pressing me against the floor lifted a little and allowed me to go back to the dormitory” (Guillermoprieto Reference Guillermoprieto2004, 105). Guillermoprieto becomes ashamed: what she considered a revolution in the form of art and dance did not ultimately answer for the atrocities the Cuban Revolution, and indeed many other revolutions in the world, were trying to atone for. Guillermoprieto's main reason for living, the embodied knowledge of modern dance, does not make sense anymore, and she considers the ultimate expression of stillness—death.

Guillermoprieto's rejection of Castro's sense of consciousness and the embodiment of the New Man results in thoughts of suicide. Her inability to reconcile how modern dance eases the ills of the world prompts Guillermoprieto to feel hopeless: “I don't like living here, and at the same time it's clear to me that the Revolution is absolutely necessary to the better future of humanity. But then what do I do with my own opinion?” (209). She abandons Neel's cards and imagines audiences finding her dead body at the center of the Escuelas Nacionales de Arte campus. Because she “no longer knew how to move,” Guillermoprieto begins to map out all the ways she could kill herself (215). This preoccupation with death is exacerbated by revolutionary propaganda like the newspaper Granma, which constantly praised revolutionaries in Latin America and around the world for dying for the socialist cause. One day, Guillermoprieto goes out onto the balcony of the hotel she is staying in, swings her leg over the rail, and imagines her mother's reaction to her death. She envisions “the horrible blotch of blood, hair, and guts that I was about to leave eleven floors below” (230). Understanding that suicide would only add more pain and destruction into the world, Guillermoprieto concludes: “I remembered that I was still alive and that in order to stop being alive I would have to kill a living human being who was myself” (230). In this moment, Guillermoprieto contemplates the ultimate expression of stillness, but this is not stillness as Cunningham envisioned. His principle emphasized stillness in service of life, in realizing the awesomeness of feeling alive, and she understands that suicide is the opposite of what her body wants to do. She wants to live a life that adds to the beauty of the world, and she wants to do it through what she knows: the embodied knowledge of modern dance.

Guillermoprieto's existential crisis parallels an existential crisis within the school: the youngest student dormitories at the ENA are found caked in excrement and obscene drawings. This behavior signals more than a lack of direction in the school; it signals a failure of the education of these dancers to serve the Revolution. The official in charge of the school, Mario Hidalgo, calls a school assembly to address the situation. While the administrators pander their support of the Revolution, the dance students voice their concerns over lack of food, classes, and viable employment after graduation. Incensed, Hidalgo snaps at the students’ complaints, “The Revolution rescued you from being a dockworker like the rest of your family, gave you a home, food, education, and career—maybe not the most honorable career, but it's the one you chose—and even after all that you still feel you have the right to complain?” (quoted in Guillermoprieto Reference Guillermoprieto2004, 235). His reaction highlights the disconnect between what the Revolution assumed the people wanted and what they actually needed, in addition to betraying the distaste many revolutionaries had for dance itself. Hidalgo goes on to accuse one of Guillermoprieto's students of being a homosexual and gusano (traitor) for wanting more than the Revolution has provided. The student runs out of the meeting distraught. Guillermoprieto identifies this moment as the turning point in her depression because she is so enraged at the treatment of her students by the revolutionaries. She realizes that she will never be a revolutionary in the way envisioned by the Cuban officials. Instead, she focuses on her embodied knowledge of dance and her love for the students: “I would never choreograph a revolutionary dance, but I could make a dance with music, with a certain structure, symmetry, and theatricality” (Guillermoprieto Reference Guillermoprieto2004, 241). It is her embodied knowledge, and her desire to be a good teacher for her students, that will help Guillermoprieto out of this existential crisis. More importantly, in her attempt to “design movement on other bodies,” Guillermoprieto would call on another type of knowledge to help her teach embodied knowledge of dance—her knowledge of language (241).

Guillermoprieto becomes able to articulate embodied knowledge to her students by using the power of poetic language and the imagination. During one class, she finds that the students have trouble understanding pleadings, a Graham technique in which the student rises from a flat, face up position on the floor through a strong torso contraction. The goal of this technique is to raise the legs, shoulders, and head before the actual torso comes up. Guillermoprieto gives the students a number of references to think about to inspire this movement, including Bernini's Ecstasy of St. Theresa or a lover scooping one up from the ground. She even describes the move as if “a ray of sunlight were penetrating your naval, which is a seed, and pinning your torso down, while your arms and legs sprout like saplings from the earth” (Reference Guillermoprieto2004, 242). None of these specific descriptions inspire the movement so she turns to the recollection she has of a poem by the Peruvian poet César Vallejo titled “Masses” (Reference Vallejo1939). The poem describes the resurrection of a dying warrior at the urging of his compatriots. Guillermoprieto recites the poem to the students which ends with

The poem articulates the power of solidarity, of a brotherly love so powerful that it could bring the dead back to life. It is a strong statement: human love transforms the most permanent embodied state—death. The students are so touched by Vallejo's description of human death and suffering that they immediately perform the move perfectly. Guillermoprieto learns that poetic language, without the aid of mirrors, can teach embodied knowledge effectively to her Cuban students, and ultimately, for herself.