This is an exciting moment for U.S.–Cuban dance relations and, as it turns out, for Cuban dance history as well. While official U.S.–Cuban relations remain mired in Cold War–era politics, dance artists and supportive nongovernmental institutions blaze trails between the nations, leaving eloquent dance creations in their wake. Although dance exchanges have gone on for decades, they are increasing in number and intensity with events like the 2011 ¡Sí Cuba! Festival, the ongoing “The Windows Project” spearheaded by Cuban-born choreographer Pedro Ruiz, and the 2013 announcement that choreographer Ronald K. Brown and his Evidence, A Dance Company will collaborate with Cuban dancers, culminating in a performance at the Joyce Theater in 2014.Footnote ¹ Concurrently, over the past decade, excellent dissertations, books, and articles have expanded our knowledge of ballet, folkloric, social, and ritual dance in Cuba. Adding to this growing literature is Contemporary Dance in Cuba: Técnica Cubana as Revolutionary Movement by Suki John, the first published monograph in English devoted to analyzing the history and significance of técnica cubana (Cuban technique), Cuba's modern or contemporary dance.Footnote ²

The author aims to bring Cuban contemporary dance “into the international spotlight it deserves,” noting that the genre has suffered from relative obscurity (8). Decades of strained U.S.–Cuban relations have kept Cuba relatively isolated from dance centers and audiences. Ballet has dominated theater dance forms in Cuba largely as a result of the talent, initiative, and politics of Cuban prima ballerina assoluta Alicia Alonso, her former husband Fernando Alonso, and her former brother-in-law Alberto Alonso. Some authors suggest that the Castro government has favored ballet at the expense of other genres, or as John more moderately puts it, ballet has “both helped and hindered Cuban contemporary dance” (95; Burdsall Reference Burdsall2001; Guillermoprieto Reference Guillermoprieto and Allen2004). Today, Cuban ballet dancers perform with the world's top ballet companies, and a considerable English-language literature has developed that deals with the history and aesthetic of Cuban ballet (Roca Reference Roca2010; Terry Reference Terry1981; Tomé Reference Tomé2011). Additionally, folkloric dance companies have received attention from anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, and historians who are interested in analyzing how theatrical renditions of Afro-Cuban music and dance have reflected and affected conceptions of race in post-1959 Cuba (Daniel Reference Daniel1995; Hagedorn Reference Hagedorn2001; Viddal Reference Viddal2012). Although memoirs, chapters, and dissertations have dealt with Cuban contemporary dance, no book-length study in English has focused on the topic (Brill Reference Brill2007; Burdsall Reference Burdsall2001; Guillermoprieto Reference Guillermoprieto and Allen2004; John Reference John2007; Mousouris Reference Mousouris and Sloat2002).

With a mixture of anecdotes, historical context, and movement analysis, Contemporary Dance in Cuba lies somewhere within and between the genres of memoir, academic scholarship, and dance journalism. It is, as the author describes, a “creolized book” (6). John touches on milestones in Cuban contemporary dance history: its official beginning in 1959, an instance of government censorship in 1971, and the outpouring of creativity in the 1980s and 1990s. In addition to recounting this history, John details her extensive travel and work experiences in Cuba from 1973 through the 2000s, adding to and complicating the picture provided by previous contemporary dancers’ memoirs (Burdsall Reference Burdsall2001; Guillermoprieto Reference Guillermoprieto and Allen2004). John focuses particularly on the Cuban choreographer Narciso Medina and his company during the Special Period, the era of economic crisis and social change that began when the Soviet Union fell. John worked with Medina's company on several occasions, and her participant/observer account contributes to the growing literature on artistic production in Cuba during the 1990s and early 2000s (Daniel Reference Daniel1995; Fernandes Reference Fernandes2006; Frederick Reference Frederik2012; Hagedorn Reference Hagedorn2001). John also uses the text as a platform to debunk myths about Cuban dance. In chapter 6, John challenges the popular misconception that Cuban ballet is just a Soviet import—an idea voiced by numerous observers, including The New York Times critic Gia Kourlas (76, 90, 201, note 2). In chapter 7, John takes on The New York Times critics Roslyn Sulcas and Claudia La Rocco for their mixed reviews of the Cuban contemporary dance company, Danza Contemporánea de Cuba, during their 2011 Joyce performance (96–9). In these “Letter to the Editor” style rejoinders, Contemporary Dance in Cuba enters the realm of dance journalism. Also reminiscent of this style are numerous passages that suspend narrative to provide detailed descriptions of choreographic sequences on stage, film, and in the studio (53–4, 101–4, 141–4, 159–62). Through employing various writing styles, John continually provides readers with glimpses into the everyday lives of dancers and lauds their artistic creativity and resilience.

Leaving chronology aside, John jumps back and forth between topics and eras at a dizzying speed, covering a lot of ground in little space with the help of division and subdivision. Though less than two hundred pages, the monograph has what amounts to nineteen chapters (a foreword by Elizabeth Zimmer, a Preface, an Introduction, a Prologue, fourteen content chapters, and an Epilogue) with multiple subsections within chapters that are sometimes just a few paragraphs long. Enriching the text are over fifty photographs, which may or may not relate to the discussion immediately surrounding the image. For readers with a casual interest or new to the topic, this is a succinct compilation that touches on the panorama of dance and politics in Cuba, while providing rich insight thanks to the entertaining anecdotes and pictures. For readers hoping for a linear organization, the impressionistic text may be frustrating.Footnote ³ Nevertheless, the enjoyable and informative study demonstrates how foregrounding the history and aesthetic of contemporary dance not only fills a gap in the literature, but also provides important insight into post-1959 Cuban politics, society, and history.

For instance, John effectively utilizes movement as an entrée into discussions about national identity, race, and class in Cuba. In the first, second, fifth, sixth, and tenth chapters, John details Cuba's diverse dance influences, which include African-descended sacred and secular dances, Spanish zapateo, French-Haitian contredanse, and ballet, among others. In Chapter 4, she demonstrates how this history shaped técnica cubana. Founding father of Cuban contemporary dance, Ramiro Guerra, collaborated with an original company of “12 white and 12 black dancers,” with movement backgrounds from ballet to cabaret, to develop a uniquely Cuban technique that reflected the island's ethnic and cultural diversity (51). This became the técnica cubana, “a highly evolved hybrid of ballet, North American modern dance, Afro-Cuban tradition, flamenco and Cuban nightclub cabaret” (8–9). Cuban contemporary dance celebrated a multicultural national identity as well as an egalitarian vision of race relations, which resonated with official policies such as the 1959–1962 campaign to eradicate racism and foreign policy initiatives in Africa (De la Fuente Reference De la Fuente2001; Gleijeses Reference Gleijeses2002). Using anecdotes, John demonstrates how this inspired ideal of race and nation had greater success as a dance aesthetic than as a socio-economic reality. She confirms what other scholars have concluded—that although revolutionary policies have provided opportunities and upward mobility for some Afro-Cubans, racial inequalities and social divides have persisted and deepened in recent decades (131–6, 179–81; Sawyer Reference Sawyer2006). Even as John presents this ambiguous reality, she tells the stories not of defeated victims, but of intrepid creators who adapt, invent, and at times even relocate to further their artistic development. As John interweaves experiences in the studio, on stage, and on the streets, she reaffirms her contention that dance can provide an invaluable lens for analyzing Cuban experience.

In addition to raising recent sociological and political issues, the text provides useful starting points for future research on the history of dance creation and censorship in post-1959 Cuba. John points out that dance is often omitted in analysis of the arts, state, and society in revolutionary Cuba (47–9). In Chapter 8, she addresses this omission by discussing “dance as provocateur,” that is, as a vehicle for political and social commentary that may provoke official sanction (117). By inserting dance into the discussion, John makes an important contribution to the scholarship on Cuba's creative environment. In the 1980s and 1990s, scholars of Cuba described 1959–1961 as a period of experimentation, 1961–1968 as a period of relative tolerance, 1968–1976 (especially 1971–1975, quinquenio gris, the “gray five years”) as a period of repression, and 1976–1989 as a period of greater openness (Dopico Black Reference Dopico Black1989). However, as John suggests, and other scholars of Cuba writing in the 2000s more explicitly argue, this periodization applies best to the writer's experience in Cuba, and much less is known about the oscillating conditions of freedom and repression experienced by other artists (113–8; Miller Reference Miller2008). Indeed, analyzing dance in relation to other art forms including music, film, literature, and theater may upset previous assumptions about creation and censorship in post-1959 Cuba. For instance, in her dissertation on Cuban dance, Deirdre Brill argues that the 1970s was not a cultural black hole but an era that witnessed important intellectual developments and artistic production, especially at the amateur level (2007). Dance may be revealing not only in terms of creation, but also in terms of censorship. John provides a fascinating glimpse into the complicated inner workings of dance politics in the 1980s, a period often described superficially as more open than the 1970s. According to one dancer, in the 1980s, companies needed Alicia Alonso's approval to go on-stage, as she had become the “‘unofficial head of the Ministry of Culture’” (106). This comment demonstrates not only that the 1980s, like the 1970s, merit re-evaluation in terms of creation and censorship, but also that dance leaders such as Alonso may have exercised considerable bureaucratic control over the dance world, serving as mediators between the state and civil society's dance practices. Though the mechanics of dance cultural policy in Cuba need further research, a dance lens undoubtedly complicates existing chronologies and reveals them to be analysts’ tools rather than reflections of reality.

The text also touches on the issue of homosexuality and dance in Cuba, opening the conversation for further work on the topic. John contrasts pre-1959 homophobia with present day respect for male dancers in Cuba (91, 94). John mentions that the current situation differs markedly from earlier decades, but does not go into how persecution of homosexuals in the 1960s and 1970s affected the dance world (8). Some scholarly studies have shed light on homophobic repression and how it fit into a larger project of internal policing and surveillance, especially in the late 1960s (Guerra Reference Guerra2012; Lumsden Reference Lumsden1996). While these works do not address dancers in particular, some studies on Cuban dance make provocative claims about how the dance world dealt with homosexuality and homophobia. One critical observer claimed that Castro initially supported contemporary dance because he considered it less effeminate than ballet, and that ballet director Alicia Alonso tried to preemptively solve the “problem” by recruiting male dancers from the countryside and orphanages, where they were believed to be “uncontaminated by the virus of homosexuality” (Guillermoprieto Reference Guillermoprieto and Allen2004, 271). Others have asserted that although Alonso tried to protect her homosexual dancers from persecution, the environment of fear and prejudice led to defections, including ten male ballet dancers in Paris in 1966 (Roca Reference Roca2010). Given the status that male dancers enjoy in the 2000s, questions remain about the ways in which dance artists navigated sexual politics on and off stage in the decades leading up to the present.

Not unlike contemporary dance itself, Contemporary Dance in Cuba is a “hearty, subversive hybrid” (152) that challenges academic conventions as it furthers understandings of Cuban dance and the global history of contemporary dance. While providing an insider's look into Cuban movement, John demonstrates that understanding the history of twentieth century theatrical dance demands looking beyond the U.S. and Europe. With dance acting as “the ping-pong of Cuban–American relations” (11, 191) (opening communication like table tennis did with China during the Nixon administration), scholars can continue John's work and grapple with the marvelous and the complex in Cuba's revolutionary dance history.