Modes of embodiment: exercising agency through Afro-Cuban dance

Abstract

This article discusses Afro-Cuban dance and its agentive powers in the global dance business, characterized on the one hand by the public’s appetite for novelty and exoticism and on the other hand by performers’ precarity and uncertainty. Cuban dancers formulate understandings of dance-as-labor and dance-as-education, as counterpoints to the dominant frame of dance-as-entertainment functioning in the European countries where they live and work. As dancers reimagine Afro-Cuban dance in diasporic contexts, they challenge Eurocentric pedagogical models, exercising their agency vis-à-vis aesthetic shifts and codification patterns, while centring African roots of music and dance as a response to daily experiences of racism.