Over the past two decades, books on the vast array of music and dance genres in the Caribbean have appeared with ever increasing frequency. The majority have focused on specific islands and the twentieth-century history of such popular genres as Cuban son, Dominican merengue, Haitian konpa, Trinidadian calypso, and Jamaican reggae. Researchers have given much less attention to earlier periods of Caribbean music/dance history, and few have attempted systematic comparative studies of the region as a whole. Creolizing Contradance in the Caribbean is thus a major addition to the existing literature. The book’s contributors explore the contradance and the related quadrille as the most prominent dance and music complex across the Caribbean during the nineteenth century and also trace their continuities and influences up to the present. In addition to serving as the book’s editor, Peter Manuel provides a very useful introduction and an extensive chapter on Cuba; he also contributes a chapter on the Dominican Republic and serves as co-author with Edgardo Díaz Díaz for the chapter on Puerto Rico. Other contributors include Dominique Cyrille on Guadeloupe, Dominica, Martinique, and St. Lucia; Michael Largey on Haiti; and Kenneth Bilby and Daniel Neely on the Anglophone Caribbean, particularly Jamaica, Montserrat, St. Vincent, and Tobago. Manuel, Largey, and Bilby collaborated before on Caribbean Currents (2006), a textbook that encapsulates recent scholarship on the region’s music.
Various researchers have discussed the contradance and quadrille in specific island contexts, and, more than twenty years ago, John Szwed and Morton Marks (1988) surveyed both African-Caribbean and African-American interpretations of the dances in a brief but perceptive article. Creolizing Contradance in the Caribbean builds on these studies to offer both brilliant analyses of individual traditions and a coherent regional synthesis. Each contributor draws on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, as well as field research, to address the historical developments of the contradance and the quadrille and their contemporary manifestations. Each effectively weaves discussion of socio-cultural contexts with clear descriptions of choreographic and musical elements. The book also includes helpful musical transcriptions and a compact disc with a variety of musical examples. While the contributors offer detailed accounts of specific island dance/music cultures, they all maintain a pan-Caribbean perspective and examine regional influences and connections. They are also careful to explain the inconsistent terminology used by early observers of these forms and deftly handle the effects of nationalist sentiments on the historiography of the region’s music and dance.
The dance complex at the center of this study originated as “country dance” in sixteenth-century England and developed as “contradance” or “contredanse” during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England, France, and other European countries. The contradance was performed by multiple couples in a circle, square, or “longways” format (in which lines of men and women faced each other), with the couples collectively executing sequences of conventional figures. During the eighteenth century, the quadrille emerged from French square-formatted dances and, by the early-nineteenth century, was commonly performed as a suite of five dance units. European colonists in turn introduced the contradance and the quadrille to the Caribbean during the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries.
Throughout the Caribbean, people of European, African, and mixed descent embraced the contradance and/or quadrille and re-created them in myriad forms, especially through the incorporation of syncopated rhythms. In Cuba the contradanza flourished as a dance and concert music with horn-dominated orquesta típica and as a salon piano form. As such, it was an attractive genre for such local composers as Manuel Saumell (1817–1870) as well as for the itinerant Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829–1869). Over the course of the nineteenth century, the contradanza evolved into the danza and then the danzón, which featured independent couple dancing rather than collectively executed figures. Parallel developments occurred in versions of the danza in both Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. In the islands of the Lesser Antilles where French Creole is spoken, people of African ancestry have continued to perform the quadrille as a symbol of local Creole culture, even though some intellectuals have condemned it as a manifestation of French subjugation. In Haiti the contredanse was common in both urban and rural settings until the mid-twentieth century and lives on today in country festivals and Vodou ceremonies. While the quadrille was popular with all social classes in the Anglophone Caribbean until the mid-nineteenth century, today it exists mainly in rural areas and serves, for example, as an expression of Maroon identity in Jamaica and of Carib Indian identity in St. Vincent. In Montserrat and Tobago, the quadrille has been performed both as a social dance and as a ritual for invoking ancestral spirits.
Discussion of these and many other varieties of the contradance and quadrille amply supports the authors’ main argument that “[c]ontradance and quadrille culture thus provided a fluid medium through which diverse music and dance elements as well as actual musicians and dancers could move and interact” (34–35). Students of the Caribbean will find much of value in this book on such topics as the dynamics of creolization, the role of expressive culture in negotiations of social status, the interaction between elite and vernacular music/dance forms, and the employment of the arts as ethnic and national symbols. Ideally, the book will inspire further comparative investigations into the music and dance traditions of the nineteenth-century Caribbean and how they have shaped the deeply interconnected popular forms of the twentieth century and today.
WORKS CITED
Manuel, Peter, with Kenneth Bilby and Michael Largey. Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae. Revised and Expanded Edition. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006.
Szwed, John F., and Morton Marks. “The Afro-American Transformation of European Set Dances and Dance Suites.” Dance Research Journal 20.1 (1988): 29–36.
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[Review length: 947 words • Review posted on April 13, 2010]