The NYBDC is hoping to stimulate interest in Cuba in historical dance by appearing in their festival, Esteban Salas Early Music Festival, teaching masterclasses and meeting with dancers, teachers and dance historians as well as musicologists. Our goal for this unique opportunity is to look at our shared history and to further understand the development of European dance in North and South America and how it was influenced by the local culture. Understanding our shared history builds community and we believe our appearance at the festival could be the first step in including Cuba in our community of international historical dance.

Our appearance at the festival would be the next step in developing our work in historical dance of the Hispanic culture in the Americas. We have established collaborations with artists in Mexico City and are currently developing workshops in Mexico and in the States focused on the Spanish legacy in colonial America. We have programs in our repertoire with French/Haitian colonial dance which includes African influences. We would like to further our artistic exploration into the Hispanic and Afro-Caribbean dances and how they interacted with the Spanish dance forms. In order to do this we truly need to meet the dancers in Cuba who are perhaps already working in this area.

Our company specializes in theatrical and social dances of Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries and we use our research to inform our theatrical ballets and concerts. We are not a traditional dance company but a company of trained professional dancers in the early ballet style. However, ballet has always drawn from traditional dance forms
to create dances of character and this explains our interest in the history of these colonial dances in Cuba. Also, we would like to know which dance notations from the Spanish settlers made their way to Cuba in the 18th century.

This engagement is supported by Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation through USArtists International in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Howard Gilman Foundation.

http://www.midatlanticarts.org/