Alma Guillermoprieto | 2004 | Pantheon Books | English
A memoir about studying modern dance at the Escuela Nacional de Arte in Havana in 1970 — one of the most insightful books ever written about Cuban body culture, and essential reading for any serious Cuban dancer.
Alma Guillermoprieto was a young American modern dance student when she was invited to teach at Cuba's National School of Arts in the first years after the Revolution. Dancing with Cuba is her account of that year: the students, the politics, the music, the way Cubans move, and what she learned about dance, culture, and herself.
It is not a technical manual. It is a book about how Cubans relate to music and movement — the visceral, immediate, unself-conscious way Cuban bodies respond to rhythm. And it is about the gap between that way of being in the body and the Western concert dance training Guillermoprieto brought with her.
For someone learning Cuban dance outside Cuba, this book answers a question that technique classes cannot: what does it feel like to be inside Cuban dance culture?
Guillermoprieto describes watching her Cuban students move and realizing that what they did naturally — the hip motion, the grounding, the rhythmic responsiveness — was something she had spent years trying to achieve through formal training. The book illuminates what "natural" Cuban movement actually is and where it comes from: the body memory of a culture where music and dance are not performances but ways of living.
For timba"> timba dancers specifically, it provides context for the Afro-Cuban movement vocabulary that underlies everything — the groundedness, the hip work, the improvisational responsiveness to musical cues.
Alma Guillermoprieto went on to become one of Latin America's most celebrated journalists (The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books). Her writing is exceptionally clear and beautiful. This book is as much a pleasure to read as it is educational.