Porfirio Vásquez Agusto y Elias Ascues Nicomedes Santa Cruz Victoria Santa Cruz Abelardo, Vicente, Osvaldo y Jose Santos Vasquez Ronaldo Campos Caitro Soto Mercedes Traslaviña Names of Afro-Peruvian artists and culture bear- ers who have passed. “Ritmos Negros del Perú” and these names are recited during Huellas .
Vicky Izquierdo Lucila Campos Carlos Hayre Felix Casaverde
Chocolate Argendones Amador Ballumbrosio Adelina Guadalupe Eusebio Sirio Pititi Manuela Lavalle Chalena Vasquez Pepe Vasquez Manuel Vasquez “Mangüe” Rafael Santa Cruz Aldo Borjas
El Tati Agüero Lalo Izquierdo
The work of Cunamacué is one of reimagining, remem- bering and reconstructing Afro-Peruvian dance practices. By combining Afro-Peruvian dance movements with ances- tral memory and historical information, Cunamacué brings visibility to the presence and cultural contributions of African descendants in Peru. I founded Cunamacué in 2010 in Oakland, California. Cunamacué’s latest work, Huellas (Footprints), is inspired by the ancestral dance Son de los Diablos. Son de los Diablos is a street masquerade dance that orig- inated during colonial times in the Catholic procession of Corpus Christi. Originally, Son de los Diablos was only a comparsa —a group of musicians that take part in carnivals and other festivities. Peruvians of African descent took this dance and made it their own by adding dance movements, and interacting with the audience in a playful manner; dancers wore devil masks to represent the disorder and sin the Catholic church was supposed to redeem. For Cunamacué, Son de los Diablos is synonymous with resilience. African descendants were able to turn around the duress of the slave system and give life to this dance form.
to Afro-Peruvian instruments such as the cajita (small wooden box) and quijada de burro (donkey’s jawbone). Both instruments appear alongside dancers wearing devil masks in watercolors by an Afro-Peruvian artist named Pancho Fierro who painted everyday life in Lima during colonial times. African descendants may have also hidden their dei- ties behind the masks. Although there is no written doc- umentation of this, ethnomusicologist Chalena Vasquez makes mention of it as a possibility in the documentary La voz de los sin voz . For us, wearing masks represents a connection to the ancestral world. It helps create a space to remember how we worshiped and encountered energies or deities that existed in our cosmology before we were colonized. “There is power as well as ancestral lineage that gets passed on when a mask is worn,” my colleague and fel- low Cunamacué member Nia Womack-Freeman reminds us. “So, for me, to have the opportunity to be open to receiving that is a great blessing. I feel dancing in this way creates a connection with ancestors where they can pass their wisdom and traditions to the next generation.” The Son de los Diablos is documented as far back as the 1800s in Fierro’s watercolors. But from the late
1950s until 1988 the Son de los Diablos dance disap- peared from both popular practice and stage. In Febru- ary 1988 Movimiento Negro Francisco Congo and Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani brought back the dance. A group of around 30 dancers and musicians paraded through the streets of Lima. As a stage production, Son de los Diablos’ movements, costumes, and masks were standardized. It became a tra- dition for the Son de los Diablos masks to be all red. In Pancho Fierro’s watercolors we can see masks that are two colors. Perhaps the colors represented deities, perhaps they represented nations, or neighborhoods, we don’t know. In Cunamacué’s elaboration of Son de los Diablos, we also wear masks that are two colors. One side is red, the other color varies. Wearing these two-colored masks reminds us that even though the masks are separate from us, when we put them on, they allow us to embody our ancestral spirit, energy, or deity. African religions did not survive in Peru. Because of that, in my dance creations, I often imagine a dance practice that goes hand in hand with a spiritual practice, one that was not imposed upon us. Huellas is a collective creation between myself; Afro- Peruvian dancer, musician, and actor Pierr Padilla
Vasquez; and violinist Kyla Danysh. The title of the per- formance, Huellas literally translates to “footprints,” as in ancestral footprints on which we walk along. Both the origins of Son de los Diablos and the wearing of the devil masks originated from a colonial Catholic perspective. Colonizers tried to impose a persona upon African descen- dants, but instead African descendants in Peru adopted the dance and created a cultural practice of it. Huellas is a music, dance, and theater piece that renders tribute to our individual and collective ancestors who have laid the ground for us and whose work we build upon. Huellas will premiere November 19 and 20 at St. James Episcopal Church in Oakland. Presenting Huellas inside a church is a revindication of that arduous path our ances- tors walked upon, of the imposition of the masks, and of religion itself. CARMEN ROMÁN is a dancer, choreographer, educator, filmmaker, and the founding artistic director of Cunamacué. Her article, “The Danced Spirituality of African Descendants in Peru,” was published in the African Performance Review (2013). Carmen was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship (2015) to research Afro-Peruvian dance. Her documentary Herencia de Un Pueblo , shot in El Carmen, Peru, received Best Documentary and Best Cinematography awards at the San Francisco Dance Film Festival (2016). In 2019 she was awarded the Mythili Kumar Emerging Artist Award and was commissioned by the SF Ethnic Dance Festival. Carmen teaches dance in Bay Area public schools.
SON DE LOS DIABLOS is the first-documented dance of African descendants in Peru. The dance may have given way
44
in dance FALL 2022 44
FALL 2022 in dance 45
In Dance | May 2014 | dancersgroup.org
unify strengthen amplify unify strengthen amplify
44 Gough Street, Suite 201 San Francisco, CA 94103 www.dancersgroup.org
Made with FlippingBook - Online Brochure Maker