CubaCaribe Dance Festival - Final Weekend

In the ripe hours after long days of toil, people throughout the Americas have relied on dance and song to shake off the dust. Culture is tenacious. Despite the unrelenting hardships of slavery, tenacious people and displaced cultures survived by recounting stories and reenacting cultural norms. Dance, rhythm and song are oral and performative traditions well suited to carrying culturally significant information over generations. Writing about Haitian dance in Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomble, Yvonne Daniel states, "...in signaling the names, musical characteristics, and movement of distinct African ethnic groups, Haitian history was encoded within the dancing body over time."

Viv Rara! is a kanaval (carnival) celebration showcasing the social organization of the Rara community including the majo jon (baton majors), pot drapo (flag bearer), colonel, wa and renn (kings and queens) and the machann (market ladies). Rara is the yearly festival in Haiti. Rara processions walk for miles through local territory attracting fans and singing new and old songs.

Bateria Bay-Lleza de San Francisco y Grupo los Locos por Samba
Both groups pride themselves on diversity of their multi-gendered, multi-cultural and multi-generational families of performers. Tonight they are honored to join forces in this collaborative project - a tribute to the strength, power, and beauty of women. In a sharp reversal of traditional gendered norms, an all-woman bateria plays for the all-male dance ensemble.