African Influence on American Dance
African Influence on American Dance
African dance has contributed many characteristics to dance in America. We see evidence of this in many aspects of dance today. Being such a diverse nation, America has the blessing of combining original dances from different cultures to create an amazing dance repertoire. American dance as we know would be completely different, if it weren’t for the Africans.
African dance began with the different rhythms of the tribes. Its roots in America began with the slave trade. The American slave trade began in 1619, (However, Africans were imported as slaves to the West Indies staring almost a century before that) with the arrival of Dutch trading ships carrying a cargo of Africans to Virginia. They were first brought over by boat to places such as Brazil, Cuba, and Haiti. Eventually different countries end up taking over those nations and slaves fall under their rule. In Brazil, the Portuguese take over, in Cuba the Spanish take over, and in Haiti, the French take over. The retaining of African culture by those in slavery was stronger in the other nations than in America, as the Spanish and French rulers adhered to the more lenient view of dancing taken by the Catholic Church. In America, the Protestant church strongly disapproved of dance. Therefore, dances that occurred in the West Indies, Brazil, Haiti and Cuba retained more of the African dance structure, than those in America did. Those dances can be classified as recreational or sacred. An example of a recreational dance is the Juba, which was a competitive dance where opponents would outdo each other in feats of skill, sometimes while balancing something on their head.
Sacred dances were based on the worship of religious gods. The goal of the dance was for the dancer to become "possessed" by the god so that it would speak through the dancer. Two examples are voodoo and Shango dances. Traces of the African religious practice of possession, or disengaging from reality through the combined effects of music and dance, can be detected in the appeal of some forms of jazz dance.
In America, the dance movement of Africa was restrained mainly by two factors: the attitude of the church towards dancing as being immoral and the restricted use of the primary African instrument (the drum). Drumming was banned in 1739 following a...