Staging Ochún: To Demand Compensation with a Smile

• In Event: Sacred Africana, Aquatic: Exploring Abundance and Scarcity Through Ritual in Burkina Faso, Cuba, and Haiti

Description for Program

This paper ethnographically engages the politics and poetics of the bodily techniques associated with Ochún, the riverine Lucumí divinity associated with feminine beauty and abundance, in Black Cuban women’s efforts to demand compensation for their embodied labor during the period of private market expansion. This post-Fidel era of economic reform came attendant with major cuts to government subsidies upon which Black Cubans have relied with marked gendered effects. In this paper, a staged drumming in Havana, Cuba serves as a generative site for thinking with what I call “Black feminist choreographic aptitudes.” This conceptualization seeks to challenge how Black Cuban women’s contributions to a diasporic Black feminist genealogy are too easily overlooked given their embodiment of a dance repertoire cast as “traditional” or “folkloric.” Instead, I look for how folkloric dancers enact a Black feminist praxis by re-creating spaces for collective praise, pleasure, and persuasion during conditions of acute material scarcity. My analysis illuminates how “the river” is summoned choreographically in search of a repertoire to body forth a kind of accountability with the power to make ends meet.

Author

• Maya Berry