Dancing History in the Archival Body: The Past and Present of the SWANA Diaspora Nightclub

• In Event: Artistic Praxis, Insurgent Futures, and SWANA Diasporic Archives

Abstract

In my ongoing research of SWANA dances, I have made use of frameworks that consider historical alongside ethnographic analyses, political economy considerations alongside dance aesthetics, and diasporic analysis alongside area studies. I see the histories and the present of SWANA movement practices as existing within transhistorical discourses and understandings, and within transnational and mediated circuits of dance labor and circular cultural flows. I attempt to hold the dance at home and the dance in the diaspora in the same analytic frame. That means thinking of “traditional,” “stage” and “social” dances as practices in constant transformation and stages of transition both at home and abroad. This requires thinking of dance in diaspora not only as a nostalgic practice, or a romantic and nationalistic legacy from the past, but also as a dialogic and constant embodied act of transfer and diasporic enactment, as well as a global labor market. That analysis necessitates a reading of archival and ethnographic evidence that considers simultaneously the politics of (social and professional) dance performance in the sending (SWANA) and receiving societies (US), and that we theorize diasporic dance forms as transnational practices that have broad reach and location, and exist, both, sponsored by, and in (sometimes tense) relationship with a diaspora community. This approach enables critical considerations of the useful, but also limiting impact of the continued uses of Orientalism as the primary or exclusive analytic in the study of SWANA dance forms in the United States while allowing us to go beyond understandings of these dances as being located only in the SWANA, by recognizing these forms have a global past, as well as a global present and wide sphere of influence. Focusing on the long and rich history of the US-based SWANA diasporic nightclub, in this presentation I will share examples from the early and recent archive of SWANA diasporic dance spaces in the US, starting in the early 1900s, that illuminate how performance ethnography helps me read history, how diasporic artists have negotiated concerns around diasporic identity, the preservation and evolution of dance aesthetics and labor, while also managing predominant Orientalist discourses; and how more contemporary dance spaces evidence preservation, rejection and adaptation to changing cultural, political, and migratory realities.

Author

• Meiver De la Cruz, N/A