BABALU
As a child, I loved to dance in our living room to the record collection that my parents used for the soundtrack of their films. One day my ballet teacher came for a visit and liked my improvisations to the Cuckoo's Waltz so much that she asked me to perform my self-composed solo at the year-end's show of her dance students at the Roxy Theater. I was only seven, and too shy to be alone on stage, and so she asked some other girls to act as flowers, so that the little butterfly would overcome her stage fright.
The end-of-the-year student performance was a big event, the culmination of the year’s classes, and for months we were busy practicing the steps of our dance and go to the seamstress to have our costumes made. It was our teacher who choreographed all the dances to music by Chopin, Tchaikovsky, and other composers, some of whom I knew from my parents’ records and others that I got to know from the performances.
Each class, divided by age group, would get their own dance, and the performance would start with the younger children, ending with the older girls - who were already in the final grades of high school. Boys, with very few exceptions, did not dance.
Often, I would get a small solo as part of the group dance that I was in, but only the older girls could star as a prima ballerina – and I admired them so. I was good, my teacher said, I could do a string of pirouettes across the entire studio floor, I could lift my legs in the highest arabesques in my ballet class. But I quit ballet when I was about fifteen, too soon to get another chance at being alone on stage.
I don’t remember why I quit. Perhaps my teacher left the island, or schoolwork became more demanding. Or did I lose interest?
It was my parents’ film "Babalú", in which two sisters dance to the rhythms of the Cuban song of the same name, that really fascinated me. The two sisters had asked my parents to make a film of the dance they performed at the Roxy Theater - a dance of liberation from slavery. Papi made a film with actors who acted out the story and he filmed the two sisters – at first as enslaved women - in the hòfi of the Santa Barbara plantation, dancing to the live music from a combo with three or four drummers and a singer. I remember that it was difficult to record the music synchronized with the film of the dance, so the dancers danced to the live music of the tambú drums, but a recording was later used in the film.
In the beginning, the two dancers do a very slow, painful dance, lamenting their lives in slavery. Sunk In deep sadness, they lie down in the shade of the coconut trees, when the enraged slaveowner runs up to them, after he received a newspaper with the declaration of the emancipation: "You are free. Go, go away! Didn’t you hear me, you are free!"
The sisters look at each other in total amazement. They can’t believe it, but the plantation owner insists, and he walks away brusquely, leaving them alone under the coconut trees. Then, they let out a cry of joy and you begin to hear the drums in the background. At first, they dance slowly, and then faster and faster, until their dance turns wild, as they feel the drumbeat deep in the center of their body.
The movie ends with the two women, now exhausted from the wild dancing, rising from the ground, slowly straightening themselves as they reach up high, while the camera follows their movement up the tall trunks of the palm trees, towards birds flying in the sky. The voice of the narrator explains that the former slaves dance to thank their god Babalú for their freedom.
I loved "Babalú". This was so different from the classical ballet I studied that suddenly seemed so cold, and stiff. I would ask to see the movie over and over again. It was the dance that I wanted to see. It was wild. It was so full of feeling.
I wondered, if the wild dance in Papi’s movie Babalú, was really all that different from the tambú that the grownups whispered about, that forbidden dance that had been banned by law? After all, both were danced to the rhythms of the drums, the tambú. Nobody wanted to tell me about the tambú dance. I wanted to know what could be so threatening about it, that it had to be banned. I wanted to know who still danced it, even though it was against the law. The grownups said that people would get drunk and go into a frenzy and lose themselves. That they became violent. That was why the tambú dance had been forbidden, they said. But, I thought, the women dancing to the tambú drums in "Babalú" were beauti¬ful. There was nothing violent in their dance. All they asked for was to be free. Even the voice of the narrator said it was a dance of freedom.
Even as a child, I knew I could dance like that. I was a dancer. And nobody knew that. They thought I was a quiet and studious girl who was always reading books. The star pupil, well behaved, never making any trouble. A quiet girl, who did not say much. If only they knew! “Still waters run deep” they loved to say about me – but did they really know how deep?
I have long since left ballet and other forms of dance I studied over the years, but I have remained a natural dancer. The Caribbean rhythms of my island never left my bones.
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photograph by my grandfather, Benjamin Gomes Casseres, taken in a Curacao hofi, in the nineteen forties.
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I created a fb page of Old Photograph Stories, where I collect all the stories and photos I have posted here, stories inspired by the many old photographs taken by the photographers in my family on the Dutch Caribbean island of Curacao.
You can open this link to see it, and read all the stories.
https://www.facebook.com/Old-Photograph-Stories-100716812738809/?ref=pages_you_manage