This dissertation combines critical ethnography, critical performance and historical analysis to examine three Trinidadian dance companies - Malick Folk Performing Company, Shiv Shakti Dance Company, and Noble Douglas Dance Company Inc. - asking how each choreographs Trinidadian discourses of race/ethnicity, class and national belonging through its own uniquely crafted embodied cultural script. Trinidad's "gayelle" of cultural politics figures as a complex matrix wherein performance practices are negotiated to determine what artists and art forms represent the local-national and are thus entitled to state resources, public recognition, and the legitimate right to be called Trinidadian, West Indian, and/or Caribbean. This study stresses cultural workers' labor as moving towards cultural transformation and decolonization via "cultural wellness" and "critical cultural citizenship." Cultural performances take on multiple lives contingent upon how and where they are used, for whose benefit these performances are enacted, and what particular ideologies these performances uphold/resist/exclude; in this vein, movement practice becomes culturally disciplined and culturally contested performance. In the era of a postcolonial Caribbean, nation-building discourses of progress, liberation, decolonization and autonomy are linked to tensions between cultural forms designated local and/or folk and those forms which are framed as not local, foreign, representatives of global Western hegemony that fight for public space and perhaps steal resources from that which is deemed "authentically" local. In the case of Trinidadian dance production, distinctions between alliances to the local and the global are increasingly ambivalent. This study argues for a nuanced negotiation of each dance company's relationship to what might be termed as "local," "beyond local," and "reformed local" cultural practices. Each organization illustrates the ongoing struggle to define cultural nationalism as a project considering simultaneously the necessity of tradition and preservation, but also the inevitability of cultural change, exchange and encounters with forms outside the local-national.

Last modified

• 08/29/2018

Creator

• Meida Teresa McNeal

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2BQ64

Subject

• Performance Studies

Keyword

• Cultural Nationalism
• Critical ethnography
• Creolization
• Postcolonial Caribbean
• Cultural Development
• Dance Studies
• Performance Studies

Date created

• 2007-12-06

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright