The Maypole Dance in Santiago de Cuba: Black History Month in Dance, 2021

109; 110; 111; 112; 113; 114; 115; 116. Welcome back to Black History Month in Dance. The best motto in dance history is one that the critic Dale Harris would always expound: “We Know Nothing.” Here’s one example of how this applies to the connections between dance history and black dance practice.

The history of the maypole dance is usually told as if it were entirely a European tradition. (Don’t tell the vile Boris Johnson or the viler Nigel Farage, but the adjective “European” does include British.) The very idea seems polite, orderly, quaint, bland, and frightfully white. Although maypole dances seem to belong in the open air, there have been a number in ballet: Marius Petipa choreographed one in Act One of the 1895 “Swan Lake”, as have a few subsequent choreographers in later “Swan Lake” stagings. For thirty-six years (1975-2011), I was one of the many who assumed that no maypole dance could be more marvellously harmonious than the enchantingly innocent - and enchantingly intricate - one made by Frederick Ashton in “La Fille mal gardée” (1960), in which dancers move in opposite directions around the maypole, weaving a tightly intermeshed pattern before, without a break in the rhythm, unwinding it.

Wrong again. Every spring, the Brooklyn Academy of Music presents Dance Africa, a weekend-long festival of various forms of traditional dance deriving from Africa and the African diaspora. In 2011 (see photo 109, taken for the “New York Times” by my old colleague Andrea Mohin), the BAM Dance Africa included a maypole dance from Ballet Folklórico Cutumba (based in Santiago de Cuba) that had not two groups of dancers moving in opposite directions but three. The third wound its way, with amazing speed and complexity, around the skeins developed by the other two. Such knots rapidly grew before our eyes that they seemed inextricable - but no: rapidly, rivetingly, excitingly, they unwound. By comparison maypole dance in my beloved Frederick Ashton’s “Fille” suddenly looked much simpler, blander, though also sweeter.

Maybe various African and/or Afro-Caribbean countries developed their maypole dances from European sources. (See photos 110-116.)The maypole dance is the national dance of St Vincent in the Caribbean, to which it was reputedly introduced by slaves; maypole dances have been practiced in India, North Africa, and elsewhere. It’s very possible that the oldest evidence for the maypole dance suggests that it began in mediaeval Germany. In truth, however, nobody knows much about the origins of the maypole dance - and nobody knows much of how the maypole dance spread around the world.

My point is simply that, in Cuba and maybe in other Afro-Caribbean and African cultures, the maypole dance evolved to a peak of sophisticated complexity way beyond any known in European ballet. The 2011 review of Dance Africa was written by my colleague (also friend and successor) Gia Kourlas, whose words confirm my memories: “nothing was as magnificent as when the performers gracefully wove pieces of fabric around a maypole and then unraveled them. Darting, ducking and leaping, they seemed to be flying — an extraordinary physical feat and choreographed to perfection.” Even round something as idyllic as a maypole, many dance histories may be found.

Friday 19 February

Ballet Folklórico Cutumba (from Santiago de Cuba), Brooklyn Academy of Music, 2011, photograph by Andrea Mohin: the Maypole dance.