Barbados is a country formed out of colonialism and global migration of the enslaved Africans, indentured servants from South East Asia and China, and Europeans to the Caribbean. By the 17th century it emerged as a prime location for extracting and trading resources, home-grown slave labour, and was considered one of the wealthiest colonies by European standards. Its “first natives” Amerindian migrants were decimated by welfare and disease, and its later inhabitants, African slaves, European colonists, and indentured labor came to constitute a new, creolized culture that reflected their diverse origins and the brutality of tropical plantation life. Barbados’s legacy is formed in part by the Caribbean’s creation of the sugar plantations and factories which stood as incipient forms of industrialization before Europe experienced the modern industrial age. Barbados’s relative adjustment to late 20th century trans-nationalization allows it to profile as the one of the world’s top developing nations.
People have danced in various settings across class and racial divides for all occasions and continue to do so. People in the Caribbean are presumed to have danced for centuries. Caribbean dance refers to dance that is given particular characteristics which directly reflect the experiences of slavery and colonialism unique to this region. However dance in the Caribbean extends beyond any one genre of dance. Many dance forms are experiences and created in the Caribbean. Barbados is no exception.
Barbados is relatively small in size at 166 square miles. It’s the third densely populated country in the world with 260 000 inhabitants. In 1966 it gained independence from the United Kingdom and of mono-culture sugar for three hundred years. One of the most politically stable, it is characterized by a quiet conservatism and governed by a parliamentary democracy. Coined “little England”, some inhabitants take pride in things English. However this has its challenges for since 1968, Barbadians are described as “cautious and complacent, conservative slow moving puritan in spirit, culturally backward, unshakably stratified by class and colour, and in need of development effort in a number of areas. Some strides have been made in the last 40 years, but Barbados has embarked on a more complex reading of its identities.
Strengths of national contemporary dance lie in the fact that in the administrative level there are persons in place who can carry the vision forward. There are after school training programs for interested students of dance in modern, ballet, jazz, Caribbean and West African dance technique, avenues for social dance, festivals and parades.
At the level of primary and secondary school there is no formal training before age 14-15. Therefore training in elements of creativity starts usually begin at a late age. There is also only two venues of dance. Other spaces need lots of funding to produce dance concerts and the government has not yet prioritized dance the way it is deserves.
Festivals, Main contexts for presentation. There have been only sporadic attempts of contemporary dance at festivals and sporadic performances take place between the institutions of the Barbados Community College (BCC) or that University of the West Indies or at the normal sites of Combermere School Hall and the Frank Collymore Hall at the Central Bank in the capital city of Bridgetown.
Dance is usually subsumed within the setting of National Independence Festival of Creative Arts (NIFCA) which happens in November each year. Community Indepen-Dance Fest, a street dance festival where participants bring lots of innovation and creativity also occurs in November/December. In July/August during our Summer Festival called Crop-Over there was one attempt at a Dance Circle which featured artists from across Barbados some utilizing contemporary dance. Groups such as Dance Strides Barbados, and Barbados Dance Theatre Company have put on signature shows in the past, but only when finances permit. The only other latest initiative is the National Cultural Foundation Choreographers’ dance Prize started in April 2008.
Dance is often used as entertainment to accompany a music act, so dance is seen at Barbados Music Awards in January, Barbados Opera Festival in March and Barbados Gospel Fest in May.
About the companies and dance movement As a small country most of the contemporary dance is limited to the few exponents of it in Barbados. Barbados Dance Theatre is the longest serving establishment for modern dance. There is now on an ebb to try to re-establish memberships. Other groups are semi-professional and conduct training programs after school As such there is no current stable companies. Dancers are usually assembled for various projects, for example for Guyana dancers were invited by the NCF to participate in that project.
There is a nominal dance association who activates around the NIFCA project or any other project which dancers are being called upon. In its initial manifestation there was a festival called African Renaissance Festival that began to promote contemporary dance and then it was discontinued.
Cultural policies for dance The National Cultural Foundation sets and implements the policy for dance in Barbados through the desk of their dance officer. Private institutions that support dance outright are sporadic. Dance is sponsored usually through association with the schools or persons involved, so that ballet schools or schools that offer courses to a wider multi-ethnic and middle class community tend to raise more money for productions than others. Community-based groups rely on subsidies from Government organizations for their visibility locally regionally and internationally.
Dance training After-school programs in ballet, modern and jazz exist, the community folk-based groups do after school programs also for women and men. Some primary and secondary schools have extra-curricular programs that children may also benefit from. At the secondary school level persons interested in formal training in dance all have to attend the relative school offering the certificate course at school leaving. Dance is being offered at the Community College and at the University without prior qualification. This makes the transition to rigorous training and learning difficult
Publications Main publications in Barbados have been sporadic, there is an ongoing newsletter form the NCF dance desk but that is at the whim of the officer. Academic writing is now taking off with a soon-to-be-published article by Susan Harewood and John Hunte in Susanna Sloat’s latest edition of Caribbean Dance. And my dissertation is to be entitled Beyond the Silence; Men, Dance and Masculinity in the Caribbean, the case of Barbados. Hopefully the story of dance in Barbados will be written and as interest is generated more publications will follow.
Text by : John Hunte, February 2009