Embodying Cultural Identities and Creating Social Pathways through Mallorquin Dance

Abstract

The description above depicts my first encounter of participating at the ballada, a social dance event. It also illustrates the translative experience of my embodied practice through a participatory-orientated methodology of dance ethnography. Embodied reflexive practice in dance ethnography and its cultural analysis invariably situates dance movement as inseparable from the cultural contexts in which it exists, see Browning (1995), Hastrup (1995); Hastrup and Hervik (1994), Ness (1992, 2004), Sklar (1991), and Thomas (2003), who all delineate the relations between the self, culture, embodied practice and performative experience. My investigation into the practice of dance improvisation at the ballada presented a more unusual and complex reflection of identity in comparison with countries that do not have a dual cultural ethnolinguistic context, such as in this case where Catalan and Castilian are the official languages.¹ It also revealed that there is an interrelationship between the processes of revival of Mallorquin traditional dance and the influence of tourism that has contributed to the formation of Mallorcan identities.

As I surveyed the scene around me, I recognized my dance teacher Gabriel and his wife in the crowd at an extraordinary banquet. It had a surreal atmosphere, as I looked upon possibly four hundred people feasting and dancing in the moonlight: children, babies, grandmothers, and the odd person who, like me, had stumbled into what seemed like an immense family party. This was my first encounter of watching a mass participation of people dancing at a ballada. I thought then that the music appeared to invoke an automatic response in the Mallorcan community as their bodies reacted to the rhythm. I later came to realize that it is the dancers beating the pulse on the castanyoles [castanets] that creates this rhythmic response in their bodies, as well as their knowledge of the repertoire of dances. The energy expended by their movement patterns seemed to create an illusion of being carried along on a crest of a wave, turning and twisting in different directions. I wondered then if I would ever experience this natural harmonious fluid state within my body as I hurtled through the air, like a resistant force in this steady stream, crashing one way and then another as I danced amongst the crowd of people.

(Dankworth, 2002, Fieldnotes, 24 July, Mallorca)