Maya Babij-Ross was introduced into the world of dance by her parents, “I always grew up with music in the house and my dad was always dancing and my mom was always dancing. They just sort of wrapped me into it.”
Babij-Ross, a Berkeley High School senior, practices many styles of dancing. She has taught herself the Colombian cumbia and salsa, as well as participating in BHS’s Dance Production program. Recently, those two worlds collided when she choreographed a cumbia routine for Dance Production’s concert last semester. Babij-Ross, who is half Colombian, described the experience, “I honestly feel like I've never felt more connected to my Colombian side. I felt really connected to my dad. I can just think about him in elementary school having to perform these dances.”
Babij-Ross has found that in her dance class, she has learned even more about her broader Latino culture’s forms of dancing. With this year’s Dance Production theme being “dancing around the world,” the class has brought in choreographers to teach Latin dances like Cuban salsa and Brazilian street dance.
Because of the lack of Colombian cumbia groups in the Bay Area, Babij-Ross took it upon herself to expand upon the basic knowledge of cumbia and salsa her parents had given her by using resources on the internet. Having experts in Latin dance teach her excites Babij-Ross, “I've been able to get a lot of really cool experience with people who know a lot of these dance styles and have practiced them and learned them extensively.”
Even before this, Babij-Ross was allowed to explore her culture in Dance Production when she choreographed a cumbia routine for last semester’s show, “I knew of the style of music, but I wasn't super informed on everything. I learned a lot of history about it along with different moves just because I wanted to feel educated as well as perform it well.” Cumbia, which originated in Colombia from slaves in the transatlantic trade, involves small foot movements and skirt work, because the enslaved people who created it had chained feet.
In a show that was mostly hip-hop and contemporary genres, the cumbia piece stood out and interested audiences. Moreover, Babij-Ross felt that the piece pleased the performers as well, giving a new form of representation to the many Latino dancers in the program. “In a way, even if they weren't Colombian, they did get to feel represented by a style of like a traditional style of Latin dance being represented in the show.”
For Mariana Hidalgo, a BHS junior, the prospect of being able to choreograph a piece for a BHS Dance show is exciting, but it has not yet become reality. Hidalgo moved to Berkeley last year from Lima, Peru. She was taught to dance with her dad at the age of five, and now can dance salsa, tango, criollo, and merengue, as well as taking Advanced Dance/Dance Projects at BHS. “It's really different when I dance in Berkeley High (School) because it’s a kind of music that I had never heard until I arrived here. And it's difficult to adapt myself to this new kind of style.”
Not everything in Advanced Dance is new, however. Hidalgo mentioned that the class had a guest who instructed the students in merengue, which is a style Hidalgo already dances. And, of course, Hidalgo still dances at home, with her father. “I think that’s important because it's part of me, my country, and my culture … I need to keep enjoying my music … and never forget where I am from.”
Similarly to Babij-Ross, Hidalgo also participates in a dance that originated from slaves, although this dance, called criollo, comes from Peru. “(It is) a dance that represents freedom, and in some ways that represents protest … It's really beautiful to see the movements express a kind of freedom… and how (the slaves wanted to) start life again without any kind of restrictions.”
Like criollo and cumbia, the Afro-Puerto Rican dance Bomba is also a result of enslavement by the Spanish. Ximena Montes, a junior at BHS, started Bomba dancing at the age of two. Montes described the dance as a sort of “conversation” between a dancer and a lead drummer, during which the drummer interprets the dancer’s movements.
A lot of bomba music was used by slaves to convey messages, such as plans for how to escape the plantations on which they were forced to work. Montes regards her dancing this as a form of preserving history, “There's a lot of written history documented from the Spanish point of view. And most of Taino and African history is mostly translated orally. And so if you keep these traditions alive, you kind of also keep those points of view of history alive.”
Bomba’s roots in the culture of slaves is evident in the barril de bomba, a drum used in the music genre, which originates from the sugar or rum barrels slaves had access to as percussion instruments. Montes lamented the fact that Bomba cannot preserve all of the oral history of Native Taino and African American slaves in Puerto Rico. “We don't know how they were playing Bomba 400 years ago just because it was under the radar and not documented or written and mostly just passed down inside of families.”
Montes, being Iranian Mexican, still feels a connection to the bomba. She spoke of the community she has found through the art, one which she feels she will be able to return to even after high school. She lovingly referred to lifelong friends and people she now considers to be like “aunties,” all of whom she has met through the dance form. “I'm not Puerto Rican, I still feel like I can connect to (bomba) ... It feels familiar.”
Though Montes loves bomba, she also wants to explore other forms of dancing, perhaps from the Mexican side of her culture. “I really want to do Ballet Folklorico just because it's so pretty and I have a couple of friends who do it.”
Noelia Ramirez Lizalde, a sophomore at BHS, is one of those friends. She has been dancing Ballet Folklórico since the age of four. At that age, Ramirez Lizalde wanted to be a ballerina, but her mother instead enrolled her in the Carlos Moreno Ballet Folklórico.
Ballet Folklórico is the traditional folk dancing of Mexico. It varies from region to region in Mexico, and Ramirez Lizalde group practices all of them. They do a lot of the better-known versions– such as the dances from Veracruz, Jalisco, Michoacán, and Oaxaca. She referenced recently doing the Hidalgo dance, which involves footwork with nails on the dancer’s shoes and making heel-toe rhythms to match the music. She also said that they have just begun to learn the dances from her family’s region: Durango.
Ramirez Lizalde is enrolled in the BHS African Diaspora Dance program. This form of dance is very different from Ballet Folklórico, whose fundamentals can be compared to that of the original ballet she had wanted to learn at four. “In (Afro-Haitian dance) I feel like I'm a lot more free to move my body. I'm more passionate, I can be more expressive. And for some of the dances, for what I do in Ballet Folklorico, it's a lot of stillness, it's a lot of precision.”
Nevertheless, dance in any form has always provided a safe place for Ramirez Lizalde. “I think dance has always been like the place I would go when things go bad … I practice two times per week for two hours. I can say (for) these two hours, I can stop thinking about anything else and just focus on this.”
Jamaica Rodriguez echoed a similar sentiment. “I think that it's really hard to find time to be present, especially as we get older … I feel like dance has been my one chance to kind of escape from all that and just be in the moment.”
Rodriguez, who has been dancing since the age of four, dances upwards of 20 hours a week, and is versed in many dancing forms, such as hip-hop, afrobeats, Afro-Haitian dance, Afro-Cuban dance, and ballet.
Rodriguez comes from a family of dancers. Her father used to breakdance. Her mother did Brazilian salsa, which she used to teach to her students during her time as a P.E. teacher at King Middle School. Rodriguez’s aunt was an Afro-Cuban dancer, and was the person who inspired Rodriguez to pick up that dance form at the age of 12.
Rodriguez also choreographed an Afro-Cuban duet for a dance showcase in her sophomore year. Afro-Cuban dance often honors certain deities, and this particular dance portrayed sister deities Oshun and Yemaya, deities of the river and ocean. Rodriguez found this to share this form of dance important for its preservation.
“In America, a lot of those traditional dances and just traditions in general have been kind of erased,” Rodriguez said. “It's really important to remember where you came from because I think that has a lot to do with who you are.”