Conference Agenda

According to Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton is “a story of America then, told by America now.” America “then” is apparent in the historical setting and libretto, while the musical past is limited primarily to a string quartet timbre and synthesized period instruments. Three songs, however, employ eighteenth-century musical styles: “Farmer Refuted,” “A Winter’s Ball,” and “Your Obedient Servant,” each set as a court dance––Minuet, Gavotte, and Waltz-Minuet respectively. While writers such as Elisa Harbert, Jeremy McCarter, and even Miranda himself have acknowledged the historical flavor of these dances, a failure to consider the eighteenth-century semiotic codes that underlie these dance topoi means that many aspects of Miranda’s character definition and social commentary are missed entirely.

Throughout Hamilton, Miranda employs the Minuet (formerly known as “the queen of all dances,” signifying elegance, decorum, and good breeding) and Gavotte (associated with courtship, and perhaps a certain coy artificiality) to underscore plot elements defined by aristocratic mores and antiquated social contracts. In “Farmer Refuted,” a minuet profiles a feminized enemy, while—via juxtaposed rap—establishing three central dichotomies that shape the narrative: the old world vs. the new, conservative vs. enlightened ideologies, and the past vs. the present. A gavotte, briefly deployed in “A Winter’s Ball,” introduces a “domestic” Hamilton, alludes to a love triangle, and highlights Angelica’s socially mandated façade. The patriots’ ironic engagement with outmoded codes of honor and justice is evoked in the waltz-minuet “Obedient Servant,” which accentuates the tragedy of political hubris to which Hamilton and Burr succumb.

Miranda’s deployment of these dance types, in the context of their original cultural implications, results in a reading that critiques social conventions––class, race, and gender politics––of the eighteenth century and present, while also underscoring the role of antiquated social ideologies in shaping our emergent national culture. The strategic placement of these historic topics within the work’s modern musical dialect allows Miranda to illuminate the temporal dissonance of the onstage encounter between past and present, an encounter that—when coupled with Miranda’s multi-racial casting and progressive libretto—offers a potent critique of Broadway historicization itself.

The starting point of my talk is an object recently discovered in an antique shop: the ladies’ gift for a Viennese company ball on the evening of March 12, 1938. The company’s founders and some of its staff were Jewish. March 12, 1938 was the day that the army of Nazi Germany invaded Austria. In the days that followed, Hitler gave his infamous speech to the masses on Vienna’s Heldenplatz, Jewish shops were demolished, and the first transports left the city for the Dachau concentration camp.

The company magazine from the first three months of 1938 provides information about the planning of the ball. The company, Caro&Jellinek, was a shipping company founded in the late Habsburg Empire. The ball, announced as a dance in traditional costume, was to take place at a hotel in the ninth district, with guests from the company’s affiliates in the post-Habsburg countries of Hungary, Yugoslavia, Italy and Czechoslovakia. A “concert and jazz orchestra” was to perform in the hotel’s main hall, and a jazz band was to welcome the audience in the salon. The ladies’ gift, which also serves as a dance booklet, reveals the music for the evening: in addition to the expected dance repertory such as Strauss’s waltzes, it contains a sequence of pieces with evocative titles: “Forget me if you can,” “I have such strange dreams,” and “Say quietly Servus when you bid farewell.”

I will examine the company ball in the larger context of the Viennese ball season of 1938: How did music and dance at these events represent Austro-fascist resistance to Hitler’s Germany on the one hand and appeasement on the other? What role did nods to Habsburg culture play? For many artists, these balls were the last major public appearance before their exile – or in their lives. Finally, I will address the question of what the evening of March 12 meant for the guests of the company ball. Was the last number on the program, a famous farewell song by Peter Kreuder, actually performed, or was the music drowned out by the noise of the new era?

Behind the film performances of Cuban rumberas (female cabaret dancers) and the grunts of mambo leader Damaso Pérez Prado (1916-1989) appeared a group of dancers known as Las Mulatas de Fuego (The Mulatas of Fire). Dressed in revealing and feathery outfits, their name indicated they were of a racially mixed background—the term mulata referring to a woman of Black, white, and sometimes indigenous heritage. Their fiery performances accompanied by fast-pace ostinato rhythms and drumming of Afro-Cuban dance in Cuba’s lavish Tropicana cabaret captivated audiences who came to see Roderico Neyra’s gripping choreographies in the 1940s and 1950s. After their popularization in Cuba, their tours across the Americas and Europe eventually led them onto the silver screen in diegetic performances belonging to Cuba, Mexico, Argentina, and Hollywood. Among the many artists who performed with Las Mulatas de Fuego were renowned salsa singer Celia Cruz, the Cuban band La Sonora Matancera, legendary Mexican American dancer Tongolele, and mambo king Damaso Pérez Prado. This paper explores the participation of the Mulatas de Fuego in the Cuban films Tam Tam o El origen de la rumba (Tam Tam or the Origin of the Rumba, 1938) and Rincón Criollo (Criolle Corner, 1950), the Mexican film Salón México (Mexican Salon, 1948), and the Argentinean film Una gitana en la Habana (A Gypsy in Havana, 1950). The group’s mediated rumba and mambo dances helped bring a globalized understanding of Afro-Cuban dance, one deeply embedded in transnational politics of race between Cuba and other nations.