AH Smeets - Danzón

Danzón is the official genre and dance of Cuba. It is also an active musical form in Mexico and is still beloved in Puerto Rico. The danzón evolved from the Cuban Habanera (known inside and outside of Cuba as the habanera).

Originally, the contradanza was of English origin and was most likely introduced by three different ways to Cuba in 1762 with the invasion of the British to Havana, Spanish colonists, and French colonists (who were fleeing the Haitian Revolution of 1791 to 1804).

In Cuba, these dances were influenced by African rhythmic and dance styles and so became a genuine fusion of European and African influences.

The danzón developed in 1879, and has been an important root for Cuban music up to the present day. The precursor of the danzón is the Habanera, which is a creolized Cuban dance form. The danzón was developed, according to one's point of view, either by Manuel Saumell or by Miguel Faílde in Matanzas.

The English contradanza was the predecessor of the ("habanera") also known as danza criolla, of this Creole genre Habanera born in 1879 another Cuban genre, called danzon, were sequence dances, in which all danced together a set of figures.[6] The first use of the term danzón, which dates from the 1850s, is for just such a dance. Havana's daily paper, El Triunfo, gave a description of this earlier danzón. It was a co-ordinated dance of figures performed by groups of Matanzas blacks. The dancers held the ends of colored ribbons, and carried flower-covered arches. The group twisted and entwined the ribbons to make pleasing patterns. This account can be corroborated by other references, for example, a traveler in Cuba noted in 1854 that black Cubans "do a kind of wreath dance, in which the whole company took part, amid innumerable artistic entanglements and disentanglements". This style of danzón was performed at carnival comparsas by black groups: it is described that way before the late 1870s.

The interesting thing is that Faílde's first danzóns were created for just such sequence dances. Faílde himself said "In Matanzas at this time there was a kind of square dance for twenty couples who carried arches and flowers. It was really a dance of figures (sequence dance), and its moves were adapted to the tempo of the habanera, which we took over for the danzón."