Ife-Ile Afro-Cuban Dance Festival comes to Miami next week

Later this month, rhythm and dance from the Afro-Cuban perspective will be given a platform for celebration and meaningful academic exploration at this month’s Ife-Ile Afro-Cuban Dance Festival on August 11.

The event is hosted by the Ife-Ile Dance Company, a group which has been sharing the deeply potent magic of Afrocaribbean dance with the greater Miami-area for 25 years.

A series of dance performances, instrumentation workshops and speaker-led talks populate the calendar for the weekend full of spirit and tradition. Topics cover not only dance-related themes like the role of eroticism in dance halls or bringing resistance to ballet, but they also cover issues relevant to the community-at-large, like Black maternal health disparities and the Haitian immigrant experience as it comes to child-rearing and acculturation.

The festival is heavily grounded in the Orisha tradition, a Black religious practice indigenous to Yoruba culture, which has found its way around the world due to the African diaspora and taken on different names and forms, like Lucumi. Many styles of Caribbean dance, like Salsa, began as dances to venerate the Orisha.

The scope of the festival reaches beyond the traditional Cuban styles explored by the group—Mambo, Rumba, Conga, Chancleta, Son, Salsa—expanding to include Haitian styles, Afrofusion, and Caribfunk. Drumming classes will be offered in traditional Cuban and African styles such as Batá, Tumbadores, and minor percussion, the background instruments that give Cuban music its signature polyrhythmic nature. The weekend harnesses colorful swirling costumes, throbbing drums and the power of movement to create a setting where Afro-Cuban heritage, Black spirituality and Caribbean styles of music are celebrated by all.