Danza

Danza is a musical genre that originated in Ponce, a city in southern Puerto Rico. It is a popular turn-of-the-twentieth-century ballroom dance genre slightly similar to the waltz. Both the danza and its cousin the contradanza are sequence dances, performed to a pattern, usually of squares, to music that was instrumental. Neither the contradanza nor the danza were sung genres; this is a contrast to, for example, the habanera, which was a sung genre. There is some dispute as to whether the danza was in any sense a different dance from the contradanza, or whether it was just a simplification of the name. Through the first part of the 19th century the dance and its music became steadily more creolized. The music and the dance is creolized because composers were consciously trying to integrate African and European ideas because many of the people themselves were creoles, that is, born in the Caribbean; accepting their islands as their true and only homeland.

Some well-known composers of danzas are Manuel Gregorio Tavárez, "The Father of Puerto Rican Danza", and Juan Morel Campos, considered by many to have raised the genre to its highest level. Others are Cuban Ignacio Cervantes, and Curaçaoan Jan Gerard Palm.

Danza (ballet)

Danza was a modern dance solo choreographed and danced by Martha Graham to music by Darius Milhaud. It premiered on March 3, 1929, at the Booth Theatre in New York City.

As with much of Graham's early choreography, little else is known about Danza. The New York Times' critic interpreted the work as "a fantasia on peasant themes, sometimes Spanish, sometimes Italian, sometimes Balkan in suggestion. Its interest lies in its impression of dance movement where there is actually only the barest skeleton of such movement."

The all-solo program included two other new pieces, Resurrection and Adolescence, and eight previously performed works: Dance, Immigrant, Valses Sentimentales, Four Insincerities, Tanagra, Two Variations from Sonatina, Fragilite and Fragments. Louis Horst accompanied Graham on piano.

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