Dancing Collaboration: Lorna Burdsall and Elfriede Mahler in Revolutionary Cuba

Abstract

Abstract: US modern dancers Lorna Burdsall and Elfriede Mahler ended up in Cuba for love and vacation respectively, but went on to become important leaders in the revolutionary dance establishment. Cultural bureaucrats tapped them for leadership positions due to their whiteness, femininity, and markers of status in the form of foreign experience. Given the ongoing Cold War tensions between their native and adopted homes, Burdsall and Mahler had to navigate the awkward contradictions of being from the United States (the enemy), collaborating with revolutionary Cubans on national dance projects, and enjoying a distinguished professional career in the process. Undeniably anomalous, Burdsall and Mahler's histories have broader explanatory power by highlighting the basic fact that solidarity is a performance. Additionally, this article contributes to understandings of US-Cuban relations during the Cold War by focusing on the awkwardness of being a Yankee in revolutionary Cuba. More specifically, dancing collaboration was awkward because of the paradoxical privileges they enjoyed, the defensive choreographies they staged to try and belong, and the ambivalent identities they cobbled together as they made a home away from home.