Yusimi Moya Rodriguez's 'Orisha Oshun Dance from Cuba: Oshun as La Mulata in Afro-Cuban, African Caribbean, Circum-Caribbean Sexualities and Libidinal Economies

Abstract

It is said that Oshún, Orisha (Goddess) of love, sex, intimacy, fertility, rivers, streams, dance and honey – transformed into a mulata (Brown woman) and travelled from orun (the sky) to aiye (the earth) to be with Africans who were forced into slavery in Cuba in the early 1500s. Despite contradictions in colourism, Oshún as La Mulata represented all Cubans (Black, white, mixed-race) mentioned in patakís (sacred stories) in Lukumí (Santeria), a five-hundred-year-old Afro-Cuban Yoruba religion (De La Torre, 2004: 207). I explore the erotic and sensual figure of Oshún as La Mulata in Oshún Pasanga (‘Oshún as Divine Courtesan’), one of thirty-eight avatars of Oshún through the artistic dance piece, ‘Orisha Oshún Dance from Cuba’ (2017) by Afro-Cuban dancer and choreographer, Yusimi Moya Rodriguez. Based in Vienna, Austria, Rodriguez was born in Havana, Cuba in 1987, and studied dance at the Escuela Nacional de Arte (ENA) in Havana, graduating in 2005 with the title, “Professional Dancer and Professor of
Contemporary and Folk Dance,” specializing in Afro-Cuban and folkloric dance. I theorize Rodriguez’s artistic dance as Oshún-as-performance through patakís and sacred dance traditions to discover Oshún’s mysteries and manifestation in the figure of La Mulata in nineteenth-century masquerade balls in African Caribbean and circum-Caribbean performances. I argue that Oshún appears as Oshún Pasanga (Oshún as “Divine Courtesan”) as erotic power countering nineteenth-century colonial representations of La Mulata in libidinal economies and in the matrix of race, gender, and sexual identities.