Moving Beyond Words: Perspectives from Suriname Maroon Music and Dance | Faculty Lecture Series 2025

2025 Faculty Lecture Series Corinna Campbell, Associate Professor of Music Moving Beyond Words: Perspectives from Suriname Maroon Music and Dance February 13, 2025 When does an interaction between a drummer and a dancer become a conversation, and what is at stake in labeling it as such? The Suriname Maroon dance genre awasa is intensely interactive, and much of performers’ expressive work could be described as having some kind of conversational aspect. Even so, the genre’s use of rhythmic cues and phrases in the drummed language apinti, and the Maroon population’s diminishing fluency in apinti, have prompted heated debates over what exactly is being communicated in awasa, and how those interactions relate to other expressive practices. In this case, the shift from drummers and dancers being in a conversation to interacting in a way that resembles a conversation can signal the loss of deeply valued cultural knowledge. I argue that the subtleties of message and meaning in awasa only fully come to light relative to a wide array of particularities in language, syntax, gesture, and word play that collectively constitute a Maroon communicative matrix. Such an approach prompts a closer examination of how choreo-musical interactions in awasa relate to speech, but also how effective communication in apinti extends well beyond the percussive rendering of words. Corinna Campbell is an ethnomusicologist and Associate Professor of music at Williams College. She holds degrees in ethnomusicology from Northwestern University (BM), Bowling Green State University (MM), and Harvard University (Ph.D). Her research focuses primarily on music and dance as practiced by Suriname Maroons (descendants of Africans who escaped slavery), addressing themes including music/dance interconnections, Surinamese cultural nationalism, culture-representational/folkloric performance, and the politics of performance. She is author of The Cultural Work: Maroon Performance in Paramaribo, Suriname (Wesleyan University Press 2020). Her research has appeared in publications including The Journal of Folklore Research, Ethnomusicology, Small Axe, and the Latin American Literary Review. The Faculty Lecture Series is organized by the faculty members of the Lecture Committee. The aim of the series is to present big ideas beyond disciplinary boundaries. The lectures are free and open to the public. Closed Captioning was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors.