#mambo jambo

mumbo: as in dating, or hallucinations?

Mambo Jambo, the Palladium Ballroom, 1952.

The capital of New York mambo in the 1950s was the Palladium Ballroom at Broadway and 53rd Street. Mura Dehn, the filmmaker, was there in 1951 and proclaimed it “the most glamorous popular dance hall in New York.” It was home to star Puerto Rican, AfroCuban, and African-American dancers, plus Italians and Jews. They felt the spirit of mambo. They strove to make it visual.

Wednesdays were dance-contest nights, filling the ballroom with concentric circles of people. There was an outermost circle of bystanders and seated persons, including celebrities like Kim Novak, Harry Belafonte, and Marlon Brando, and an inner circle, seated on the floor communally, composed of black, white, and Latino dance connoisseurs and would-be experts.

[Mambo is] more than a dance step. It’s memory. It’s a moment regained from the dance courts of Kongo. Across the villages of North Kongo you find this step, particularly during matanga (“second funerals”). According to one indigenous expert, Fu-Kiau Bunseki, the Bakongo people refer to this sequence of movements as buntika ye yalumuna makoto—“closing and opening the knees.” Doing buntika means “I’m open to dance with you if you’re willing.” Yalumuna means “Let’s move together with those in the dancing court.”

     —Robert Farris Thompson on Aperture.org

Mambo Jambo