Bomba Takes The Green

Cristina Lugo of Movimiento Cultural had the microphone on the New Haven Green. The group, seated in a semicircle Sunday on the corner of Church and Chapel, had just finished its first scorching number, and had already drawn an audience.

“What’s that called again?” someone yelled. He meant the style of music.

“Bomba,” Lugo said. Then she told everyone what it was all about.

Bomba — a style of music focused on drums, dancing, and call-and-response singing — came out of the plantations of Puerto Rico, Lugo explained. It originated at slave gatherings. ​“They would express happiness and frustrations, or sometimes plot revolutions,” Lugo said. The drums back then were barrels with goatskin stretched over them; the drums are made the same way now. They played in a semicircle to create the batey, the space in the middle. When dancers entered the batey, Lugo said, they were no longer slaves; they were the masters of the drummers, who would do their bidding, watching their movements and translating them into the rhythms they played.

“That’s why bomba is so empowering,” Lugo said. ​“That’s why we take it with us wherever we go.”

“Turn it up!” someone called from a nearby bench.

Movimiento Cultural obliged. It provided an afternoon of vital music and dancing that also offered onlookers a deep slice of Puerto Rican culture.

Before they began, one of the drummers showed a curious audience member some of the basic rhythms of bomba.

Members of the group demonstrated the crucial connection between drumming and dancing at the center of the music.

“The lyrics can be pretty intense,” said Lugo (at right in photo). She explained that the group had just finishing singing a song in which the singer, an exhausted worker, was looking for shade to rest in. But other songs gave details about insurrections. ​“Sometimes the revolution was plotted right under the master’s nose,” Lugo said.

As the crowd thickened, Lugo invited audience members to join them. ​“The batey is open. Anyone is welcome to try. We can teach you,” she said. ​“We’re not dancing for you. We’re dancing for ourselves because we want to feel empowered. Anyone can be a bomba dancer, even just for a few minutes.”

For a second no one moved.

“Don’t make me come out and get you,” one of the drummers said. The audience laughed.

A woman stepped forward. ​“I’ll try it,” she said. Another woman joined her. They were given bolts of fabric to act as flowing skirts and together they followed the dancers’ steps.

The drummers and singers were women and men, but so far all the dancers had been women. Lugo explained that men also danced bomba; in fact, women had not been allowed to participate at all. That had all changed, but as a drummer demonstrated, men still danced the style as well.

By then the group had been playing for comfortably over an hour.

“Do you want us to continue?” one of the drummers said.

“Yes!” a few shouted from the audience. ​“My train comes at 5:30,” said one. ​“You got an hour and a half.”

Movimiento tore into another number, and showed all over again how the style worked. There was a dancer in the batey executing her piquetes — her improvised dance steps. She swirled and spun in front of one of the drummers, giving her commands. His eyes were locked on her every move. He turned her movements into sound that echoed all the way down the block.