Catalog

Tania León was born and raised in Cuba but her ancestry spans Europe, Africa, and Asia as well as the Americas. In the music she has been composing for the past four decades, she has absorbed all of these influences and transformed them into a vibrant synergistic totality that foreshadows the omnivorous polystylism of the early 21st century. More than 35 years separate Haiku (1973) and Inura (2009), and they conjure up wildly different sonic universes. Haiku, created during León's tenure as composer-in-residence and music director for the Dance Theatre of Harlem, is an aphoristic and almost otherworldly re-imagining of seventeen classical Japanese haiku poems, which somehow form a cohesive and unified whole. The holistic approach León took with Haiku would however be anathema for Inura, a celebration of contradictions created for DanceBrazil that is inspired by Candomblé. Candomblé, like Santer'a in the Caribbean, is a syncretism of traditional African animism and European Catholicism that has been practiced for centuries.