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Berta Jottar

Berta Jottar is in part a theoretician interested in social acts; yet she has at least as much technical skill and artistic acumen working with visual media. Even before her undergraduate training in communications at the University of California at San Diego, she had been producer and camera operator for Baja California's cultural television in Tijuana, Mexico. While pursuing her bachelor's degree, she was principal cinematographer, interviewer and line producer in Ecuador and California for the PBS series Zero Degrees Latitude.

She describes her undergraduate experience as being dually rooted in communications and culture, "but my work in the border went beyond the academic field," she said. During this phase of her education, extending into her M.A. work with a concentration in Performance Studies - also conducted at the University of California at San Diego - Jottar's activism continued to occur in artistic contexts.

"I did a lot of work on migration, particularly on the discursive," that is, the idea of crossing, "and the physical disappearance of the female body once she crosses the border. We did public installations and performances with artists on both sides of the border," she said.

But it was partially music that drew her to TISCH, School of Arts at New York University, in which she's completing her dissertation for the Program of Performance Studies. "I went there because I like rumba music - I like music in general - and I wanted to be in a context where it was thoroughly accessible. So now, instead of doing bodies that cross borders, I'm doing bodies that embody borders," via rumba performance, "through movement and dance."

Jottar has three area specializations for her Ph.D. program: Latin American theatre in the context of dictatorship; dance and music in the Caribbean; and performance and the body. More specifically, her dissertation fieldwork examined rumba music and culture as performed in New York City.

"What is interesting about the New York rumba," she said, "is that it becomes this space of coalition between all the Afro-Latin diasporas, and all the Latin American migrants. This rumba is like a microcosm of what New York is, or the history of Latin American politics. But I'm interested in looking at the music, analyzing it from within the sounds and gestures, and seeing what it tells us about the performers, the history and the traveling of the performers. I'm interested in what rumba might be in the context of exile." For her investigation, performers, or rumbaras\os, include musicians as well as dancers in the public space.

Hosted by IU's Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Jottar spent summer session one participating in various symposiums and local conferences, while also advancing her own research. Simultaneously, she has been working in the lab on a video performance piece, entitled "Conflicto Rumba and the Persistence of Memory." She said, "It's really about the police stopping the rumbas in central park over the last two years. And they have succeeded in stopping it." The piece was scheduled for its international debut at the Vienna Arts Festival in June 2001.

- Written by Amy Locklin