My notes from Martha Gonzalez’s TEDxSeattle talk “Fandango without Borders.”
Martha started off with a traditional Fandango performance.
When a woman has the cathartic experience of exhaustion from dance, they call it leaving her soul on the dancefloor. It is a community effort. The community stages or convenes a Fandango together.
The music within the Fandango is a musical style from Mexico, a merging of several cultures. It has thrived for 400 years. There has been a movement recently to reinvigorate the tradition in Mexico and the US. There is now a Seattle Fandango Project.
They intentionally include their personal lives in the Fandango event. They have many teachers and their teaching is decentralized and participatory. At the heart of learning is active listening. Music and dance reinforce listening and convening and establishing mutual respect. Fandango participants are very diverse. Fandango resonates with their sense of shared humanity.
Participatory music and dance have a power to transform lives. These communities mobilize around environmental justice and immigration reform. It has allowed people who might otherwise be alienated in the University of Washington community to feel that they are part of the heart of the community.
Sarah’s commentary:
This has interesting parallels with some of the tech-related intentional communities that have popped up, like barcamps and tedx’s. The internet is clearly enabling like-minded people to intentionally create spaces and events that would not have sprung up organically. The Fandango community seems to consider themselves a family in much the same way the nonprofit technology community does. We get together and have fun and end up learning about each other’s experiences and culture informally.
