Blood + Sugar 2008

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In Blood + Sugar, choreographer Ramos Alayo fuses Afro-Cuban modern and folkloric dance with percussion, cello, vocals, and spoken word to narrate a hard-hitting, yet lyrical story of betrayal, cruelty, suffering, resistance, and triumph. Blood + Sugar traces the charged history of slavery—from the shores of West Africa, through the Middle Passage, and finally to Cuba—where the intensification of sugar cultivation in the early nineteenth-century precipitated a mass importation of enslaved Africans.