Abstract

Santeria ritual and music is an aspect of the Cuban Santeria religion which is derived from West African Yoruba musical traditions. Santeria practitioners believe the music to be a practical technology for altering consciousness for the purposes of healing (Navarro, 2013 p.46). The Neo-Santeria music style is a hybridisation of traditional Santeria with electronica and includes visual communication approaches and performance methods. This study investigates the transformation of Santeria into new contemporary forms using musical analysis, autoethnographic fieldwork, and practice-led creative research. These performance innovations in Neo-Santeria appear to develop from a set of underlying ritual principles that reflect cultural objectives of altering consciousness. The outcome is the development of a Neo-Santeria framework comprised of the research insights, and which includes music, performance, symbols, and visual narratives. This framework is applied to the creative works to provide an analysis of the translation process. The creative outputs consists of two music EPs of ten tracks in total, two album cover artworks, a music video, and visual records of live performance. Insights from the research illustrate the aural, visual, kinaesthetic, conceptual, and psychological nature of the Neo-Santeria framework, and its development into global contexts and contemporary forms.