In any culture, music and dance are all but inseparable.  Consider then the “Afroperuvian” music of South America, the product of a slave culture, in which the two forms are so intertwined that the music can’t be recorded without bringing dancers into the studio.

“The dancers set the pace for the music,” explains Juan Morillo, a Los Angeles musicologist who has organized the first national tour of Peru Negro, a music and dance troupe that is an institution in its native land.  When members of Peru Negro perform on Tuesday, Feb. 24^th, at the Hopkins Center in Hanover, they will be sharing a form of music that they have brought from the fringed of Peruvian society into the nation’s mainstream.

“It wasn’t so much that it was forgotten as that the larger part of Peruvian society was not connected to it,” Morillo says.  “It was still like a family thing; it was performed at the home, for black families.”

When drums were banned, African slaves in Peru improvised new ways to express themselves using wooden crates, church tithing boxes and donkey jaws.

Afroperuvian music’s transformation into a national institution began in the late 1960s when Ronaldo Campos and three musicians steeped in the genre were invited to develop an act for a restaurant.

“There’s a series of paintings by a painter named Pancho Fierro that depict colonial life in Lima; there are a lot of portrayals of black cultural life,” Morillo explains.  Based on those representations, they developed a theater piece in which (the Campos family) participated.”

An instant local success, they were invited in 1969 to participate in Argentina’s Hispanoamerican Festival of Song and Dance.

Thirty years later, Peru’s oldest continuously performing Afroperuvian troupe is considered the end of the rainbow by the nation’s black musicians; membership in the group of 22 singers and dancers is the most coveted gig around.

“It’s now an integral part of Peruvian culture,” Morillo says.  “The way communications has grown now, you can do everything with different media.  So it was going to happen sooner or later.”

American audiences were first exposed to Peru Negro during a “trial tour” in California two years ago; response was so strong that Morillo has brought the group back.  With five sold-out shows in Los Angeles in San Francisco behind them (the Los Angeles Times called their music “one of the most vibrant styles in the Western Hemisphere”), Peru Negro is headed for Miami, the Kennedy Center in Washington and Town Hall in New York, as well as Boston, Montreal and Hanover.

“The response has been overwhelming, I think; we didn’t really expect it,” Morillo says.  “We expected support, a good response, but it was overwhelming.  In San Francisco I think they were sold out 10 days before the show, so was L.A.  For the company, it was very special to them.”

Morillo estimates that perhaps 40 percent of the California audiences have been of Peruvian of Latin American origin, the rest a cross-section of black, white, and Asian Americans – “quite a mix.”

About three-quarters of the members of Peru Negro are professionals; several of them, still in their teens, trained at school called Peru Negrito (“Little Blacks”).

Any music created by a historically oppressed people in the crucible of hardship is bound to have a political subtext.  Morillo prefers to think of Peru Negro’s deeper message as “some element of social consciousness more than politics.”  As an example, he cites Espana, a song that recalls the arrival of the Spanish in Latin America, who brought Christianity to the region even as they enslaved its people.

“It’s paradoxical, because now black are Christians, right?”  Morillo says.  “But in these colonies, although we became Christian, we were also crucified like Jesus was.”

To the casual American ear, Peru Negro’s forceful, exuberant music seems to ring with joy and celebration – but the truth is more complex.

“I think the element of rhythm is what created that rich, festive atmosphere,” Morillo says.  “But when you see it onstage, you can see the emotion of the people performing it – and it becomes more clear that part of that is not just joy.  There’s a sorrowful element, too.”

Morillo notes that American audiences, to the extent that they know Peruvian music at all, are more familiar with the culture of the nation’s interior – the music of the Andes, which is what you hear on the soundtrack of those Discovery Channel documentaries about Machu Picchu and the Nazca Lines, and to the extent that Peruvian music has left a footprint in such tines as Paul Simon’s El Condor Pasa. (“I’d rather be a hammer than a nail…)”

“This is another side of the culture,” Morillo explains.  “This is the culture of the coast, which is not what most people are exposed to in the States.”

Peru Negro will perform on Tuesday, Feb. 24, at 7 p.m. in Spaulding Auditorium at the Hopkins Center.  Tickets are $26, $5 for Dartmouth students, $16 for children under 12.