A trip around the Latino
countries to experience different styles of salsa and
other Latin dances. Set off
from Cuba, the Meca of salsa, made the way along the mainland, through
Venezuela and Cali, Colombia's salsa city, to Panama. Then an island-hopping the
Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, and gave a full stop in the
Cuba-in-excile, the Latin quarter of Miami. Well, and a Salsa Congress in Blackpool.
Let's see how different among different salsa styles. | Description | Class | Clubs and others | |
|
Cuban Salsa (Havana, Cuba) |
Tends to lean forward a bit and push the chest out. Correct partner: palm vertical, pressing against the partner’s palm but not clasping her hand Moves: forward-and-back, dile que no (cross-body step), enchufla (where the man spins his partner CCW then reconnects), the enchufla doble (where the lady gets half CCW turn, is caught and sent back before being spun completely round), encufla doble a la moderna (giving the lady a half-spin, then walking her in a circle while turning her again before sending both partners independently into a spin away from each other) Salsa music in Havana has a steady and insistent rhythm. The crowd would clap the clave- the basic the basic three-two syncopated rhythm of salsa. Para disfrutar la musica. |
Start with flexing the body and joints with different body isolating
movements. Have to find the internal point of balance at the centre of the chest, and swing from there, as if it’s a kind of pivot. Everything follows the heart, el corazon. |
Difference between Lady European visitors and Local people are
noticeable. Europeans tend to be preoccupied with elaborate moves and expect a lot of spins and exciting moves Local Cuban dancers dance more simply, more subtly, and move in the rhythms of the music like fish in water. Cubanas follow the lead all right, but they don’t give the impression of being familiar with all the moves the man knows. |
|
Venezuelan Salsa (Caracas, Venezuela) |
Basic as swinging from side to side instead of forward and backward,
and turn straight from the drop-back Using music from the coast, where there are more negros and the music is more African, which is more intricate and powerful. Moves: Suzi Q, mambo (forward and back), guapea (where the partners step back, then come forward to meet, pressing palms together), arriba (man moving straight ahead, lady backing away), abaio (man moving backwards, taking lady forward), forward and backward, , open-out steps. |
Rueda de casino, salsa circle dancing controlled by a caller, with da
me (give me), and da me dos (give me two) using Cuban moves. |
People are precise, delicate, and light on their feet. But still turns
are not often danced. Clubs play also electronic music, reggaeton, house, hip hop, r ‘n’ b…. The music drives the people. Everyone participate, dancing or clapping, people become part of the music. The clapping is a fourth percussion instrument, a collective heartbeat urging the music on. Danced side by side, footsteps setting up a complex pattern with the syncopated handclaps. |
|
Colombian Salsa (Bogata, Colombia) |
Colombian style started since 1960s. The key to it is simplicity. Maintain floating precision with small steps and a lot of sensitivity to the music. Colombian Salsa involves less body movement than Cuban, and fewer complicated turns. It uses smaller steps and stay more upright. Authentic Colombian way of footwork: a tap at 4 & 8. Each final toe-tap is completed by the lowering of the rest of the foot smoothly to the floor, as the opposite foot is lifted. In particular, the style favour circular monememts of the hands: L in R, R in L and making little rhythmic movements with them as if polishing windows. Moves: anticlockwise spins, Setentas, Sombrero (crossing hands, then holding and raising them so that they lady spins round and end with arms over each other’s shoulders before returning to the usual drop-back step), cross-over, cross-and-tap, |
Teaching the footwork ‘left-right-left-left’, right-left-right-right’.
Dance to slower music, the extra tap helps to keep time and fills gaps in the music that might otherwise seem uncomfortably long. |
Steps similar to Venezuelan style, music is Cuban. Dance low-key style, with just a few turns and complex moves, concentrating more on the subtle rhythmic interplay of their bodies than on elaborate pyrotechnic. |
|
Colombian Salsa
(Cali, Colombia)
|
Taking through simple moves to see how clearly the lead is, then move
on to more complicated turns. The lovely, showy moves take time to get right, but the sheer neatness and apparent intricacy when it goes the way it should is an immense reward. One of the turns: spin the lady cw and then back, turning myself in the opposite direction and passing her hand round behind my back. Then give her a neat push and both turn in opposite directions, returning to partner-hold as come face to face again. |
Style of club dancers is similar to Venezuelan style: not showy, with
very few turns or spins. Small, precise steps, continually dropping back, and neat little hand movements. Dancers play around the music as if splashing about in shadow water. It is nifty, elegant style that couldn't be further from the exuberant circling and spinning of the Cuban approach. Dance shows by Swing Latino involved fastest and dizzy patterns filled with showy moves that looked lethally dangerous. However, the moves are based on salsa and unlike the UK where so-called 'salsa' is often unrecognisable as having any relation to the way real people actually dance on Frjday nights in a genuine club. One can recognize all the basic salsa pattern but just that it's taken to a degree of elabration, speed and accuracy, and with a whole layer of acrobatic added on top. Even in shows, still there was tension and magnetism between the couples, the feeling that they're relating to each other and not just drawing a picture for the audience. A kids' competition with astonishingly athletic and frentic moves like cartwheel and aerial in lightning speed. | |
|
Panama Salsa (Panama City, Panama) |
Dance the estilo linear, the linear style in which dancers move to and
fro on a single axis called 'tramlines'. A tight, neat, self-conscious style, with the guy looking very cool and controlled and the lady stepping like catwalk models. Moves: forward-and-back, drop-back, side-step, cross-over in front and behind, left and right turn, cross-body, sombrero, Sambuca (reverse arm. Sambuca de mujer is holding both lady’s hands and raising her left hand above her head to turn her cw, so that her right arm ends up behind her back, then spinning her round again to extricate her. Sambuca de hombre involves doing the same thing to the man himself, turning cw so his own left arm ends up locked behind his back, his hand still holdng the lady’s right), deplazamiento lateral. |
On the tramlines, when men move the girl across in front of them they
do not swing them around and back like in Cuban style, just step neatly out
of the way and push the lady across from one side to the other so she moves
in a straight line. In doing the Sambuca de hombre, the difficulty in linear style is that the lady can’t help the ma by moving round, so man is to spin fast enough to turn a full 180 degrees himself. Man has to make a complete turn so he can continue dancing, on the same old linear track, before turning back again at the same dizzying speed. | Dance the NY style like rather than doing the S. Am or Carribbean
Salsa. |
| Puerto Rico |
Estilo
puertorriqueno (dance on two)- somehow the ‘on two’ rhythm is more natural,
but less obvious. Salsa has been made into something too complicated, the genuine salsa is a thing an 80-year old lady with two hip replacements can learn in 5 minutes. We gringos, with our competitiveness and obsession with technique, are in danger of forgetting the essence. Dancing with elegant simplicity, expressing the music and their feelings for each other without a setenta complicada in sight. They have been reduced to dancing mostly with one another. Moves: cross-body lead, sombreros, right- and left-hand turns. |
Isolating
exercises in class, ribcage sliding is particularly hard. A German group learning the ‘on two’ and finds it tricky. For ‘on one’ dancers, it’s fine to start correctly but keeping to it and remembering to hit it again after turning or making a complicated move is much harder. Cross-body lead for the man was taught with a small step back on the ‘six’ so as to stay in exactly the same position, rather than following the woman as she moves across. |
Club has big
bands; the sound is chunky, rich, sonorous, with the percussionists putting a
strong intricate network of sound on top. Most of the band members are
dancing as they play. Afternoon dance are crowded with half a dozen couples, nobody doing anything showy, nor anyone dancing ‘on two’, just going to and fro or side to side, circling gently. Salsa musicians talking about the future of salsa music: Salsa romantic has done so much damage and turned salsa into Hallmark sentiments, cheesy love-and-heartbreak stuff. Although people think that the way forward now is with reggaeton, a lot of reggaeton artists actually want to play salsa now. The music has a 300 years of history, it’s not going anywhere but just to reclaim urban relevance for traditional real salsa to make it meaningful. |
|
Dominican Dances- Merengue & Bachata (San Juan, Dominican Republic) |
Won’t find much salsa, people listen to it a lot but can’t dance it as
when they were growing up in merengue and bachata. However, one can’t find much bachata because the middle class disapprove of it, it’s considered low and indecent. Clubs and discos in town are for tourists, as local can’t afford them. Locals dance merengue and bachata in car washes, which turn into dance clubs on Fridays and Saturdays. |
--No salsa class-- |
Some reggaeton dancing in clubs, salsa unthinkable. People in car wash are of all ages: groups, couples, children. Styles range from the elegant to the utterly casual, physiques from the tall, svelte and willowy to the bulging and frankly blobby. Slender black couple dances elegant bachata: the man dancing with stylish restraint, pointing his toes, making small, neat, accurate movements, and the woman tall and slim, her skin-tight white trousers stretched over a bottom that wiggles with incredible agility and rhythmic precision. When merengue is played, instantly couples hurriedly thread their way between the tables and flood onto the platform. The music is loud, punchy and exciting. |
|
Miami Salsa (Miami, Florida, USA) |
Music is miles away from real Cuban music. The percussion lacks that
Afro-Carribbean, rhythmic dynamic that powers the best Cuban Salsa. Salsa dancers do Cuban style like without many fancy moves, often seems to begin on five, half way through the clave. Rueda moves: guapea, enchufla, enchufla doble, vacilala, sombrero, exhibela, adios, with calling ‘da me’ and ‘da me dos’. |
Need an assessment before attending classes in Salsa Lovers, the best
salsa school there. There are levels with vast number of rueda moves at first, one can take 2 lessons to learn how to adapt these moves for couple dancing. It’s the exact opposite of the system in the UK, where you learn salsa as a couple dance and at some later point get introduced to rueda. Rueda callers use a system of hand signals: a flick of the hand =da me; tapping the head=sombrero; pointing to the eye= vacilala; a wave in the air= adios |
DJ played salsa, merengue, reggaeton and other Latin styles, there’s a
lot of jazz and rock influence. Salsa is not dominant. When asking around for ladies of different colour/ages/physical built, all refused. Blacks guys playing drums on the pavement outside a café, people are dancing Cuban rumba. |
|
Annual Salsa Congress, Blackpool, Lancashire |
The instructor said in Spanish, ‘it’s not about learning moves. When
two people dance together, the dance is an expression of what is in the
heart. El Corazon.’ Authentic salsa isn’t about showy moves or competing. It’s about love and freedom, about the heart, and about letting the heart float in that music, the music that has such a depth history and colour and magic in it. |
Some Reggaeton after isolating exercises.
Rueda dancing.
Dances of particular Orishas, gods form the Santeria patheon; Yemaya, the sea-goddess; the dance of Chango, the thunder god. |
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