Salsa Music: History and Cultural Impact

• An episode of the fictional law series Ally McBeal featuring “Latin sensation” Chayenne of Puerto Rico aired on television in 2001.
• The episode involved a civil lawsuit where Chayenne played Sam Adams, sued his former salsa dance partner, Inez Cortez, played by Constance Marie.
• Adams claimed Cortez stole dance moves they choreographed together and used them for financial gain outside their partnership.
• Nelle Porter, played by Portia de Rossi, defended Cortez and won the suit, showcasing salsa to mainstream America.
• Over the last decade, research on salsa grew as evidenced by publications such as Lise Waxer’s anthology Situating Salsa: Global Markets and Local Meanings in Latin Popular Music.
• Other publications include Frances Aparicio’s Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music and Puerto Rican Cultures; Angel Quintero-Rivera’s Salsa, sabor y control; and Olavo Alén-Rodríguez’ From Afro-Cuban Music to Salsa.
• Further publications include Hernando Calvo-Ospina’s Salsa: Havana Heat, Bronx Beat; and Cesar Rondon’s Libro de la salsa, to name just a few.
• Despite works existing on salsa music, explorations on salsa dance have been scarce.
• Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/o America, anthologized by Celeste Fraser-Delgado and José Esteban Muñoz, has been pivotal to peaking interest in the counterhegemonic potential of Afro-Latin(o/a)2 dance.
• None of the articles on salsa deal with the dancing body, despite the book’s title.
• Although the essays on salsa engage music and lyrics, gesture takes a back seat to language and writing, both tools of colonization.
• Salsa dance has been given a bit more attention in the anthology Caribbean Dance from Abakuá to Zouk: How Movement Shapes Identity, edited by Susanna Sloat
• Alma Concepción writes on “Dance in Puerto Rico: Embodied Meanings,” including insight on salsa dance.
• Nathaniel Hamilton Crowell discusses “What is Congolese in Caribbean Dance?,” and describes salsa in terms of movement.
• Work on the dancing body relation to salsa functions within a larger issue concerning the marginalization of dance scholarship across disciplines such as cultural studies and anthropology.
• The marginalization can be linked to “Western” religious and philosophical notions of disembodiment that began with thinkers such as Plato and Descartes.
• Ambivalence toward the dancing body contributed to dance being separated from sacred tradition in Western culture.
• The split between the sacred and the secular/“profane” stems from dance's power to “possess” and “entrance” the body, writes dance historian Gerald Jonas.
• Philosophers built on the neo-Platonic idea that the “flesh was inferior to the transcendent realms of the intellect and spirit”.
• Descartes divided the mind from the body, asserting that it can be more easily understood.
• Descartes' philosophy is at the core of Western academic investigation.

European Ambivalence

• European ambivalence toward the dancing body of color is related to the perception of its movement as profane.
• Salsa dance has inherited this bias, reduced to the erotic other promoted in U.S. mainstream media and culture.
• Exoticism is an industry that requires distribution and marketing (Savigliano, 1995).
• Salsa dance is often stripped of its cultural politics (rooted in a history of slavery and colonization) for mass consumption.
• Many Latinos/as in the U.S. combine salsa dance performance with language and music to construct and affirm a cultural identity (Concepción 2003).
• The need to affirm their cultural identity grows out of their diaspora experience, including assimilating into the dominant Euro-American culture.
• Latino/a experience tends to toggle between the extremes of exoticization and homogenization within U.S. imperialism and colonialism.
• Foucault’s assertion: “Where there is power, there is resistance” (1978: 95).
• Latino/a cultural affirmation is aligned with salsa dance, which has a counterhegemonic potential that involves the body and accompanies the same potential in the music.

Salsa Dancing

• Salsa dancing shapes Latino/a identity in New York, and Latinos/as fashion salsa dance in a “search for continuities between 'tradition' and 'modernity" (Concepción 2003).
• Dance can be examined as a privileged site in the production of cultural identities, national boundaries, and subversive practice.
• There is a historical and potential function of dance in social struggle in Latin/o America (Fraser Delgado and Muñoz 1997).
• Salsa dance in New York represents a transcultural negotiation between resistance and acceptance/compliance in relation to Latino/a cultural politics.
• Scholarship on salsa dance is limited, therefore, research draws from many sources including: experiences and conversations with fellow dancers in New York
• Research includes tenure with the Eddie Torres Latin dance company (1996–1998); articles, films and books on salsa music; and theoretical frameworks provided by dance scholarship, ethnography, and performance studies.
• Latino/a identity is based on an “imagined community (Costantino and Taylor 2000)
• Latino/a performance of salsa dance has the potential to function in opposition to the pressures of assimilating.
• Salsa dance and music are typically represented as apolitical and ahistorical in U.S. mainstream media and culture, thereby diluting their counterhegemonic potential.
• Performance studies scholar Diana Taylor suggests that both the theory of transculturation and the social process it represents bear counterhegemonic potential.
• Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz coined the concept of transculturation in the 1940s as an alternative to the term acculturation that was beginning to take hold in anthropology and sociology.

"New" Culture

• Ortiz took the idea of acculturation to actually mean assimilation (Spitta 1997: 161).
• This Latin American theory positions itself against what Silvia Spitta refers to as a “one-way imposition of the culture of the colonizers”.
• It is done in order to undermine the homogenizing impact implicit in the term acculturation” (161).
• The theory of transculturation also denotes a process that necessarily involves the loss or uprooting of a previous culture, which could be defined as deculturation.
• Transcultural expressions of salsa dance and music relate to Latino/a identity.
• Latino/a identity is based on an “imagined community” that is “more a political, ethnic, and cultural positioning than a genetic or racial identity . . . a political, rather than biological, matrix”
• The umbrella term Latino/a encompasses many different cultures from Latin America, the Caribbean, and the U.S., neither Latino/a identity nor salsa dance can be reduced to fixed, homogeneous characteristics.
• Similarly, the collective roots of salsa dance come from many heterogeneous sources, complex history from the colonial encounter to U.S. migration.
• The salsa dancing body narrates this history, expressing a multifaceted, transcultural Latino/a identity that is in constant motion.

Danzon and Mambo

• Danzón (due in large part to its primarily European heritage) developed into the Danzón.
• It became a couple-dance that allowed for improvisation.
• Dance instructor and scholar Fran Chesleigh states that the danzón was danced with a basic 1-2-3, 1–2–3, left-right-left, right-left-right step that was also done to many different types of Cuban music, including the Afro-Cuban son.
• The son was violently rejected in the elegant salons as well among the working people of the Cuban aristocracy, who succeeded in having the government ban it.
• The main reason alleged was the obscenity and immorality of the movements in it provoked in those who danced it.
• Afro-Cuban bassist Israel López Cachao and his brother cellist Orestes López Cachao invented the mambo section of the danzón and its sister rhythm cha-cha-chá in the 1930s.
• Regarding Cuba version of Mambo (Daniel 2003) writes that the specific gestures involves patterns such as "touch step"
• Mambo and son were influenced by North American jazz and the swing band era in the 1950's
• The Palladium dance tradition in turn gave rise to contemporary salsa practices that serve as a form of cultural resistance and affirmation of identity.
• The tumbao is underpinned by the clave, a rhythmic pattern played by two wooden sticks over a bar (2 measures of 4 beats) of music, or 8 beats.
• Polycentrism/rhythm is one of the African contributions to salsa dance, it can also play itself out while marking rhythm.
• If the dancer is responding to the tumbao, s/he will be in time with the music, “breaking on 2" where the emphasis or the break is on the 2.

Eddie Torres and Salsa Dance

• There were not studios for that studio so nightclub scenes were the nurturing ground for dancers.
• Torres picked from every one of their styles: Jo Jo Smith’s jazz movements; Freddy Rios’s very Cuban typical style; a little of Louie La Máquina
• THe Eddie Torres nightclub technique includes afro/cuban son, mambo, and North American Jazz dance
• Example of moves includes suzy-q, one of the first steps that students learn

Torres

• Torres can be seen as a "transculturating transculturation"
• The tradition that Torres and the like expands in new york continues transculturation where african culture resists colonial oppression through Latin American dancing
• It adjusts to the comtermporary demands in the Diaporic milieu that is the US context

Perceptions of Salsa

• It is now common for more that are male to allow themselves to follow and women will now openly lead.
• Woman have been accepting as a way to lead together, there has also be a large surge in female instructors.
• The partner work is often critiqued for looking "mechanical" by latino's who find perpectives of more "traditional" techniques.
• Dancers will often learn choreographed steps hindering and harming their individual expression.
• Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1998: 283) provides a relevant theoretical slant to illuminate such phenomenon:

Contemporary Mass Movement

• The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence.
• In permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced.
• These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind.
• Both processes are intimately connected with the contemporary mass movements.
• It is a community that is credited with a high level of virtuosity, leading to the “professionalization" of salsa dance for Latinos/as in New York.
• In addition to resisting assimilation through salsa dance performance, Latinos/as in this community are also resisting marginalization from the mainstream stages of dance in New York