Salsa
Salsa is for you if you have rhythm and sauce in your blood.
The Spanish word Salsa literally means sauce or flavor. Take the literal meaning and add it to a dance form and you have Salsa! Saucy, flavorful and great fun!
Was it the Spanish who really invented the dance? Was it the Cubans or the Puerto Ricans? History has it that Salsa is a distillation of many Latin and Afro-Caribbean dances with each playing a large part in its distillation. Salsa honestly has its origin in Cuba where Contra-Danze (Country Dance) began to mix itself with Rumbas from Africa. This syncretism also occurred in other countries in smaller degrees. The dance quite naturally flowed into New York where it earned its name “Salsa”. The term became popular as nickname to refer to a variety of different music, from several countries of Hispanic influence.
Salsa is usually a partner dance form that corresponds to salsa music. Salsa is danced on music with a recurring eight-beat pattern, i.e. two bars of four beats. Salsa patterns typically use three steps during each four beats, one beat being skipped. However, this skipped beat is often marked by a tap, a kick, a flick, etc. Typically the music involves complicated percussion rhythms and is fast with around 180 beats per minute. Salsa is similar to Mambo in that both have a pattern of six steps danced over eight counts of music. The dances share many of the same moves. In Salsa, turns have become an important feature, so the overall look and feel is quite different form those of Mambo. Mambo moves generally forward and backward, whereas, Salsa has more of a side to side feel. Phew! Tiring!! If you ask me!!!
The good news about Salsa is that you are not travoltzing all over the floor like in Foxtrot or Samba. This is a spot dance, where you occupy a fixed area on the dance floor.
Throughout the world there are variations on how the basic movements are performed. In the USA there are several methods, most notably New York Hustle/West Coast based method, often referred to as New York Salsa/Mambo. The two basic movements are the Forward Basic Movement and the Back Basic Movement. Variously coupled or combined and often with small variations in body position, these two movements create the Salsa moves. Great fun especially if your partner has Salsa in his blood. If on the other hand it is `Bloody Mary’, then I guess the steps might go a bit awry and you will be nursing your hurting feet all the way back home!
