Black Belt Salsa Close Order Drill With a Salsa Beat

Baila Con Pasion Presents Black Belt Salsa

By MIREYA NAVARRO Published: October 09, 1997

Exhibela! (Show her off!), the caller shouted, and the men pushed the women into a turn and snapped them back to their right sides. Dame una! (Give me one!), and the men let go of one partner and grabbed another to the right. This is salsa dancing, casino rueda style. Nights at the Palladium in the East Village once meant expressing individual exuberance and dance-floor passion to Latin rhythms. Now, nights at clubs like Starfish in Miami Beach and Club Mystique at the Miami Airport Hilton mean synchronized choreography and partner swapping in what looks to outsiders like a hybrid of salsa and square dancing with a disco flair.

As an incubator of the macarena, the line dance adored even by the rhythmically impaired, Miami is now serving up a more challenging dance style that originated in Cuba but is now spreading around the United States. Fans call salsa rueda addictive and exhilarating, like a roller coaster ride. Connoisseurs already talk of a Miami style (technical and complicated), a Havana style (looser and more free-form) and a Los Angeles style (showy, with jumps and  splits), but the basic steps are the same from city to city, and a list with descriptions for each one can be found in places.

In salsa rueda (rueda means wheel or circle), the leader calls out fast three-step combinations that dancers perform before moving on to the next partner, building to a choreography that draws on more than 150 steps, with names like finger, Coca- Cola, balsero (a term for a Cuban on a raft) and tell her no. Ana Martinez, 36, who made news last year when her husband was accused of spying for Cuba when he abandoned her and  resurfaced in that country after four members of the volunteer pilot group Brothers to the Rescue were shot down by Cuban  fighters, said she took lessons four times a week with her 13-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son partly as therapy.

It's something happy to do, she said. ''It's not threatening. I hate the club scene, but I can go to Club Mystique, do the rueda, and that's it. I leave sweaty, soaked from head to toe.'' Intricate even by the standards of experienced salsa dancers, casino rueda began in the 1950's, to the cha-cha beat, in members-only sports clubs in Cuba known as casinos deportivos, said Carolina Sanchez, an official at the National School  for the Arts in Havana. The casinos held balls with big orchestras and provided a place for dancers to improvise and create new styles. Soon, she added, people would say, Let's dance like in the casino, or Let's dance casino.

The dance has been enjoying a comeback in Miami in the last five years or so, as the children of the original dancers and new arrivals from Cuba brought it to parties and living rooms, adding their own steps, and instructors started teaching it. The dance has now achieved critical mass in places like the Salsa Lovers Dance Studios in Miami, where 400 to 700 students take group classes on any given night, and at Miami-area nightclubs like Club Mystique and La Covacha, which throw in free  lessons on casino nights.

Ramani A. Nicola, an Ecuadorean married to a Cuban-American, started teaching rueda last year to 10 students in his Miami living room. His company, Salsa Casino, now instructs an average of 140 students three nights a week at a dance studio and hundreds more every Thursday at Club Mystique. We have basically done this without advertising, he said. Once they meet, rueda dancers often travel together to street fairs and salsa concerts, following the music like the Deadheads followed the Grateful Dead. These salsa heads increasingly can be found in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, where Miami transplants are spreading the dance and constantly incorporating new steps.

Caribbean Music and Dance Programs, a group based in Oakland, Calif., that organizes educational tours of Cuba, said it planned to take six teachers from the National School for the Arts and two Cuban dance companies to San Francisco; Los  Angeles; Portland, Ore.; Tucson, Ariz.; Bozeman, Mont., and Jackson, Wyo., for workshops this fall on rueda and other Cuban  dances. Melissa Daar, the group's president, said a rueda workshop in the Bay Area last fall drew 100 people.

People love it, she said, but very few people know it well enough to dance it at the clubs. In Los Angeles, casino rueda has been growing over the last two years, with the help of Miami natives like Tomas Montero, 37, a computer specialist and former Salsa Lovers teacher who moved there in 1995 and now leads a youth dance group, the  L.A. Salsa Kids, that performs casino rueda exhibitions at cultural festivals, nightclubs, universities and parties. He also teaches adults, a melting pot of Japanese, Filipinos, Chinese, Mexican-Americans and Salvadorans who, he says, have no  reason to envy dancers on the East Coast.

There are some Asians here that can put Cubans to shame, he said. They can dance. Casino rueda could soon become a national craze with the February release of Just Dance, a movie set in Houston and Las Vegas starring Vanessa L. Williams and the Puerto Rican pop star Chayanne as a couple who fall in love while dancing. The movie includes a brief casino rueda sequence in which Chayanne, who plays a Cuban, shows Ms. Williams, a ballroom dancer,  how Latin dancing is really done.

The film's director, Randa Haines, a salsa dancer herself who first spotted rueda in Miami about four years ago, said Americans were ready for it. The music is so uplifting, she said, and it's a way of being with people. Ms. Haines, who directed Children of a Lesser God, added: ''Partner dancing is making a tremendous comeback because people want to be together, to touch each other. People are tired of talking.''

Slow to Take Hold In New York City

So far, however, rueda has yet to take hold in Latin centers like New York City, where salsa purists and mambo dancers may object to its clonelike movements. Eddie Torres, a longtime salsa instructor with a studio on Eighth Avenue near 55th Street in Manhattan, said rueda reminded him of the mambo jamborees of the 1960's, a kind of spontaneous rueda in which  groups of couples would do moves that the men invented on the spot. Still, he said, he had heard so much about rueda that he recently started workshops for his students and planned to introduce it in some salsa clubs in a month or so.

If it is something that lends itself to different age groups, and it's not too complicated, it can become popular, he said. We won't know until we put it in the clubs and see how people respond. Ana Marengo, 33, who works in public relations in Manhattan and goes out salsa dancing at least once a week, said she had seen a rueda only once at a club in New York and found it corny. New Yorkers like to show off, do their own thing, she said. ''It probably won't catch on. It doesn't give the couple or the individual a chance to show off at all.''

Even in Miami, longtime salsa dancers like Rafael Gonzalez, a 34-year-old chef of Puerto Rican descent, refuse to learn it, saying it looks too staged, relies too much on spins and often gets ahead of the music. Worse, he said, you can tell rueda dancers even when they dance in couples. It's like disco dancing, he said. It's not something with feeling. Some rueda dancers admit that the complexity of the steps can sometimes overpower the dancing, making it seem more like working and less than play, said Jordan Levin, a Miami arts critic who is taking advanced rueda classes.

It can also be impersonal and a departure from the sensuality associated with Latin dancing. Even the kiss, a move in which the man puts his arm behind the woman's head in a gesture of embrace, often hardly merits a glance from the male partners,  who are more preoccupied with following the caller's commands. ''Sometimes I pucker up just to say: 'Hello! I'm here,''' Ms. Levin said. It seems to wake them up. At a Salsa Lovers class at the Blue Banquet Hall in Miami recently, the school's director, Rene D. Gueits, went over the basic steps with 45 beginners lined up in three long rows: ''One two three, and back two three. Pick up your heel. And left two three and right two three.''

The man who dances salsa has energy, spark, Mr. Gueits said, giving the stiff dancers a reason to loosen up. If your girlfriend dances and I'm there, don't go to the bathroom. In a bigger room, five beginner ruedas of up to 15 couples  each revolved around instructors who shouted commands. By persevering, they could move up through half a dozen levels of intermediate and advanced classes in which the steps and turns get more complicated as the rueda gets more fluid.

A Crowd Pleaser In South Beach

For Debbie Ohanian, owner of Starfish in the South Beach section of Miami Beach, casino rueda has provided a product that unfailingly draws crowds. After renting out the club to Mr. Nicola for rueda lessons on Monday nights since June, she instituted Strictly Salsa nights every Friday. They have been such a hit that she is extending them to Saturdays next month. Ms. Ohanian recalled that among her first customers were two groups from competing dance studios who showed up one night to check out her place and ended up retreating to separate corners to eye each other. It was like 'West Side Story,' she said. But eventually the two groups came together in one big rueda.

If you take classes every week, she said, you've got to show off.

Baila Con Pasion | Black Belt Salsa

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