Salsa (Los Angeles style)
Salsa is currently one of the most popular forms of dancing throughout the world. If you have not already had a salsa experience, we recommend that you further your health by immediately signing up for an introductory class. Salsa is the sensual dance that makes everybody smile. We invite you to loosen your breaks in a safe environment. Our salsa courses are held by skilled and experienced instructors in a friendly environment. Get to know some new people, and install the skills you need to surf the massive “Latin wave”. You do not have to bring our own partner.
Brief salsa history
Slaves carried African drums to Cuba. Here African drumming was mixed with Spanish guitar playing, local and Spanish song traditions and various local rhythm instruments. These musical experiments inspired concomitant experiments with various forms of dancing. Mambo and cha-cha were “defined” as dance forms during the fifties and sixties but before that a whole series of local varieties and precursors of these forms of dancing was evident. To trace the exact origin of all these forms of dancing is by no means a trivial pursuit, and I am sure heavy books could be written on the subjects (and there would still be dispute). Immigrants from Puerto Rico and Cuba brought their music and dance to the busy and multiethnic streets of New York. In the Big Apple melting pot immigrants and especially the Puerto Ricans kept on cooking and experimenting with the many dialects of music and dance that were represented among Afro- and Latin-American people in the Latin Quarter of New York, known as “El Barrio”. The experimenters also added a generous amount of Rhythm’n Blues, Jazz and Rock’n Roll.
Salsa means “sauce” in Spanish, and the term first hit the streets of New York in the beginning of the sixties. Salsa should be considered a generic term encompassing a wide spectre of musical and cultural influence, it includes everything from Cuban Son Montuno to Bebop. It is the Puerto Ricans that are generally acknowledged to have distilled and commercialised the product known as Salsa (the Cubans of course would not agree with this). Originally the music was called salsa, and the accompanying dance form was called mambo. Today the term salsa is used more loosely and we usually speak about both salsa music and salsa dancing. After the commercial break through of salsa dancing world wide, there has been, and still is, an ongoing dispute over who should be given the credit and the right to claim the rots of this mesmerising form of dancing called salsa.
Various forms of the North-American styles dominate international salsa today, and the most intense evolution is going on in the US. “Los Angeles Style” salsa is an open, creative and “flashy” form of salsa dancing where there seems to be no limits to the stunning and breath taking tricks that the dancers will engage in. From a set of basic salsa principles, i.e. the ones we cover here, this style is still evolving and incorporating new elements from other forms of dancing in an ongoing, exploring and playful process.
Sources:
Salsa con Sabor, History of Salsa
Isabelle Leymarie, Mambo Mania
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