Events
Surrender to the salsa beat
SHONALI MUTHALALY
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At the recently-concluded India International Salsa Congress in Bengaluru, the dance form seemed to have surmounted national barriers because of its inclusive culture. There’s no resisting its universal language.
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‘It’s the music — the rhythm, percussion, that velvety voice. It gets under your skin.’
Seductive rhythms: Participants at the Salsa Congress.
Hot pink stockings and meticulously spiked hair. Gravity defying lifts and dizzying spins. Addictive rhythms and shoulder shimmies. There’s raw energy, pulsating music and an electric atmosphere at the recent Kingfisher India International Salsa Congress in Bangalore. Which could explain why this originally Cuban dance featuring Spanish lyrics and New York moves has managed to not just captivate the world but also create a fascinating sub-culture uniting dancers of all nationalities.
Sensuous and scintillating, salsa might have originated on the streets of Cuba and Puerto Rico. However, its addictive inclusiveness and unique ability to harmoniously lodge itself within a culture, while retaining it’s own very distinct essence is why its now danced everywhere from Chennai to China.
Improvisation is the essence
The basic steps are universal, but style changes from country, to city, to individual. And that’s not just dance style. Salsa dancers, or ‘salseros’, quickly develop a flamboyantly quirky, defiantly individual, deliciously cutting-edge sense of fashion too.
So when the annual three-day Congress, organised by the Lourd Vijay Dance School (LVDS) for the third consecutive year, brought together almost 5,000 dancers, instructors and salsa students from across India and the world for workshops, performances and a lot of enthusiastic dancing, essentially, everyone spoke the same language, whether they came from Madrid or Mysore. The same terminology, the same sense of rebel-chic and the same fluid mambo. And of course, the same fabulously high heels.
Delightfully loud
At the venue, Knzo, dancer, designer and icon on the world salsa stage, points out rows of gasp-high heels in delightfully loud colours, strappy, shiny and very sexy. “I work with a foot doctor — so you can jump, twist and spin in them,” he says, tugging thoughtfully at his ear studs. (He also has nose studs and a French beard bleached blonde, like his hair.) His clothing line for the festival includes baggy pants with “Salsa” emblazoned across in screaming red, knee-length denims studded with shiny gold dust, sequin-studded shorts.
The look of the moment, according to Knzo, is “Afro Chic”, which coincidentally best describes his dancing style. Originally from Senegal, he began dancing at the age of 8 and can currently do the salsa, Latino, Afro, hip-hop, Capoeira and samba. “Afro was the first dance in the world,” he says, “But Salsa can include those body movements. It takes in different countries, people, music… for me it’s the best dance in the world.” He adds, “When I started salsa, people said it’s just going to be around for one or two years… It’s been 10 years, and more and more people are dancing.”
Talking of Paris, where he lives, Knzo says, “There are many more salsa clubs, many more schools, many more people who dance salsa every single day.” And these are not professionals. Just regular, everyday people.
Alex Diaz, a first generation Cuban American, who drew hoards of swooning women to his classes on Musicality at the festival, says it attracts a lot of the IT crowd. “I was a software engineer,” he says, adding that he dreaded his 9-5 job, and eventually decided to make his salsa hobby a career, by moving to Bangalore to teach. “Now it’s been two years — the happiest two years of my life,” he says.
How does a dance form set to lyrics incomprehensible to much of the world manage to soar above barriers diplomats struggle with? “It’s the music — the rhythm, percussion, that velvety voice. It gets under your skin,” says Alex, adding “In Cuba, it’s more a street dance: raw and democratic.” Which is how it’s been flexible enough to twist into so many other forms. Salsa hip-hop, or tango, or even Bollywood.
“With salsa moves, everything pertains to what you do naturally,” says Sneha Kapoor from the LVDS, who, with her dance partner Richard Tholoor, has won a slew of prestigious dance championships across the world. (The LVDS maintains, “If you can walk, you can dance.”) So it’s far less intimidating for new dancers. And also makes it possible for dancers like Richard and Sneha to play with the form, like they did for “Indian Salsa Sutra”, their performance in Hong Kong last year. “We used Bharathanatyam styling, a lot of mudras and also some Kathak,” says Sneha. “We did it because, even now, when people meet us (abroad) they’re shocked that salsa exists in India.” Meanwhile, California-based Giju, a Kerala-born Senior Reliability Engineer with Intel by day, and salsa dancer and choreographer the rest of the time, recently became the first International artist to release a salsa album — in Hindi.
“I’ve been travelling across the world, watching people express themselves with salsa,” says Joseph Enin, DJ and organiser of the Annual Hong Kong salsa festival. “Taking a style and making it your own — that’s the beauty of salsa … It encourages a culture. There’s nothing we love to see more in Hong Kong than different parts of the world represented in the dance,” he says, adding, “We all have to learn the same basic step. The trick is to put your own feeling there. To invent. The heartbeat of salsa is to bring in something new.”
Lourd Vijay, who started teaching the dance in Bangalore almost 10 years ago, says more and more people are dancing in India. He estimates that the country has one lakh active salsa dancers and almost 250 dance schools. Every year more Indian cities feature at the Congress. This year there were dancers from Ludhiana, Jamshedpur, Bhubaneshwar, Madurai and Mysore, besides the metros. Instructors and festival promoters came from across the world, including a small contingent from Kathmandu.
Getting better all the time
This year the ESPN World Championship Qualifiers also made their Indian debut at the congress. “It gets better every year,” says Knzo, adding that India’s started attracting International talent thanks to events like this. “As I travel to congresses, I meet people from different countries… They don’t take vacations — they salsa across the world in their spare time,” he laughs.
Hence the “salsa vacation”. This congress concluded with a backwater salsa cruise: two idyllic days of dancing on board a houseboat in Kerala. Meanwhile Anup Thomas, who is now promoting salsa in Bangkok, is organising a salsa vacation in Phuket next year. “It’s like a regular vacation — with lots of salsa,” he says, talking about how vacationers will be scuba diving, taking elephant rides and chilling on the beach during the day, “and then partying till morning!” The idea is to bring people who love dancing together, irrespective of which part of the world they live.
After all, salsa’s effectively captured the dance floors. Clearly, now it’s time to take it to the beaches.
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