Salsa on Curaçao
Merengue is still more popular then
salsa on Curaçao but thanks to Stephen and his dance school "Salsipuedes" we're
for sure on our way to change that !! He is the one who started the salsa fever on
Curaçao, great teacher, great dancer uuuhh is he my teacher/ social dance buddy ???
Who gave you that idea ? ;-)
The Curaçao
way of dancing Salsa...... on the RIGHT foot!!!
Like Stephen wrote to
Edie about Breaking the "Breaking"
Mystery of Salsa Timing We dance a bit different then the rest of the world, we found
this out in Puerto Rico at the World Salsa
Congress '97 and again at the 2nd World
Salsa Congress '98 where we by then had converted a typical left foot forward step
(cross body lead) into our style.
Edie -PR98:
"They danced opposite... going forward, with the right foot, and back with the
left foot. I asked Stephen, their team leader, why it was so easy to dance with them last
year, but this year, I found myself feeling like I was on the wrong foot..."
Stephen -PR98:
"Last year we did not use the cross body lead in our dance. So after the first
congress we decided to introduce it to our way of dancing so we could do more advanced
turn patters. The only difference was that we decided to do the cross body lead with the
right foot forward in stead of the common left foot. For the people living on Curaçao
(and Holland) it is easy to follow
because everybody dances with the right foot forward but outside our "borders"
it does feel strange for the one you are dancing with. But still it doesn't prevent us to
have a blast here."
But now after PR98 BIG revolution going on here on Curaçao!!! Lot of us
started to mix the left & right altogether, don't ask me how the guys do it but they
do. I'm so HAPPY I'm not a man in dancing :-) and have to lead!!! But now some of us even
go that far that they get their "fix" more on the left then on the right. You
should hear some of our conversations about the different feeling you get only by changing
a different foot forward. I'll try to get Stephen to write about this.
UPDATE:
As of July 6th, 1999 we decided to switch totally
to the left foot forward, read
more about this.
Stephen -PR97:
"On Curaçao we have one small (actually a BIG) difference. In Puerto Rico we
found out that we were the ONLY ones where the men breaks with his RIGHT foot. Everybody
else was breaking with the LEFT foot (disregarding if they would break on the
"1", "2", "3", or "4").
After we came
back from the congress I was determined to find out WHY my parents, old great salsa/mambo
dancers of the island, why actually the WHOLE ISLAND danced on the "3" with the
RIGHT foot forward. After talking to several people and watching very old tapes of our
Local Television Company I found out that we dance like that because of a cultural dance
called the "TUMBA". |
 Animated Dance on the
"Three and Seven" with left!! |
The tumba is
known as our national carnival music! The tumba has "more or less" the same
rhythm patterns as the salsa/mambo and has been around since the end of the 19th century.
This tumba of course came with it's own style of dancing. So when Mambo arrived in
Curaçao in the late 50'ties
we adapted the style of dancing tumba into the style of dancing salsa. It just fitted at
that time.
That's why Edie you liked watching our group dance as we move our hips and buts, that is
exactly what we do in the tumba !!!
Still there was one mystery. Why did I never noticed the difference while living for 9
years in Holland ?? The answer was quite easy. As Curaçao is a part of the Dutch Kingdom,
it was the same people from Curaçao that during the big migration brought salsa/mambo to
Holland. That's why Leo & Monique (Dos Bailadores) from Holland (remember them from
the congress?) also danced like we do !!"
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