Salsa

Originating from the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, Latin American folk dance is, with all its cultural and ethnographic richness, the result of the fusion of various cultures, notably African and European. It is a type of dance with an extremely sensual, intense, joyful and expansive character, expressed through a strong component of individual improvisation and music that in itself is a faithful mirror of a grand intercultural history. Salsa was born as a musical genre in the late 1960s in the “Latin quarter” of New York, home to a growing population of Latin Americans, specifically Cubans and Puerto Ricans. In pursuit of the American dream, these Latin Americans found, instead of a land of opportunity, a wretched “ghetto” known as “El Barrio”, steeped in unemployment, alcoholism, crime and drugs within an extremely racist and decadent society.

A commercial marketing phenomenon, the word Salsa, which in Spanish means sauce, spicy, flavour, was used by the “Fania Records Company” to identify this new sound. The offspring of traditional Cuban music, Salsa is in its musical structure an amalgam of rhythms with multiple influences ranging from Jazz to Rock and Pop. Music for dancing, Salsa established itself as a borderless musical phenomenon, which from New York spread to other Latin American and Caribbean countries, setting out to conquer the world. Salsa, with all its musical, cultural and sociological richness, is considered more than just a Latin American rhythm, but an extremely rich musical genre due to the themes of its lyrics and the complexity of its orchestrations.

These highly sociable classes focus on partner-dancing technique.

Registering with a partner is recommended but not required.