A Depth of Latin Culture: Bolero and Bachata (Part 1)

Bosco gets around a bit, not only in his day-guise as mild-mannered leading exponent of visual merchandising, but also by night as delinquent DJ extraordinaire. I find his take on the transnational Latin scene in the Far East, as a Nuyorican who'd 'been there' at salsa's genesis, illuminating. Oftentimes, it's the questions he asks that inform me the most. Here's an edit of a recent one:

[begins]

José María Bustos:
Why do Asians not dance boleros? They enjoy dancing bachata and no doubt enjoy the close physical contact and the romantic nature of the songs, although many cannot understand the words. Yet nothing is more romantic to Latinos as the bolero and when you hear someone like Vincentico Valdés sing 'La Montaña' or Tito Rodríguez sing 'Un Cigarillo, La Lluvia Y Tu' there is nothing quite as romantic... when dancing bolero... Latin schools in Asia don't teach boleros either? Is it danced in Europe? In America you play when the lights go down and the floor is packed with young and old alike.

[ends]

'Wow,' my mind boggled. Pana had managed to cram a whole horde of ideas into one innocent-looking paragraph. I looked around suspiciously... 'was he doing this on purpose?'

Well, Asians don't and yet they do dance boleros.

Bolero is a much older genre than bachata and salsa, and unlike in Latin America where the same word 'ritmo' refers to both the music or the dance, the coupling between them is not so tight in other cultures. When the bolero had already attained its cultural zenith, radio (and not yet television) had only just started to become commercially relevant as conduit of the mass media. Bolero music that did reach Europe and the Far East was largely consumed in the same social space as that of easy-listening crooners (note the word 'listening') - take, for example, the career dimensions of Machín when he chose to settle in Spain.

Radio allowed the sounds of bolero to stretch out and impact significantly, parts of the world where visuals of its dance could not. Compare that to the effects of talking pictures and television on the chachachá later. The dancing of the bolero, requiring the visual form of communication, was restricted to the physical human migratory patterns out of Cuba by the predominant mode of transport - shipping. Hence the strength in reach of bolero's dance was limited to around the Caribbean basin and the port of New York.

But bolero the dance DID reach Asia, albeit in a different guise.

The ballroom rhumba, developed to conform to European mores, is danced to bolero music. International ballroom's codification of the chachachá and its rhumba serve as historical snapshots of the European, mainly British, interpretations of these genres; just as its own tango relates or not to tango argentino. This very British institution spread its influence throughout the colonies and eventually the Commonwealth; my mother remembers dancing the ballroom rhumba and its chachachá socially (i.e. on1) as a young girl in the 1950s under a grand estate-house in Butterworth. And let's not forget that Bruce Lee, aged eighteen, was Crown Colony chachachá champion of Hong Kong in 1958.

A 17-year-old Bruce Lee dancing the chachachá with Leung Bo Ling in the 1957 Hong Kong movie 'Darling Girl'. The next year he won the Crown Colony Cha-Cha Championship.

The dance studios where international rhumba may be learned are legion: across an expanse including Canada, the United States, Great Britain, Italy, Lithuania, Malaysia, Singapore, China, Australia and Japan. But the practice of this dance occurs in a far different social space than the bolero referred to by Bosco.

To my partner in crime, it is the bachata which now appears to occupy the place internationally that bolero once did locally in the Americas...

(On to Part Two.)

Loo Yeo

My Momentary Lapse Of Reason

What was I thinking? Somebody cuff me over the head with a heavy object.

After returning from San Diego, I realised that I'd been eating that little too well during my travels - business entertaining and all that. Coupled with the remarkably sedentary life of a musician, the pounds seem to have found a swarming point on my frame.

"Okay", I said to myself, "exercise is the key". So I cast about thinking about the best avenue to explore. Running again was too boring a prospect, with the included hazard of dodging student-hurled chow on the pavements; and I haven't returned to swimming since being a substrate to an overly-friendly Trichoderma. So the obvious thing was to go out dancing more.

"Winner", I thought. Burn off some of those dastardly calories and inflict myself on more people at the same time. The only proviso being that it can't be on a band practice night...

Only then did I realise how limited my options were: most salsa spots are during the weekday, as the bars make more money with mainstream nights over the weekend. Jive was the same. The prospect of a return to ballroom dancing was starting to loom large. Also, there is the increased prospect of business dinner-dances, so it's clearly in my best interests to knock a few rust-spots off.

So I gritted my teeth and returned to the club I'd left as a student more than a decade ago, knowing that I'd be incognito, and hoping that the things that I'd despised about it (I don't use strong emotional words like those very often, so please bear with me) had changed for the better. My timing was perfect as it coincided with the beginning of the new academic year, and the "Give-it-a-go" introductory lessons were on. I turned up on the Friday evening without a change of dance shoes...

There was the usual gender imbalance that most dancing clubs in the UK have to negotiate. But at least the competitive team members were there to act as demonstrators, and the instructor tried to deliver an airy and light atmosphere.

I'm really sorry to say that those are the only positive points I could find. (My thoughts on the level of physical education skills in that arena are well documented, so I shan't retread old ground.)

The same reasons why I'd left and started up the Salsa & Merengue Society - those same issues, which when addressed properly made S&Msoc the most successful of its kind, were still there in the now-rebranded Dancesport club more than 10 years on. Even as a then member of the Dancesport competitive team, I felt strongly about the oligarchic nature of the club, that team members failed to engage more extensively with the standard 'pundits' if you like, in order to foster a higher quality of dance.

Societies are funded in great part, in proportion to their membership numbers - Dancesport can recruit more than 250 members annually, of which at most 24 will compete in the A,B and C teams. In my time, a disproportionate level of resource I felt was being devoted to subsidising the team and not enough on developmental opportunities for the non-team students. This perception was made more vulnerable to conflict of interest as the governing committee comprised team members or their friends.

That night, team members spent most of their time exhibiting themselves, and talking to each other and to their Latin instructors - who arrived late. To be fair, apparently there had been a mechanical failure with the bus that the latter had been on; they had been taking lessons in London - but it begs the question, "Why didn't they allow for that?" They would have, if it was a competition they were going to - you can bet your bottom dollar.

Maybe the occassion of introducing a group of interested people to your supposed passion and livelihood wasn't considered important enough. And not a single team member was actually in the learning body to offer any remedial advice. Not one. I (surreptitiously) helped more than all of them put together.

This club laments the dearth of male dancers, and their ability to hold onto them. Very clearly, the instructor was more conversant with teaching females than males (consistently giving erroneous direction changes to the leads is unforgiveable), and the latter were sorely neglected from an organisational perspective. Apart from the oligarchy, the lack of reason linking cause to effect is, as I said before, despicable.

All those involved purpot to love dance. But there is an obvious disparity between word and deed. What I saw was a love of individual self, not a commitment to helping another person experience one's passion.

And to score one more point:
At its height, the Salsa & Merengue Society recruited more than 800 members in a year, of which 120 were active every week (that's half the Dancesport's total membership); AND the S&Msoc waived its right to membership subsidy while still running a calendarful of well attended events.

I will go back once more, to see if the Latin teachers are any better. I hope for the sake of the run-of-the-mill members that they are.

Loo Yeo