Cubanising Baladas

Following up from the latest bolero sessions at Solares, one of the participants, an avid YouTuber, wanting to get his ear in, directed me to the below:

asking if they were boleros. I responded saying they were 'baladas' ('ballads'), not boleros, because they lacked African-derived rhythmic phrasing. The question he asked, and the examples he gave, told me an immense amount about how Europeans might listen to Afro-Caribbean music. It got me thinking as to how I could develop the rhythmic perception of someone versed in the European aesthetic to one who was just as sensitive to the African aesthetic.

Then it struck me to use these songs themselves. I could offer for them to learn how to play the bolero tumbao on congas, and the martillo rhythm on bongó, and then play them alongside these tracks, thus 'Cubanising' them from baladas into boleros!

It would develop the perception of African rhythm as anticipating that of European AND it would open the door to the subtle nuances of rhythmic phrasing, which is a sensitivity transferable to dancing!

I'm sensing the start of another research project.

Loo Yen Yeo

Return to the Bolero and on to the Promised Land

Last Tuesday, solares made a return to the bolero after a hiatus of two years. The workshop was small: comprised equally of those whom had done it before, and those for whom it would be their first experience of it, so the time was right.

The impetus behind this was the torneo content of the previous few weeks. It had reached that stage where 'drivers' needed to improve their:

• visualisation of line of dance
• implementation of line of dance
• silence in the frame (reducing the transmission of movement vibration to the torneo partner)
• sensitivity to the torneo partner's vertical axis of rotation

Torneo partners needed to develop their:

• foot-bearing - the pivoting contact point on the floor
• core strength
• sensitivity to the driving partner's lead, to distinguish between orbital and axial lead information

Both sides needed the rhythmic dance space to gain a gentler touch to their musicality. All these, I began to see progress in. However the most wonderful thing, for me as educator, was the validation of the exercise begun two years ago. It took the experienced dancers just one song to get back in the flow of things, a telling sign that naturalisation had been achieved. Moreover they all danced displaying a strong connection with the music, something they happily (and with some surprise) admitted to.

This opens the way to the promised land of articulation and synthesis - firstly in the use of space, and afterwards in the interpretation of rhythm. I'm also intrigued as to what extent the experienced dancers might catalyse the development those new to the genre.

Loo Yen Yeo

Loo's Three Simple Steps To Bolero Success

Step 1: Perfect your synchrony between your vocalisation of "gung-ging-gung, pak, pak" and your hip movement.
You should feel the most pressure through the soles of your feet at "ging"
You should feel the most stretch around the outside of your hips at the second "gung"
Do this without music

Step 2: Listen to Bolero Teaching CD1 and pick out the tracks where "gung-ging-gung" is clearest.
Listen for the drums' "gung-ging-gung" sound
Synchronise your "gung-ging-gung" vocalisation with the drums' "gung-ging-gung" sound

Step 3: Hips, vocals and bolero song all-together
Listen for the drums' "gung-ging-gung" sound
Synchronise your "gung-ging-gung" vocalisation with the drums' "gung-ging-gung" sound
Synchronise your hip movements to your "gung-ging-gung" vocalisation AND the drums' "gung-ging-gung" sound

Easy Peasy :-D
Loo

Solares Debuts

I decided to open Solares as I mean to go on, with a workshop on bolero.

The slow tempo Cuban dance genre was selected because of the attending audience: all of them had been dancing studio or academy salsa for years. I wanted to provide a complementary experience; to develop skill sets under-emphasised by convention, and these features are key:

A convention of non-verbal vocalisations
Creating sounds with the human voice as a means of learning and propagating rhythm in the African tradition. We began with the vocalisation "gung-ging-gung" simulating the conga open tones of the bolero tumbao instead of an European-centric count of "and-4-and".

Synchronising movement to vocalisations
The lateral cradle-swing of the hips, thus transferring weight, was timed to the "gung-ging-gung" vocalisation. This brings the practice immediately to the First Stage of Independence (FSI), where each student is able to practice this without any external support. FSI is crucial for self-motivated, engaged students who would like to function in a flipped learning environment.

"Flipped Learning is a pedagogical approach in which direct instruction moves from the group learning space to the individual learning space, and the resulting group space is transformed into a dynamic, interactive learning environment where the educator guides students as they apply concepts and engage creatively in the subject matter." (from http://flippedlearning.org/cms/lib07/va01923112/centricity/domain/46/flip_handout_fnl_web.pdf)

Correlating vocalisations to sonic artefacts in the music
Understanding that the sounds they produce have their counterparts in music, and that this relationship between human-generated sounds and instrument-generated sounds is one of co-operative complementarity, not of dominance-subservience.

Synchronising movement to sonic cues
Once sonic (vocal) and kinesthetic (movement) production is matched, the sonic production is synchronised to the sonic artefacts in the music, resulting, too, in synchronised movement.

Raising the seat up timing
Conventional salsa studio instruction is foot-based i.e. it is the foot-placement to the floor which is correlated to each number of the count. This means that the rest of the body, most importantly the hips and heart, move, and are felt to move after the beat. This causes a dissonance, and even disconnection with the rhythm. (Hearing-impaired dancers have better rhythm because they are taught to feel the low-frequency vibrations of music in their chest.)

The synchronous "gung-ging-gung"-pelvic sway practice moves the seat of timing off the floor, up to hip level.

Fine control of movement
With a tempo range of 80-100bpm, there is twice as much rhythmic distance between each beat in the bolero compared to salsa (160-220bpm). Movements must be made more slowly and smoothly in order to fill these elongated spaces.

The greatest challenge faced by any attendee is a conceptual one. Having spent years being selected for and being optimised in an European learning convention, whom might cope with the change to a non-European learning context?

Loo Yeo

A Depth of Latin Culture: Bolero and Bachata (Part 2)

Whilst I personally agree that Tito Rodríguez, Daniel Santos, and Vincentico Valdés sing heart-moving boleros, if one is unable to discern the lyrical content, then are bachata and bolero equals?

I feel it's necessary to ask this since they:

• share a common ancestry, being descended from what is sometimes referred to as trova (troubadour) music in Cuba, and música de guitarra (guitar-based music) in Spanish Dominica*;
• owe much to the work of one man - Sindo Garay;
• rely on the martillo (hammer) rhythm of the bongó, not the conga, as their main propulsive element; and
  
• are slow to mid-tempo, of broad sweeping phrases with a late attack.
  

The main difference, over that bolero was danced contratiempo (on2, accent4) whereas bachata is not (on1, accent4), and that the latter is slightly more up-tempo with a faster attack; is that bachata is what's happening now.

Each dance is of its time - that is the social, political, economic conditions must be right for it to thrive. For example, salsa would not likely have occurred in the courts of King Louis XIV despite the Sun King's penchant, nay, necessity for dance:

1. Individual partner dances did not arise until later in the colonies, when plantation owners did so to express their independence from the crown. Until then, people kept step with one another in court.
2. Military defeats in Islamic Africa and the fear of slave revolt led to suppression of influences from the 'heathen' Dark continent - including extensive syncopations and polyrhythms in music.
3. Overt hip movements were considered lascivious and publicly indecent.
   

(Gawd! I'd've been thrown in the Bastille.) On the other hand, salsa arrived in Venezuela and Colombia right at a time when there was no indigenous expression for the cosmopolitanism their burgeoning cities were experiencing**. Bachata enjoys the dissemination rights of the Youtube Generation: globally reaching, and yet with its music and dance undivested of each other.

And as for the romantic musical expression, well... would people still dance to its soft soothing tones if bachatas de desparecio (thematically disparaging of women) were played? Maybe not in the Spanish-speaking countries, where women have begun to take some stand against similarly misogynistic expressions in reggaetón. But plenty of others are indifferent, and would dance anyway. They'd dance in Asia, oblivious. The attribute of being romantic would seem to owe its weight to music, with lyrical content as modifier. So how might one physically interpret this as a dancer?

The bolero does not have the same chequered past that the bachata has - its cultural history is clothed with more gentility and thematic consonance musically and lyrically. In places lived in by both, the bolero holds its own; described indicatively by Bosco as 'In America you play when the lights go down and the floor is packed with young and old alike.'

At least for now.

But are the people on that floor executing a series of movements to a rhythm; in a manner discrete enough to qualify as the ritmo of an actual genre? Or are they just shuffling about as they do in 'smoochie' sessions here? Could the latter form be the definition a social bolero - simply swaying to bolero music as opposed to dancing contratiempo? I suspect that the answer lies towards the easier end of in-between.

I got a hurry-up from him:

[begins]

José María Bustos:
Hey, my man!? Check out my pics of the MWSC and when you have a minute try to reply to my question about why Asians don't dance boleros and do they in Europe? In NYC its the most romantic thing about Salsa!! Y gue Dio's te tenga en La Rumba! B.

[ends]

Bro, I hope you've gotten your answer.

I myself can't say how long the grace of bolero will last in a space that bachata means to fill. With no premier bolero dancers of international repute to show us how, it can't be far away. But isn't it interesting to see how a cultural insider considers the bolero to be a part of salsa?

(On to Part Three.)

Loo Yen

*yes, a 'History of Bachata' is being planned for the salsa website.
** yes, there will be mention of this when I update the 'History of Salsa'

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