If you haven’t yet found out – we are hosting our first contest ever on the website in partnership with FOX and So You Think You Can Dance! You only have a few days left to submit your video. Remember, it just has to be a quick video with a dance pattern that you think people will like! You don’t need a fancy camera and you don’t need to explain the move. It’s that simple! It is something you can do at the end of a salsa dance class! Salsa, Cha Cha, Merengue, Salsaton.. anything goes. [Instructions]
In a salsa galaxy, far, far away… let’s just call it Iowa.
To show you an example of a quick video you could take, I have dug up one of the many videos from the very old ‘Salsa History Archives’ of Salsa Anthony version 1.0. This is a video of when I first started to learn how to dance in Ames, IA in a Salsa dance club I started with a few friends called ‘Descarga Latin Dance‘. While I will let you laugh at my XL-clothing attire and ‘boots for dance shoes’ – I hope it shows everyone that with hard work, you can grow your dancing abilities little by little: ANYONE CAN DANCE SALSA. We all go through the same growing pains. Hopefully this serves as inspiration to a few of you out there.
I expect a few funny commentaries or captions below.
You ever wondered how Salsa started? Where it started? When it began?I am a nut for the history of things so I have been researching Salsa for a while now. I have been around the NY/NJ Salsa scene for about 10 years now and I have seen how it has changed. Yeah, there are more instructors. Yeah, there are more places to dance. Yeah, the dancers are better. But the most important change has been that mainstream people are again appreciating the Art of Salsa now and they are wanting to take part in it. I have been working on a set of articles that will detail the history of Salsa/Mambo through the last six decades. In the meanwhile, let me give you a little peek.
Although this video is from a 1965 film, this Mexican film “El Dengue del Amor” shows the importance that Mexico had in the development of Mambo in the 1950s. The song in this video is “Mambo Universitario” starring Perez Prado as himself. The university portrayed is the U.N.A.M. (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico) whose professional soccer team are the “Pumas”. Continue reading ‘Mexico City and the Origins of Mambo’
I have come to realize that the videos that I have come to enjoy the most are the ones that provide me an emotional connection to the past of salsa. Sometimes I wonder if this is my ’second’ life since somehow watching these vintage videos makes me flashback to a time I was never born.
This video shows you a little more about the history of salsa. Selling Puerto Rican food cooked by the community. No big stage for the band. The crowd is all on the streets listening and feeling the music. The performers are playing on the small steps to a church. This is part of the old essence of the culture of salsa. The People’s Salsa. Not commercialized. Powerful lyrics. The singers are still human, while iconic. In a time when Latino immigrants came to New York to find a better life, there always remained a sense of ‘no matter what, we still have each other’.
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