Dancing Questionnaires (13): Tom from Cardiff

Tom from Vamos a Bailar: Salsa in Cardiff and Around steps up:


1. Can you remember your first experience of dancing?
Dancing to a rhythm’n’blues band in the 1970s on the beer-soaked linoleum of Cardiff’s notorious – and long-demolished – New Moon Club.

2. What's the most interesting/significant thing that has happened to you while out dancing?
My answer to this changes all the time, because it always relates to the most recent dance where I really make a connection with a partner.

3. You. Dancing. The best of times…
Paris last summer. Free dancing on a warm Saturday night in the open air on the banks of the Seine, and then Sunday afternoon in Barrio Latino: I was on form and the dancers and the music were great.


4. You. Dancing. The worst of times…
Cattle markets in Cardiff Students’ Union in the late 70s, trying to pluck up the courage to ask for a dance.

5. Can you give a quick tour of the different dancing scenes/times/places you've frequented?
I used to jump about in an uncoordinated way at parties in the 70s. Myself and my (straight, male and female) friends also used to go to gay clubs and dance to disco music around the same time. I only got seriously into dancing around seven years ago: I’ve become addicted to dancing LA-style and more recently Cuban salsa (and the group version ‘rueda de casino’). I also dance merengue and bachata (dances from the Dominican Republic) and reggaeton if I’m sufficiently relaxed, though strictly speaking I'm too English and middle-aged for the latter.

6. When and where did you last dance?
Last night in Jumpin’ Jaks, Cardiff. A great night.

7. You're on your death bed. What piece of music would make your leap up for one final dance?
‘Este te Pone La Cabeza Mala’ by Los Van Van.

All questionnaires welcome - just answer the same questions and send to transpontine@btinternet.com (see previous questionnaires)

Dancing Questionnaire (11): Kate Aan De Wiel

Kate Aan De Wiel looks back on dancing all the way from West Ham to Cuba:

1. Can you remember your first experience of dancing?
Tap dancing lessons and an appearance as a Little Dutch Girl at West Ham Town Hall at the age of 3.

2. What’s the most interesting/significant thing that has happened to you while out dancing?
The 'High' of dancing Cuban Rueda da Casino with a bunch of friends in front of a crowd of people.

3. Dancing. The best of times…
In Cuba, in the street with a crowd of Cubans dancing Cuban Salsa

4. You. Dancing. The worst of times…
Realising that at my age, and with my knees, I should really pack up dancing.

5. Can you give a quick tour of the different dancing scenes/times/places you’ve frequented?
Country dances as a child at school.The Twist in the 60s, Mod dances in the 60s, etc etc in the 70s and 80s. Then discovering salsa and Cuba in the late 90s.

6. When and where did you last dance?
2 years ago at a club in Highbury, the Cuban Lounge at the Buffalo Bar on a Monday night - my favourite !

7. You’re on your death bed. What piece of music would make your leap up for one final dance?
El Tragico by NG La Banda .. and bugger the knees !

All questionnaires welcome- just answer the same questions and send to transpontine@btinternet.com (see previous questionnaires)

It is wild. It is sexy. It is the mambo

Around 1950 a new music and dance craze swept across the Americas - Mambo. It had emerged in Cuba during the 1930s as a series of variations within existing styles before becoming seen as something new, distinct and fashionable.

In New York, the key centre for Mambo was the Palladium dance hall in Manhattan. After visiting it in 1951, writer Jess Stearn wrote an article for the New York Daily News with the headline: 'Touch of Jungle Madness: Denizens of Broadway go Slightly Primitive under Spell of the Wild Sweaty Mambo'. The article continued 'it may turn the Great White Way into a veritable Congoland before it is through. It is wild. It is sexy. It is the mambo'.

David Garcia argues that such statements - not uncommon amongst writers in the USA and Cuba - reflected a 'shared sense of anxiety over and desire for racial and cultural Others whose sounds and bodily movements did not complement those commentators' concepts of a culturally and racially homogeneous nation'. They tended to cast 'Latin musicians and mambo music as relics of the remote or "primitive" human past' and by implication not belonging in the present on equal terms with other musics or indeed people.

Dance teachers saw a potential new market in popularising Mambo, but only by reducing it to a simplified series of steps. In a 1951 article in Dance Magazine, Don Byrnes and Alice Swanson argued that 'It is now the responsibility of the teacher to standardize, discipline and properly present this thrilling dance to make it acceptable'.

By contrast, Garcia found that 'Cuban and Puerto Rican dancers... emphasize the individuated, extemporaneous and communal aspects that defined and inspired their dancing in the 1940s and 1950s'. In contrast to rigid steps, the first generation of Mambo dancers stressed 'feeling the music', inner emotions, spontaneity and dancing as 'an embodied experience, in which sound and movement were merged through the body'.

Source: Going primitive to the movements and sounds of Mambo, David F. Garcia in Musical Quarterly, volume 89 (4), Winter 2006

Some great footage of Mambo dancing in Harlem in early 1950s, posted by the folks at dancehistory.org: