Is It Possible to Market Casino as Anything Other Than “Salsa”?

God knows, I feel your pain, and indignation, they have been mine for many years. That said, I’m loving this site and if I don’t entirely agree with everything put here, you’re dealing with so many of my pet subjects of the last 25 years or so. You may be working in a very different environment but here’s hopefully some insights from living and working in the UK.
I learned “Cuban Salsa” beginning 1991 from a Cuban in London, the first to teach here. Early on we went to see Los Muñequitos de Matanzas at a club and after their set, they joined in the social dance and actually, kind of took over the floor. I couldn’t figure out what was happening but it looked so different from what I was learning. It wasn’t till 1994 when another Cuban arrived- there were literally only a handful in all of London back then- that I saw anything like it again. He was teaching a class where I was a DJ and at first I just wondered what the hell he was doing. Then, when he finally got going, making complete figures, it was almost like I was back watching Los Muñequitos again, it was the same dance. Clearly, though my first teacher stood out a mile from the Colombian dancing that dominated London Salsa at the time, his basic structures had adapted to his environment and lost the essence of Casino.
This new teacher was most definitely a bailarín, very showy, but in his dance group I was for the first time able to analyse what made the dance the way it is. One of my eureka moments was watching Homero dance Guaguancó barefoot, during which his connection with the ground and the way this flowed through to his torso became apparent. I’ve never seen anyone teach this, or try to. Cubans learn it through osmosis and never think about it, foreigners usually only see and learn steps and figures, then wonder why they still can’t actually dance. This may well not have been an aspect of Casino when it was born in the affluent layers of Cuban society but today it is this often subtle, Afro-Cuban derived subtext, which gives Casino so much of its flavour.
In 1997 I made it to Cuba for the first time with my then wife, and we did a crash course at the dance academy of Narciso Medina in La Habana, at which we would crawl through a hatch into a little attic and, each of us with a 2 litre bottle of water, dance Casino, Danzón, Guaguancó and Son for 3 or 4 hour stretches. Jesus, it was hot! And thanks for the clases, Tomás, I’ll never forget them.
The forward stepping is, as you say, fundamental to the dance and it’s really difficult to progress without breaking the habit of back steps, it certainly gave me problems for a while. My partner dances a lot more than me these days, necessarily with Salsa and “Cuban Salsa” dancers and though she prefers a contratiempo, it often takes a few dances to get used again, to Casino logic. That said, I don’t see such technical issues as the biggest problem in teaching Cuban dance to the British. We found several much greater obstacles to passing on what we wanted to. Firstly, most of our students came to us with something entirely different in mind from what we had to teach them and expected us to be different from how we were. Many had no interest in music, Cuban culture or even dance, really, and just wanted a “fun” way to keep fit.
My ex had studied historic European dance in Moscow where she became close with several Cubans and she was well versed in the Afro-Peruvian and indigenous dances of her country. I had worked as an English teacher in Tenerife, where I first discovered Salsa and Son. We taught Casino for many years in London, in clubs and adult education centres as well as running our own courses. I wanted to advertise the courses as Casino because that’s the dance I love and calling things by their proper names is important to me. But we just knew that we’d end up with a crowd of gamblers without adding (Cuban Salsa) or advertising Cuban Salsa (Casino). In the UK today, and in spite of there having been, for many years now, Cubans teaching Casino under various descriptions in many major cities, you couldn’t market a course as Casino, let alone Son, and expect to reach beyond a tiny niche audience. It would just be sectarian lunacy. Where I now live, outside of London, such advertising would attract precisely nobody. “Cuban Dance” might draw another tiny crowd here, particularly among well established teachers with a personal following but they would expect anything from dances for the Orishas to, well, have you seen the film “Cuban Fury”? If the Cuban involved in that film was willing to so misrepresent their country’s culture, not to mention the history of Salsa, or have any part in it, you can see anyone with an interest in popularising historical and cultural truth has an uphill struggle.
I’m a social dancer, not a performer, I’m British, “white” and with no pretensions or desire to comply with anybody’s torrid “Latin lover” fantasies and all the spray-on suntan that would involve. We had to compete with other teachers who were better, showier dancers and were able to tap into a fantasy that just wasn’t us. If I say so myself, with time and experience we became excellent, really professional teachers. Our agenda was to give students the vocabulary they needed to really dance rather than just robotically perform sequences, but that was often not what they wanted. We used to start every class with core body movement exercises, isolations, both to warm up and also to allow students to gain control of the parts of their body from which our culture has excluded us and which they would need, to dance Cuban. We did ok, many stuck with us over the years, but we found that most students preferred classes in which they would actually learn less, but would be constantly “wowed” by their exhibitionist teachers, most of whom couldn’t even plan a lesson, let alone pass on what they knew to anyone who couldn’t already dance. Obstacle number one, then, is that many people here tend to want confirmation and satisfaction of their fantasy rather than to learn about Cuban dance and culture as they are. They will see no beauty in and not be impressed by Casino because they are looking for quite different things. In the UK, that remains by far the greatest section of the audience for “Latin”.
For historical reasons, the English, whatever colour, are generally strangers in their own bodies. Centuries of protestant body shame and industrial work ethic have created a culture, or lack thereof, in which non-aggressive physical expression is socially unacceptable. Men worked then on their day off, went to church, drank and/or got in a fight to let out their pent up feelings. Dance is only for women, gays and toffs who have the time. You can see in professional ballroom, the camp aesthetic that persists. Not that I am at all homophobic or think gays shouldn’t dance, but it cuts me when TV dance judges constantly affirm theirs as THE way men dance and dress, because a heterosexual dance aesthetic is quite excluded from social or show dance in the mass media.
An important part of the resulting inhibition is the ability to play in a dance. We generally don’t know how to make physical jokes, to coquetear, to tell a story or develop a relationship in movement. We, particularly the middle class, are a verbal people and can be excruciating sharp and witty in words, but the same through our body has not merely never been cultivated but has been educated out of us. Likewise, if your motive in dancing Latin is to keep fit, make new friends or suchlike, you will not necessarily dance in relation to the music which you probably don’t particularly like anyway, and will tend to demand simple, dumbed down music which sounds close enough to what you already know, to go through your moves to. Sounds familiar? I’m pretty sure that catering for a musically unsophisticated foreign dance market has played a part in the demise of Timba.
We do, though, have a history of popular social dance here, which began to take off in the early 20th century as growing layers of society found themselves with a little more money and leisure time and Jazz influenced music, fake jazz, began to cross the Atlantic. Ballroom couples dancing used to be very popular, albeit in a terribly stiff, inexpressive way. This began to break down in the 1960’s and ‘70’s with the arrival of successive waves of genuine African-American and Caribbean music and to some extent dances, which took hold particularly among working class youth in the industrial north. This coincided, though, with a generational rejection of partner dance, in favour of soloing. It seems this is a necessary stage in recovering body literacy.
If you take a crowd shot from a YouTube clip of some Motown act on Ready, Steady, Go! of the early ‘60’s you’ll see white working class kids dancing. See how rigid and lifeless they are, like ghosts drifting around a floor. By the seventies, this had developed into a quite athletic style, a boxing shuffle, with upper body still held absolutely rigid, often very fast footwork interspersed with kicks, drops, break dancing and spins. This was, at its best, music driven and dancers would really connect with and interpret music in a way you hardly ever see in any form of Latin dance over here. Check out some Northern Soul clips on YouTube. This style has changed little except that there is a slight but perceptible increase in upper body movement, the dancers are loosening up, relaxing, and tend to look a little more at home with themselves, less defensively aggressive than in decades past. It’s useful to take snap shots of dance over time to see these dances not as fixed things but as a living social process.
New waves of body popping and break dance have accelerated this evolution until young people are growing up in our cities with quite a high degree of body literacy, much more than my generation. Some teenagers we once tried to teach in a school were ridiculously shy of dancing with the opposite sex, but the anxiety around being labelled “gay” for dancing is evaporating fast, as is homophobia. It’s a bit sad, though, that “Latin” hasn’t drawn in many young people, mostly just increased its appeal to my ageing generation. Who knows though, one day, English dancers might even take that connection with music of which I know we are capable, and take the leap back into couples, but I suspect I will not be around to see it. If I’ve played a small part in bringing that about, I’ll be content with that. Meantime, I haven’t taught a course for more than a decade and am happy to take a view on all this unburdened by the need to make a living. Getting out a bit more as my kids grow up, me, the Mrs and whoever else, will just be doing our thing and looking out for people who feel something like the same, because you can’t push stuff on people who aren’t ready for it, just be yourself and hope somebody appreciates it. Some do.