UNIVERSITY VAN AMSTERDAM
GSSS
GRADUATE SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES
RESEARCH MASTER IN SOCIAL SCIENCES
RMSS THESIS
Supervisors: Dr. Alex van Venrooij and Dr. Christian Bröer (Department of Sociology)
Third reader: Dr. Olav Velthuis (Department of Sociology)
Salsa Passion: The Experiential Character of Cultural Enjoyment
Student: Juan Escobar Campos
Student Number: 11785349
Date: 14th of August 2019
Salsa Passion: The Experiential Character of Cultural Enjoyment Juan Carlos Escobar Campos
University of Amsterdam
Abstract
This research explores the place of enjoyment in the contemporary field of cultural sociology. To do so it analyzes a case of consumption and engagement to a cultural practice that moves across different social, ethnic and cultural sectors in Europe: salsa. It argues that the enjoyment of salsa cannot be explain with the usual concept of habitus, as in salsa there are no direct connections between social positions and enjoyment. Instead, it proposes that enjoyment should be regarded from its experiential character: shaped by previous experiences and capable of acting in situational experiences. Additionally, I show that one practice can different forms of enjoyment because multiple configurations of enjoyment are ascribable to different life trajectories. Processes of cultural learning and emotional situations are accountable for how life trajectories configure meanings around the use of the body, identity, sexuality, intimacy and sociability, which in turn, configure the enjoyment of salsa. I present seven independent forms in which salsa can be enjoyed and I argue that each of these forms has its own aesthetic logic, configuring what can be understood as a good or bad salsa dance. Finally, this opens the possibility to study cultural judgement from experience, assuring that cultural evaluation can be the result of the possibilities enjoyment that objects and practices bring to us.
1. Introduction: diversity in Salsa
Why do a wide variety of people across the globe dance salsa? If all the salsa lovers that participated in my research gathered in one event, the result would be a party in Amsterdam with nationals from more than 15 countries and all ages between 25 to 61. Similarly, it would be possible to find dancers at all different educational levels and even with different migration histories. In that party it would be possible to find the so-called “expats”, migrants from Morocco and Turkey, descendants of Surinamese and the Dutch Caribbean Antilles, migrants from Latin America and Dutch people without a migration story, white, blond and tall. Additionally, they would all be moving with different dancing styles and doing different personal performances, dancing according to the different things that they are looking for. In fact, this party would look and be like any other dancing night of salsa in Amsterdam.
In this article I suggest that the usual tools of cultural sociology are not sufficient to explain the passionate engagement with salsa. With such a diverse scene, it is rather difficult to associate the practice of salsa to a particular cultural habitus, originating in specific social positions of the actors, which makes a Bourdieusian sociology hard to apply. We can neither explain the practice of salsa as a form of cosmopolitan cultural consumption, as salsa aficionados are not passive and conspicuous consumers of a foreign culture, but rather active producers of a constantly developing cultural world in which they fully immerse with commitment and personal dedication for years.
I propose to explain the consumption of salsa by studying the enjoyment that participants experience in the dancing and social situation. I contend that enjoyment holds the key to understand how the passion for salsa is both social and personal. Enjoyment is a part of a process of becoming a salsa dancer. In this process, migration trajectories, race, gender and cultural identities are highly relevant, but not fully determining the engagement in salsa.
Across the literature that studies salsa in Europe, it is common to find problematizations of the racialized character of its consumption, given that is a practice shared by white Europeans and Latin American migrants. Similarly, studies also criticize the
gendered and heteronormative character of salsa, which is centrally observed in the role of dancers with a man leading and a woman following.
Following recent research in the field of cultural sociology, I will explore the type of experience that salsa brings rather than the general social relationship between that practice and affiliation to class or race. I will address how enjoyment is personally configured in life trajectories where cultural meanings where learned and I will attempt to explain how enjoyment is connected to aesthetic evaluation and cultural conventions. Thus, I will suggest that the concept of enjoyment not only explains why salsa lovers engage in salsa but also is strong enough to cross cut between the experiences of different actors with different personal trajectories, social backgrounds and cultures, configuring different preferences on how to live salsa.
I will change the focus of research to the multiple social and personal dimensions that dancers develop like bodily expressions, identity, love for music, competition, romance, sexuality and sociability. With this study, I expect to contribute to the field of cultural sociology by exploring the place of enjoyment in the current literature, as well as its active role in shaping personal experiences of cultural consumption, that are, nevertheless, social.
2. Literature Review, Theoretical Background and Problematization:
Research literature on salsa dancing is not scarce. Since the emergence of salsa scenes in multiple global contexts, scholars have been interested in the ways in which the practice of salsa has been adapted to local contexts (Waxer, 1991).
The departing point of most of the analyses is the cultural appropriation of salsa that has resulted in conflicts around the aesthetic forms of the dance. Scholars characterize this conflict as a social and symbolic struggle between a community of Latin American migrants -which originally brought that cultural practice with them- and the non-Latin American dancers who have appropriated the practice for their own economic benefit and corporal enjoyment.
2.1 Salsa Beyond Social Fields of Symbolic Conflict
The most predominant interpretative approaches to this phenomenon have been the Bourdieusian theory of social fields and critical theories of cultural appropriation. As to the first, authors have seen in salsa a new cultural field in which a conflict exists for the
determination of the aesthetic logic that governs the field (Boulila, 2017; Pietrobruno, 2006; Urquia, 2005). Aesthetic judgements are part of this conflict because Latin American dancers have to compete against their non-Latin American counterparts to determine what should be the correct form of salsa in terms of dancing styles, meanings and appearance. The symbolic struggle that takes place in this field, therefore, has taken the form of the already existing social conflicts, reproducing social hierarchies of race, class and ethnicityi. In this view dancing styles are subjected to symbolic confrontation, representing the type of cultural capital employed to fight for it. Thus, discourses and performances of authenticity and exoticness constitute the form of cultural capital among Latin American migrants, while discourses and practices of technicality and the rationalization of the dance constitute the cultural capital of the non-Latin American migrants.
The magnitude of the symbolic conflict is often extended to the way in which both communities enjoy salsa (Roman Vásquez, 1999). It is believed that salsa dancers have patterns of cultural consumption that correspond to their community and their dancing style (Skinner, 2007; Renta, 2002). Those embodying a Latin American habitus are able to express themselves in a more fluid, expressive and natural way, in which dance is more passionate and emotional, while those embodying a European and North American habitus have a more rational, technical and domesticated use of their body, in which music interpretation, creativity and improvisation is confined.
Furthermore, the construction and performance of identities has also been understood from this framework, in which different symbolic communities form different group identities. The language spoken, physical appearance, the preferred music and social codes of conduct are representative of each of the communities of salsa dancing (Schneider, 2010; Skinner, 2007).
This approach to salsa is largely based on Bourdieu’s understanding of cultural fields and his sociology of taste. One of Bourdieu’s greatest contributions to the field of cultural sociology was demonstrating that aesthetic judgement is anchored in the social positions of actors, due to the existence of an embodied “system of schemes of perception and appreciation” (Bourdieu, 1984) -habitus- in the mind of the participants of the social and other cultural fields. With this, Bourdieu provided sociologists a framework to explore aesthetic judgement as a fundamental aspect of cultural consumption, art appreciation and
personal enjoyment, originating in social conditions rather than in a natural disposition of actors. Furthermore, in his cultural sociology, taste becomes a pattern of consumption configured as the ability to enjoy certain activities or objects for the social meaning that they may have in a given sphere of social relationships, which would be consistent with the claim that groups of dancers enjoy salsa differently according to their belonging to racial and cultural communities. Later developments of the theory explain how cosmopolitanism, as the preference for cultural practices of foreign contexts, works as a practice to show a particular type of capital. This has meant that cosmopolitan practices are better understood for its conspicuous character, for its form and not its contents (Peterson & Kern, 1996).
Despite the strength of the work of Bourdieu, its theory is hardly applicable to practices that move across different social spheres and whose patterns of consumption are not defined by any specific social group. And the case of salsa is representative of this limitation.
The idea that dancers with a particular dancing style ascribe themselves to certain dance communities -which in turn are rooted to particular ethnic and cultural groups- is often contradicted by events and parties where all styles are danced and all ethnic groups are welcomed and they dance with each other. Similarly, this idea is also contested by cases in which dancers from different ethnic and cultural groups can flow between styles. Some Latin Americans have mastered the more technical and challenging styles, while some Europeans and North Americans have learned the hip moves and the flair that constitutes the more “authentic” or “indigenous” styles of Latin Americans. These facts make the theory of cultural fields inconsistent, as long as the appreciation and enjoyment of salsa appears to not be linked to specific cultural and racial communities with variations of cultural capital.
Even though actors change from different styles they give value and prefer certain styles and certain aspects of salsa more than others. How can we then explain the differences in cultural appreciation of salsa? And what explains that under multiple legitimate dancing styles some dancers are still considered good and some others bad?
This problem suggests that there might be specific traits in cultural enjoyment that could be better explained by understanding the specific content of the practice and its pleasurable aspects in the situational context for actors with different life trajectories.
Recent works in cultural sociology have contributed to understand these aspects of cultural consumption. The work of Hennion & Gomart (1999) develops a theory for the sociological understanding of attachment. Departing from the analogy with addiction of drug users, the theory explores how such an intense engagement with an object is also possible among consumers of any cultural object such as the one of listeners to music. Previously, Becker (1963) had already envisioned how the use of marihuana was the result of a process in which its users were socialized in order to enjoy the effects of the drug.
These ideas allowed Benzecry (2011) to shift from a sociology of taste to a sociology of passion that provided a deeper approach to the analysis of the love for opera among fanatics in Buenos Aires. For Benzecry, the performance of musical taste is rather far from the traditional sociological concepts of status or class and can be better comprehended from “the stages they [opera goers] traverse to reach a level of knowledge and mastery that guarantees the most complete enjoyment” (Benzecry, 2011, p. 180). His additional contribution to the field comes from highlighting the personal processes that actors go through in order to become committed opera lovers, with their initial circumstances, cultural mediations and kinds of sociability.
In opera fanatics, Benzecry discovers a mystical approach towards music by which opera lovers seek transcendence and the connection to the divine through inwardness and personal contemplation of the object. Collins and Benzecry (2015) elaborated on the mysticism around opera as high art form, explaining that types of cultural enjoyment are identifiable among upper, middle and lower classes, resembling religious experience. The enjoyment of opera lovers is typical of middle-class consumers who seek self-absorption as means of inwardness, distancing themselves from the emotionalism and corporality of lower classes. This is why Benzecry’s approach is not fully applicable to salsa. It deserves a deeper understanding of the individual cultural experiences in objects and practices that are not traditionally considered as high forms of art but rather forms traditionally considered as popular. How do middle classes enjoy forms of arts in which body and emotions predominate?
A different approach to enjoyment in salsa comes from the anthropological literature that deconstructs the racialized discourse of Latinness as exoticized and gendered dance. These works do depart from the question of what is enjoyable about salsa. Discourse analysis have concluded that salsa shapes the relationship between dancers under the frame of the passionate others (Boulila, 2017; Escalona, 2015). Salsa is pursued by European and North American dancers for its imaginative value, seeking pleasure in the enjoyment of the exotic Latin lover, as a sensual body more connected to emotions. This view also points to the gendered roles of the dancing because they are connected to the pleasure that dancers pursue in performing imagined traditional roles of a dominant male and a fragile female (Schneider, 2013).
In this work, I also suggest that such a view is not fully consistent with an ethnographic approach of the dancing experience, based on narrations and observations of how the dancer experiences the practice of salsa. Usually, when asked, respondents do not corroborate that preferring certain cultures or ethnicities, or fantasizing about an exotic other determines their preference for dancing. Analyses in this approach have failed to see that dancers can enjoy their dancing partners irrespective of their nationalities, cultures and ethnicities, and even though they have identifiable preferences for specific forms of dancers. The question still remains puzzling from a sociological point of view: Do race, culture and gender configure the preferences of salsa dancers? If not, how could we better explain such configurations?
Great contributions to the disentanglement of these issues come from approaches that consider independently the role of the senses and the situational experience of dancing.
In her book “Dancing Tango: Passionate Encounters in a Globalizing World” (2015) Kathy Davis has taken the first step to locate pleasure at individual cultural experience in the passion of tango dancers in Amsterdam and Buenos Aires, connecting body, emotions and intimacy with experience, cultural consumption and the taste for music and dance. The work of Davis is important because through the concept of passion she resolves the two tensions around race and gender that underlie the consumption of Tango in global scenarios. The first is the reproduction of social hierarchies as distances between Global North consumers and Global South producers that take place in tango and the second is the gendered structure of roles and the reproduction of the male dominated culture through dance. By describing the
passionate practice of tango, she shows that dancing practices among Europeans and Argentinians have little resemblance to the social hierarchies that persist in the postcolonial global order.
Additionally, she shows that women dance tango with full awareness of its gender roles, highlighting that it is passion rather that embodying these roles what engages them in tango. The work of Davis describes the nature of tango passion and locates it in a global cultural field, in which discourses and practices are localized for individual pleasure, situating passion in its social conditions. However, Davis fails to explore the origin of the passion as to the first contact of individuals with the dance, as well as the mediations between this experience and previous experience in self trajectories.
The above cited works of Benzecry and Davis describe a homogenous and socially shaped experience that constitutes a single form of enjoyment. But this view still needs further development to explain how cultural experience can make actors pursue certain forms of passion and not others.
In this paper I will suggest that multiple forms of enjoyment can co-exist in a cultural world. This is still a fundamental step in the development of the theory of passion in order to comprehend the dynamic nature of cultural worlds, that presents contradictions, disagreements and even conflicts around how passion should be lived and enacted. In that sense, I turn again to the question of cultural judgement with the questions of what constitutes a good or a bad experience of the field, who is living it adequately and how. This is different from a theory of the symbolic domination of the cultural field as I will not locate the aesthetic judgement in embodied social structures in the form of habitus, but rather in learned cultural skills and meanings that are activated in specific cultural situations. Different to Benzecry and Davis, my ethnographic observations show a field where not only one form but multiple forms of passion co-exist, allowing for actors to choose among different possibilities of enjoyment in the salsa situation. I situate the possibility of enjoyment in their personal trajectories, from which they elaborate what is a good and a bad salsa experience, mediated by meanings of the body, emotions, intimacy and socialization.
Finally, literature on the social history and the sociology of salsa as form of popular culture is also characteristic of the research conducted in Latin American countries and in the places of social diaspora in the US (Rondon, 2008). A big part of this literature politicizes
the character of enjoyment. For them, salsa enjoyment is not only archetypical of resistance towards social and cultural domination but it has also shaped the contours of a Latin American identity with a sentiment of belonging (Quintero, 2011). A second tendency in the literature analyzes the mediations of salsa between sociability and popular culture, describing how the reception of salsa among different social classes created types of sociability, through individual experiences, that are possible to disentangle sociologically as collective memories of enjoyment (Gomez & Jaramillo, 2013; Ulloa 2015).
2.3 Theoretical background
To understand the practice of salsa I propose a theoretical background that considers the enjoyment of the practice as an experience. Experience is conceptualized both as a situational experience and as accumulated experience that can be read as trajectories or individual processes of cultural learning. I will also suggest that when those trajectories meet the interaction ritual of dancing salsa they can configure patterns of enjoyment. The mechanism that makes the latter possible is the activation of declarative and non-declarative modes of culture, producing meaningful experiences. The practical consequence that this will bring to the field of cultural sociology is that it will suggest another approach to aesthetic judgement, proposed as the evaluation of cultural objects and practices according to the possibility of achieving experiences that are considered good or bad differently by different actors. Enjoyment is finally suggested as the global mechanism that connects multiple experiences and bring together different worlds of meaning.
Sociologically, experience has been conceptualized both as accumulated and as situational. The first conceptualization owes to Alfred Schutz the notion of experience embodied individually as “stock” (Schutz & Luckmann, 1973). This concept was applied by Schutz himself to the field of arts to understand musical knowledge not only of the musician who knows the rules of the practice but also of the layperson who “approaching a so-called unknown piece of music does so from a historically determined situation, determined by his stock of musical experience at hand” (Schutz, 1951, p. 86).
A second notion of experience comes from the conceptualization of interactional rituals (IR) by Randall Collins (2004). To him a sociology of ritual is needed to understand the situational dynamics of experience as a possibility to produce and reproduce meaning
through the canalization of emotional energy. In his conceptualization, emotional energy (EE) is not only the result of the ritual that can create bonds of solidarity -as in Durkheim (1912)- but also a driving force in the rationale of individuals who strive for it. Thus, power and status enter as social conditioning of the possibilities that actors have to achieve emotional energy. In this paper I will describe the different contours of the emotional energy that result into different forms of enjoyment in the ritual of salsa.
The concept of life trajectory is suggested as individual accumulation of experiences that shapes the cultural preferences of actors. This understanding of life trajectories takes distance from Bourdieu’s (1993) definition of trajectory as the change of one actor’s positions in a cultural field (as cited in Giuffre, 1999, pp. 818-819). I will go closer to Giddens’ (1991) notion of trajectory as an individual process of self-development that stretches over the lifespan of the individual. As paths of self-realization these trajectories are processes influenced by personal decisions, skills formation, by lifestyles adoptions and by the formation of identities. Additionally, as Collins (2004) has shown, interaction rituals form chains of connected situations, in which a previous situation sets the frame for the experience of the following. The work of Faulkner & Becker (2009), also identifies how musicians connect to each other thanks to cultural repertoires learned in careers of personal formation and situational experiences. Thus, I understand life trajectories as an articulation of the individual processes of self-development with the situational enjoyment of the salsa experience.
In a recent influential paper, Omar Lizardo (2017) has described the mechanism that explains the relations between culture and action in cultural cognition. With his notions of public culture and personal declarative and non-declarative culture, Lizardo provides a theory of “enculturation” in which the interplay between these forms of culture constitute the individual’s repertoire. Cultural experience as a form of enjoyment or passion could be understood as the interplay between individual skills and dispositions for bodily and emotional experiences, intimacy and sociability with public forms of culture available in interactional situations, such as rituals, catalyzed by music, dance and other aesthetic forms.
Finally, from the sociology of valuation and evaluation proposed by Lamont (2012) I ask what makes a cultural experience good or bad -as to enjoyable or not enjoyable- and how different forms of enjoyment can compete to determine what is a good or a bad dancer. As
different actors may have different repertoires of enjoyment, rooted in different experiences of the body, emotions and sociability, they have different ways to evaluate what is an enjoyable dance, a good dancer and a good party. One of the conclusions of this article is that actors that embody different repertoires of enjoyment are considered better in the field.
3 Case Selection and Methodology
In an initial exploration of the field of salsa in Amsterdam I found more than 15 dancing schools that offer regular classes of salsa and bachata. Similarly, I found around 10 nightly events that occur on a weekly basis in the city, throughout the whole year, while some other 5 to 10 events are organized monthly. In summer, salsa events multiply and the chances to dance are also extended to day time and open-air locations. During that season, I found that the biggest event can congregate weekly more than 700 dancers distributed in five different spaces with orchestras, workshops, DJs, food and 8 hours of non-stop dancing.
Furthermore, Amsterdam is a regular stop for salsa dancers, artists and orchestras touring around Europe. It also hosts international events where dancers from around the globe show their talents and contribute to the spread of new steps and styles, like congresses and festivals. Amsterdam has a world of salsa dancing that is representative of and comparable to other European capitals where salsa has transformed the night lives of many inhabitants in the past twenty years. Additionally, the diversity of the city is also represented by the diversity of the dancing scene with people from a multiplicity of nationalities and backgrounds. All of this makes Amsterdam a privileged place for the study of salsa dancing, with a scene embedded in the dynamics of globalization.
I researched the case of salsa with an ethnographic methodology that sought to provide a description of the phenomenon, as detailed as possible. To do that I involved myself in the field, combining participant observation, informal conversations, personal reflections and semi-structured interviews as sources of data collection.
My involvement in the field was influenced by the fact that before arriving to Amsterdam I had been dancing salsa for many years in Colombia. Salsa is part of my vital experience, embedded in a circle of familiar, social and intellectual relationships. I learned salsa around the age of 15, taught by the female members of my family in Bogota, a city with more than 30 clubs specialized in salsa and where it is common for people to go out dancing
every weekend as part of the social life. During those years I also learned how to play the patterns of salsa (“tumbaos”) on piano and in percussion.
This background meant to me that I experiencing the field already from a particular enculturation of salsa. I was not new to the music or the dance and I did not have to learn it from scratch. Nevertheless, I had an indigenous dancing style partly transferrable to the local styles and that partly required some adaptation, which I did by standardizing my style to the Cuban style, in a process that was much like what native English speakers do when softening their accent to make it understandable for the non-native speakers. In an effort to counterbalance my grounded departing point, I followed lessons of other styles from the amateur level and explored the world of those styles, annotating my observations and reflections.
Noticing that the type of students that go to the dancing schools does not change much in terms of age, nationality and level of education, I sampled two of them to observe their lessons, based on the dancing style that they offer, as research shows that separate dancing communities can exist depending on the preferred style (Schneider, 2013) -one of them offers LA style classes and the other Cuban style lessons.
I also noticed that lessons that often target a particular social group are taught by a private teacher. Therefore, I attended lessons at three different community centers, one in which the group was composed by elder dancers (above 50), one in which the lessons were offered to the particular community of neighbors of all ages and one for elder people of a particular community of neighbors.
Along with lessons, I also conducted observations in all the regular weekly events organized in Amsterdam, as well as in some occasional events. Moreover, I observed the events of a national dancing competition twice, the only one of its kind in the country, which features contests between couples from all the Netherlands and that awards the best ones in each style and category.
18 semi-structured interviews were also conducted during the period of fieldwork. I distinguished between the roles that different actors have in the field of salsa and found types of roles in dancers, teachers, school owners, party organizers and DJ’s. I interviewed at least one person in every role. Furthermore, I used a stratified purposive sample to interview salsa dancers according to their levels of expertise. I found categories of dancers that could be
students, social dancers or professionals. Segments of stratification among students followed from the type of academy and style learned and from the different levels at which they were: beginners, intermediate and advanced, segmented also by sex and nationality. The social dancers I interviewed are those dancers that completed or stopped having lessons but continued to dance regularly. I considered professionals all those dancers whom are considered so by the salsa world, this resulted in those who have made salsa one of their main sources of income.
I approached the majority of the interviewees after lessons or during salsa events. After lessons I talked to the students and usually one or two from every class wanted to participate. In parties I got the opportunity to talk to different people and in this way, I found out from the beginning who was more approachable, talkative and willing to tell their own experiences in the dance floor. On the other hand, I used the snowball technique to meet dancers whose experiences were considered important by other dancers. In general, all participants were curious and excited about a research on salsa dancing.
I interviewed 3 beginning students, 2 intermediate and 2 advanced, one of whom works also as a teacher assistant, 4 of them females and 3, males. I interviewed 2 female and 4 male dancing instructors, 1 female and 1 male teacher assistants. Moreover, I interviewed 4 additional participants that are only social dancers, 2 females and 2 males. Finally, I also interviewed one male DJ. All in all, out of the 18 participants, 10 males and 8 females, between the ages of 25 and 61, although most of the participants are between the ages of 25 and 45, and from 13 different nationalities -Dutch, English, Austrian, Italian, Spanish, Moroccan, Ugandan, Colombian, Peruvian, Mexican, Uruguayan, Dominican and Cuban.
As Vaisey (2009) and Lizardo (2017) have contended, interviews in the field of culture can only access the conscious level of individuals or “the elephant rider”, while a more unconscious individual levels remains unexplored. I overcame this problem in two ways. First, I triangulated the interview data with observations, in many cases observing the same interviewees, which allowed to compare what people say about what they do with what they actually do. Some interviewees are regulars on the dance floor and during the parties I asked them what they felt as a significant and valuable experience vis-a-vis a non-significant experience in the situation.
Second, I did not only ask for reasons and motivations in my interviews but also asked for experiences at the level of more unconscious or non-declarative modes of culture. While I interviewed participants, I did not only ask for the reasons of “why they danced salsa”. In fact, this was far from the approach that I used. I approached my interviews by asking first about the dancer’s life, their life experiences with music, dancing, travelling and family relationships. Secondly, I asked them about their particular experiences with salsa, with their first encounter, their learning process and to what extent salsa mediated a personal story. Since my goal was the collection of recollections, I also asked to elaborate on feelings and emotions that were connected to those experiences and how they placed their body in those memories. Bodies and emotions are disentangled from the narrations of conscious justifications because they occur sometimes even without the intention of the dancer. By asking the dancers to elaborate on those emotions the sociologist can not only capture the experienced of what happened but also the justifications that actors give to those emotions. This is valuable data to understand how dancers learn how to master their bodies and their emotions and the extent to which they are aware of the process of embodiment.
Contrary to what Vaisey (2009) proposes, interviewees that dance often observe their bodies and emotions in the situation and can provide and account of their bodily experiences. In many cases, they are even aware of the factors and situations that trigger particular emotions and body sensations and have learned how to foster them or how to control them. Many individuals I interviewed could elaborate on the place of a particular emotion, or a particular body skill in the situation of salsa. In a way, they could understand the relations between levels of declarative and non-declarative culture.
After data collection, I analyzed the data qualitatively and inductively, combining some fundaments of grounded theory (Timmermans & Tavory, 2012; Charmaz, 2006) with theme analysis on the software Atlas.ti. I transcribed all the material and free coded about three quarters of it. Secondly, I made an axial coding of the data which resulted in groups or family codes. I filtered the groups leaving all those codes that co-occur with enjoyment. Next, I organized all the groups in themes according to what the data said about a good dance, a good dancing partner and a good party. Finally, I created networks of all codes in themes that result in the final themes of my analysis that I refer as forms of enjoyment. Therefore, my analytical approach is phenomenological and grounded in the interpretation of situations, of
stories heard in interviews, of my own thoughts and in the constant questioning of 6 months of fieldwork.
4 Results
4.1 The scene of salsa dancing
The history of salsa has it that Puerto Rican and Cuban migrants were responsible for the creation of salsa in the marginalized neighborhoods of New York (Quintero Rivera, 1998; Rondón, 2010 [1979]).
Amsterdam was among the European capitals struck by the expansion of salsa dancing during the ninetiesii. It is a city whose dancing scene is influenced by the presence of many Cuban migrants who left their country in the eighties and nineties and brought their dancing style to the Netherlands. Together with Cubans, Colombians, Venezuelans and many other Latin American dancers have contributed to the embracement of salsa. Its dancing scene is also enriched by the presence of migrants from the overseas Dutch territories of Aruba, Curacao, Bonaire and Saint Marteen, which adopt salsa along with their Caribbeanness.
4.2 Salsa and its different forms of enjoyment
The joy of dancing salsa can be experienced at the individual level, personally and inwardly, yet it can be mutually transmitted and reinforced by dancing couples or it can be collectively experienced by the group of dancers. All of which occurs in the parties, known as socials, meetings or simply events, where a group of regular and new dancers meet to move along the Afro-Caribbean beats of salsa for hours. In a club or dancing venue, a couple -usually of a man and woman- shares one entire song, sometimes two or sometimes more, depending on how engaged they are with each other. On the dancefloor all eyes are on all couples, which means that every song and every partner contribute to build a public image of the dancer and sometimes even a reputation lasting longer than the party. The dancing space with its disposition of the dancers, the quality of the floor, the temperature inside and the bar can all contribute to make the experience more enjoyable for the dancers and, of course, more profitable for the organizers behind it.
In this setting, salsa dancers are always on the search for a good dance, a good dancer and a good party, that provides the highest experience of joy and pleasure. Although there
are different personal ways to experience salsa, there is one common rule to dancing judgement: to be a good dancer, one needs to enjoy what one is doing and that implies entering into the flow of emotional energy that the situation allows.
“You get into a flow that keeps flowing. With that flow you don’t think of anything, you experience the dance to the fullest. Pick every accent in the music and it fits to the moment. You are in Sync with the partner, with the music and you reach the Essentia. All the parts become one. That differentiates the better dancers from other dancers.” (Ray, 25, Dancer)
The experience of being absorbed by the dance is similar to that of the religious trance. A mind and body state in which the dancer has transited to a different reality either alone, with the partner or with the whole social body. The practical effect of this sensation is that dancers unwind, leaving all preoccupations behind and immerse their bodies in an automatic flow of movement. While Benzecry (2011) found the same sensation of self-absorption and personal transcendence in opera fans, these music lovers have one specific path of inner experience i.e. being one with the resonance of the operatic voice. In salsa, on the other hand, there are multiple forms of feeling in trance: feeling one with the music, feeling one with your body, absolute connection to your partner, self-realization and accomplishment of goals, being brought back to your country, romantic realization, being all of a sudden in a different country or culture or experiencing the collective effervescence. These are all forms of emotional energy (Collins, 2005) with different contours and contents, triggered by the interaction ritual of salsa.
However, the sociological dimension of salsa appears to be that just enjoying is not enough to be a good dancer because cultivated forms of enjoyment shape what is considered good by different dancers. I call forms of enjoyment particular types of cultural consumption and appreciation that lead to a desired state of joy in salsa, built from previous experiences and life trajectories and stimulated during the situational experience that express individual and social meanings around the use of the body, emotions, identity, intimacy, sexuality and sociability.
I present the forms of enjoyment according the levels of experience where they occur. Sometimes enjoyment occurs at the personal level, some others at the level of interpersonal
exchange with the dancing partner and other times at the social level with third persons or with the entire collective body of a party. Some forms of enjoyment communicate different levels of experience and this is what allows that a person feels comfortable with the social world in which they are immersed.
4.3 Stepping into the dance
For the view of the outsider, having fun in salsa is a privilege reserved only for those who can dance. However, many decide to cross the border and experience the fun themselves. The setting in which they learn, the learning process and the stage of their life in which they are with respect to music and other dances will contribute to shape the type of experience that they will look for later. Therefore, what is interesting about salsa is that the enjoyment everyone looks for comes not only from the process of familiarization with the music or with the moves, but also from the result of the activation of individual dispositions and meanings towards the use of the body, the experience of emotions and the socialization with others. And this is to a large extent the result of individual processes of joy enculturation.
Because of previous dances and previous parties, experienced dancers already know well enough what type of experience they like and how they like it, while some of them are also open to experimentation of new styles, genres, venues and people. Dancers with less expertise have had that enjoyable experience before but want to learn how to have more and achieve it faster, with less effort. Those new to the field have seen salsa in previous situations or they have heard passionate accounts of it. They are driven to become part of it because they do not want to miss out on the fun, whatever it is. Therefore, new dancers start a process of cultural embodiment with the goal of making the moves very much part of themselves so the fun comes naturally, without struggles. A common trait of salsa enjoyment is that the dancer must feel comfortable with their steps to dance. The more embodied the steps, the easier dancers can detach from daily life.
In Amsterdam, as in many other cities, the basic step (“el básico” or “mambo basic”) is the technical requirement to get access to the realm of salsa dancing in any style. Anyone who has not learned this basic step considers themselves a dancer or can say that they have experienced salsa. Schools and instructors teach this step by asking students to count from 1
to 8 and to make 3 steps and 1 pause every 4 counts, depending on the style the steps can be in the 1-2-3, 5-6-7 beats or in the 2-3-4, 6-7-8, but the first one is the most common.
During the lessons that I attended, I observed that all the instructors, even those that had learned salsa from an early age in Cuba or Colombia, used that counting system. This contrasts with the way in which they originally learned. As they assured in interviews (and this corresponds to my own experience), learning the basic step without formal teaching takes longer because it is done by imitation, from friends or family members, in ways that are not even easy to rememorate. In this way, these dancers do more than only the basic step with their feet, because they add to it small moves of other body parts such as knees, hips or chest, all of which were embodied during initial exposures to salsa.
Once they started teaching, they adopted the counting system that allowed students to access the basic steps and the realm of enjoyment faster. In a way, they have transformed a mode of what Lizardo calls non-declarative culture into declarative culture to make enjoyment more immediate to students, by using counting as a learning strategy that is universal to most dances.
In order to do the basic step right, the student must in the first place learn how to count correctly just to later put their feet on the right beat. The ability to feel the music beat before counting shows how modes of non-declarative culture support the learning process of salsa. If the counting is right, what follows is just putting the body in the place that the instruction demands.
Personal trajectories of dancers mediate the process of salsa learning, making it easier or more difficult. For a person with experience in ballet, modern dance, urban or other western dance styles, the skill to count from 1 to 8 can be transposed to salsa, with the exception that they must know that 4 and 8 are pauses. If the pursuers of the dancing do not go to a class -and therefore learn the declarative knowledge- it will be difficult to match their dancing trajectory with the salsa language.
These friends of mine who used to dance salsa would tell me: “How can it be possibly that you can dance all your styles [ballet and modern] but you cannot dance salsa? So they explained me the basic step. I couldn’t get it, nothing, always off-beat, because I could not hear the beat. Nobody explained me, that in all my life I always counted to 8, and simply nobody said that [in salsa] you count differently. 4 and 8 are a pause. And counting from 1 to 8, I was always out of beat. I would
go to the parties to try it, because everyone was enjoying, except for me. The partners would tell me “do not worry, I lead”. Nothing. They would step on my feet. (Magdalena, 32, Italian dancer, experienced)
The first experience of many dancers in salsa is to do the right step and discovering all the different elements and possibilities of enjoyment that the dance brings like the music, the body contact, the social situation, the use of the body and alternating between those and getting the steps right.
In light of all the described learning process of salsa, my observations show the basic step works as a technical boundary that divides those who can dance and have fun from those who cannot.
4.4 Enjoyment at the personal level: Experiencing personal absorption
4.4.1 Musical absorption: The energic line of a trumpet or a trombone, a jazzy piano solo, the rhythmical improvisation of the Afro-Caribbean percussion instruments, the voice of the singer or the catchiness of a chorus are all musical cues that a salsa lover can recognize in a song, triggering excitement and emotion. Musical enjoyment is the personal engagement with salsa music in parties, concerts or even in everyday situations. This form of personal love for music has been described before in the sociological literature (Benzecry, 2011; DeNora, 2000; Henion & Gomart, 1999) and I found it also among the lovers of salsa.
One of my interviewees, a salsa DJ and music collector, is not only a music lover but also lives the musical enjoyment in salsa to its highest degree. As he explained to me, he feeds his passion for salsa with new music but also with meaningful musical experiences that makes him feel one with the music. It works as a communication with the sublime.
When I play the song “Diez lágrimas” I get goosebumps. I went to the concert of Pedro Arroyo [...] and when he was playing the first song “Y qué”, I said: Is it true that he is going to sing it? That song is in my veins. And then he was singing “Y qué” and then I knew all his songs. I was happy, I felt that no one else existed, it was only me with the music. Did not matter who was next to me I felt it was only me. (Willie, 42, music DJ)
But musical enjoyment is also traceable to personal trajectories. The life of this DJ was marked by the fact that he was adopted from Colombia in the Netherlands 40 years ago. Even though he always had full citizenship and command of the Dutch language, his childhood was difficult as he was discriminated at school for his skin color and had no friends during this time. He found his own world in music mixing techno tapes and playing with synthesizers -salsa was not a possibility yet. At the age of 18 he discovered and became friends with a group of other adopted children from Colombia and was exposed to Latin American music. There the love for salsa came not only from listening to the music but from feeling welcomed and finding friends in the type of parties that those Colombians would organize. He started collecting salsa music and soon became a DJ. He explained me that salsa for him was not about feeling Latino or belonging to this community in Amsterdam. For him salsa is about owning the music and making it part of his life and his body.
Teachers and dancers refer to musicality as the ability to hear the music, interpret it and dance on the beat. Thus, musicality is an important embodied skill to have before learning salsa. Some beginners have more than others and many times it depends on previous experiences with music or dance, like playing an instrument or having a background in previous dances. Often new dancers are struck by the power of music in their first dance, feeling totally connected to it because of their musicality.
Musical enjoyment configures a logic of dancing evaluation by which good dancers have more musicality and can interpret music better than others. Then, dancers that enjoy music more than everything else, create dancing repertoires that are activated depending on the type of salsa style that they dance, e.g. mambo, Cuban salsa, romantic salsa. Additionally, a good dancer knows the songs with its breaks, changes and sings along. This compensates many times for not being technical enough because at least the person is enjoying the music. A good party is to a great extent influenced by the selection of music for some.
Musical enjoyment can also be in conflict with other forms of enjoyment, like technical enjoyment, affecting the quality of the dance or the quality of the party. Many music lovers mention how much they disagree with dancers that attempt difficult turns and dance combinations in slow romantic salsa songs, for example, or dancers that would never attempt to learn the songs by heart.
Music enjoyment can enhance other forms of enjoyment like enjoyment through means of body and self-expression or enjoyment of the Latin American identity of salsa, as we will see further.
4.4.2 Absoprtion in cultural identification: Salsa is a rich universe of meaning whereby songs and other symbols communicate a Latin American identity. It is also the site of communication of smaller national, ethnic or local identities, like the Cuban, Puerto Rican, Black Caribbean (the negro and the mulato) or the one from the Colombian city Cali. They all interact together in the vast repertoire of salsa songs that narrate anecdotes about migrants in New York, about urban characters, about the Spanish colonization, about Latin American cities and many others. As these songs are all in Spanish, many Latin Americans are aware of these meanings and in many cases build their identity from them.
Additionally, many salsa songs mention implicitly or explicitly a second common aspect of Latin American identity, the qualified character of Latin American enjoyment. For salsa lovers and many Latin Americans, no one can enjoy parties, music and dance better than Latin Americans.
In every salsa event I went to, the DJs played at least one song from the strongly meaningful repertoire of cultural anthems for Latin American dancers, who reach a certain state of excitement with the music. But what is at play in this situation is not the enjoyment of the music as such, but the experiential enjoyment of cultural identification. A state of happiness that is achieved through the performance of well-known songs that evoke past experiences and previous anecdotes of joy.
I think in salsa I feel privileged to understand the music because that gives me a spark to dance better than others.
One song that I like is “Me dicen Cuba” was created by Cubans and I love it because it says something like my name is Cuba because I carry the suffering in my blood, because I have struggled. All this I feel for my country, because if I want to be Latina, Peruvian, I must have walked the streets, have smelled the aromas and have fought. That shows the Latin experiences because in the end we are all similar. We come from countries that have struggled. People that need to migrate and work hard for less money. And music is what gives
you the happiness in that. When I listen to salsa, I can live it in that way! (Rosa, 27, Peruvian - Spanish, Dancer)
Emotional songs and situations are usually the moments in which Latin American dancers try to show their best and most authentic moves, with styles that are more representative of their country like the Cuban or the Colombian style or the style danced in the Caribbean Dutch Antilles. Most frequently, these dancing skills were embodied by some Latin American dancers after processes of long exposures in emotional situations of socialization.
Ángel, a 26-year old Mexican living in Amsterdam, explains how the life experiences of the Latino, combined with the particular enjoyment of salsa as an identity -that he calls ‘feeling’- sets the foundation of an aesthetic logic.
Only a Latino can have a latino feeling. The language and understanding the song, you can
relate to things of your life, things you see in the everyday, the taste of the food. It is all that.
(...)
As to the movements it’s special.
You can easily recognize another Latin American person while dancing. When you dance with a Latina girl is like: oh! This is the move. And some Dutch they dance very naturally and very good but still you can notice the difference.
(...)
Sometimes you can see the most European person that you can think of. But he or she interested themself in dancing and then they learned the language and then the culture. Then he or she liked the Latinos or Latinas and then, pam! He or she turns into an adoptive Latino and develops a feeling. It’s not genetic. A Latino brought up in China or Russia will not be an expert salsa dancer.
As Ángel acknowledges, two elements make the Latino dancer a better dancer. First, the long-process embodied skills and second, the particular Latino enjoyment that he calls “feeling”. Those two are connected by means of previous emotional and situational experiences and constitute the “authentic” enjoyment or interpretation of salsa. Latino dancers on the dancefloor show not only their moves but a particular emotional disposition
to enjoy salsa that they acquired in Latin American fiestas. In this way, while public salsa symbols such as songs trigger the usage of embodied skills and awake feelings of belonging, dance display on the dancefloor reinforces a public culture of symbols that talk of Latin Americans as good dancers, as more likely to enjoy social reunions and more capable to express emotions.
But enjoyment not all the dancers with a Latin American nationality or identification feel of salsa in this way. Catalina -a half-Dominican and half-Austrian dancer- speaks Spanish, knows all the songs but does not feel the Latin American identity in her dance. As she explained me, her Dominican father used to listen to all types of music in Austria, where he migrated, and not only Latin American music. Besides, she did not grow up or lived in a Latin American country before she turned 18. For her, music and dance are personal and mean freedom and self-expression.
Thus, life experiences are the source of the entanglement of enjoyment, cultural identification, dancing skills and aesthetic judgement. As such they can be acquired at any moment as they are not restricted to national identification. Benjamin, a Dutch octogenarian who navigated the Caribbean Sea as a sailor between the end of the fifties and the mid-seventies, visited several Latin American countries where he learned salsa in parties and other social events. He has a dancing style different from many dancers and steals the show on the dancefloors. He is recognized among many Latin American dancers as a legend in Amsterdam’s salsa.
As I will show, this form of enjoyment clashes frequently with enjoyment as technical and personal accomplishment, because the latter seems less authentic and not originated in festive experiences. Therefore, dancers that mainly enjoy salsa from their cultural identity criticize other dancers with technical skills because they “are not enjoying it” or “lack the feeling”. In spite of the criticism, there is not a social conflict between the Latinos and the Europeans that can be located in the dancing style. During the research I could not find any hard feelings stemming from the Latinos towards the Europeans nor any claim that they should not dance or that they should only do it in the traditional way. The reason for is that Latinos may or may not enjoy salsa in the traditional way and some Europeans may be able to experience in this way from previous personal trajectories.
Even though the songs have a strong political meaning, we should not see discourse or belonging to a culture as the source of enjoyment but experience. It is experience and its aesthetics what bridges practice to identity going through enjoyment. In this way the music experience has a constitutive character to identity, just as Simon Frith has discussed for popular music and subcultures (Negus & Román Velásquez, 2002; Frith, 1996)
4.4.3 Enjoyment of Accomplishing Personal Goals: As in any performative art, salsa dancers are aware of the attention they attract and often enjoy the compliments that come with it. To some extent this is common to all dancers. But in some this attention has a very important role in their individual experience of salsa. For many aficionados, enjoying salsa for its technical accomplishment and for the realization of personal goals is what keeps them going to the parties every week. While some dancers could dance forever with a basic repertoire of steps and still have fun, for others, technical achievement represents so much joy that new skills and steps become an obsession. This explains why every week the salsa world in Amsterdam has workshops with new teachers coming from different parts of the world.
In the enjoyment of salsa as technical accomplishment, dancers take pleasure in the in the successful execution and exhibition of difficult turns, which leads to compliments from others and the satisfaction of personal challenges. One respondent explained to me how after mastering a step he had the sensation of being flying, feeling very light, liberated from the fear to failure.
Public figures in the salsa world make use of social media to gain followers. Good dancers upload their videos to Instagram and YouTube and this becomes the source of a new profession, where they get to travel around Europe performing and giving workshops. They become role models for the use of their bodies, just as it happens to famous sport players. These dancers struggle in the process but enjoy the results because pride and self-image contribute to what Giddens would call the “ontological security” (1991) of the dancers as a lifestyle, with the meaning around the use of the body that this supposes. This form of enjoyment entails, subsequently, social competition on the salsa parties and events.
Tessa a 61-year old dancer created the Dutch salsa championship with the intention to respond to her dancing needs and the needs of others. I asked her why she and other would be interested in competing and she said the following:
The idea is to motivate people to work harder, to get better. Some people say no you shouldn’t compete because it’s a social thing. Fine! But then there are those people that are a non-sense in the social dance floor because they are always showing off and they are always hitting other of people because they don’t watch, they are annoying, because they want to show how good they are. Those are the people that you get into the competition because they need the challenge. Some people are very happy just to dance socially at a party and have a good time. But then there are those people that want more. And they see it as a challenge for themselves to get as good as they can. And you have that in all sports (Tessa, 61, Teacher)
The personal configuration of this form of enjoyment might come from personal processes and intense emotional experiences that give meaning to the use of the body as well as. As to the first one, personal processes of body education in certain dancing styles can shape what it means for a person to dance. As Tessa and other respondents assured, dancing experiences in ballet and ballroom styles are focused too much on excellency, perfect execution and strict use of the body. These are dancing styles designed to be performed on stage, after intense sessions of choreography repetitions. 7 of the 8 women interviewed in this research had former dancing experiences, starting at a very young age. All the Dutch women interviewed had received formation in ballet, ballroom or hip-hop dances before beginning with salsa. Furthermore, 5 of the 8 female interviewees did ballet or jazzballet in their early childhood. Two of the five women interviewed with experience in ballet are now part of a female show team that enjoys performing choreographies of bachata and salsa in parties and other events.
Here, I want to go beyond the usual association between a set of cultural preferences and class, suggesting that also early experiences in ballet and ballroom dances could configure the way to approach dancing enjoyment. The cultural sociological theory argues that the practice of ballet and other classical art forms are associated to class and therefore could configure enjoyment as part of a cultural habitus (Bourdieu, 1984). According to the theory, these forms of distinction are replaced with a conspicuous consumption of
cosmopolitan practices such as salsa, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century (Peterson and Kern, 1996). However, while studying this form of enjoyment I discovered that the practice for salsa largely replaced ballroom, because most of the dancers considered that these forms were excessively stiff, rigid and strict. A broader social process of informalization of the social manners (Elias, 1939[2000]) made the people prefer a more relaxed approach to dancing.
I could learn later from the experience of Tessa and other dancers that ballroom was the biggest dancing practice in the Netherlands until the seventies. Some dancers assured that they had this dance as part of their educational program in schools during their childhood. During the eighties, the style started waning. I asked Tessa why she changed ballroom for salsa and she explained me that:
At the time ballroom was worse than now. If the coach told you to put your arm up you couldn’t put your arm somewhere else. Which was bullshit, because why? But that was how it was you could just do what you were told. And I have never been good at doing what I am told. (...) I was at odds with my instructor because I didn’t think it was logical and we were always fighting. He was like this is what the book say.
In salsa there is also a logic and there are rules but they are not written down. Dancing is still dancing and movement is still movement so the same rules of moving, dancing and leading still apply. That is when the downfall started. Some ballroom teachers adapted and some didn’t. (Tessa, 61, teacher)
It is possible to think that the form of enjoyment related to technical achievement is in a way a surviving cultural form from the times of ballroom, especially when many of the ballroom studios started embracing salsa and organizing competitions on this dance. This shows a social process of dancing informalization and reformalization, which coincides with the observations that sociologist Cas Wouters did of social manners, including popular dances, for the Netherlands (Wouters, 2007, p. 183)
Emotions can also shape the approach to salsa enjoyment, stemming from significant former emotional experiences. An example of this is the first experience of Jasper in a salsa club in Cali, Colombia, when he was on holidays with his girlfriend. Once in the nightclub
the best dancer of the place asked his girlfriend to dance, while Jasper remained jealously observing on the side.
It was a long time ago that I felt so small because I was just dancing with my girlfriend and look like nothing because I had just one lesson and then the best dancer of the club, we were all looking at him because she could dance so well, ask her for a dance and they were rocking it and I thought fuck. For her it was just fun and I didn't make a scene or anything but inside
it was... it was quite something. (Jasper, 27, Dutch, beginner)
Feeling small, being irritated and an offended ego motivated this student to become better. He wants to return to Cali one day and show them how well he can dance salsa. He also told me he aspires to “reach the skies, the limit” with salsa dancing. However, he feels a mix of embarrassment and irritation when during the classes he cannot learn the dance easily and the partner he dances with notices this.
As I have argued before, as personal experiences configure a form of technical enjoyment, they also configure a particular aesthetic of what is a good dancer. The national Dutch salsa championship explains in its handbook that evaluation rests in the elements of Technique, Composition and Imageiii. Some of these elements have been transposed to the social events in salsa as some dancers move from the stages to the parties. Enjoying in this way creates also conflict among dancers, as some of the dancers who enjoyed salsa like this are usually referred as arrogant or people who just want to show off.
A good dancer, either man or woman, is also someone with whom the person can put into practice all his or her skills and challenge themselves with new moves. And a good party is that in which the venue offers plenty of space for all couples to practice freely without crashing with each other. A good party also has a good dancing floor and the attendees are of a good level. Dancers that enjoy this are not so likely to dance with beginners or go to parties in small venues.
The styles of Los Angeles (LA style) and New York Style are the aesthetics of salsa that align better with this type of enjoyment. These are the most technical and are configured towards performance. In LA and New York style dancers respect a line, facing each other and returning to the same imaginary line after every turn. It is said that the style was invented
in Puerto Rico but later adopted in Los Angeles for performances in which dancers would stand perpendicular to an audience.
In the literature of salsa, studies show how these styles are often criticized by dancers who find them too far from the authentic tradition of the Latin American styles. This is the case of Pío, a teacher of the Cuban style in Amsterdam, who comes from a tradition of salsa dancers from Santiago de Cuba.
What makes different the Cuban style is that when we dance we make a party. We dance to enjoy, not to make a show. The LA style from the beginning to the end is just about raising your hand and legs like if you were working out.
If you really want to enjoy with the LA people, the woman has to be a really good dancer.
Are you thinking too much what you are going to do? Are you doing ballet? (Pío, 49,
Teacher)
What in the literature is believed to be a conflict between styles is actually a conflict between forms of enjoyment. As we see from Pío, his critique is not directed strictly to the dancers but to the form of experiencing the dance, which from Pío comes with no enjoyment. This conflict necessarily suggests an aesthetic confrontation, which is observed through the use of the style, but the change that I propose is to view the conflict stemming not from social characteristics like nationality, race or culture, but from differences in life experiences like differences in the first encounters with salsa and different notions around what the role of the body should be in salsa.
This form of enjoyment is also connected and enhances the enjoyment of the sexual relationship with others, as pride and confidence are feelings that contribute to the way in which dancer relate with the opposite sexes.
To what extent this form of enjoyment is connected to lifestyles and competition at the educational, working or economic sphere needs to be explored in further research.
4.4.4 Enjoyment of bodily self-expression: Some dancers enjoy more than nothing connecting mind and body to from reality. In their view, dancing also contributes to a form of self-absorption but this time not achieved through music but through the use of the body. Like this, students aim to get to know their bodies better, getting acquainted with
unfrequently used articulations and muscles. They want to improve their use of shoulders, hips, bellies, legs and feet in ways they have not done before. Under this form of enjoyment dancers take pleasure in extending their consciousness to the body.
Ugandan-born-and-raised Nico is a passionate dance teacher who believes that every person can develop a personal style. This is possible for him since he believes that music is able to touch any body and inspire movement in it. Similarly, for Catalina, the dancer we met in 5.3.3, salsa entails freedom. Freedom to move your body without the restrictions of any particular style. Additionally, for Ray, a 25-year old student, son of Surinamese and Antillean parents, who started dancing in his father’s dance school at a very young age, dancing is about developing your own style from a big repertoire of dancing moves. For him, the enjoyable part of dancing is to create your own moves and express a particular feeling.
But some teachers go like, you are offbeat. There is no such a thing as offbeat we interpret the music different. People get too frustrated because they think they are dancing offbeat. It’s a bad exploration. Dance is a journey. It’s about exploring what your body can do. But with all this modern stuff, having to have a technique here and there that’s why a lot of people forget what is most important the happiness, the fun part and they all go too
technical. But also you find a lot of people stressed out, getting frustrated with their dance partners because they are focusing on the wrong thing.
When it comes to Europe it changes because here it’s the nature of how people live, it’s always “I compete with you because I’m better than you”. Always hierarchies. So that’s why everything that comes here be it in dance, business, these always have an element of competition.
(Nico, Ugandan-British, Dancing teacher)
These three dancers have in common that they started dancing at very young ages and have transited many different styles of dancing. From ballet, to Afro, to hip-hop and modern dancing, these dancers believe in the possibility of developing a personal style with the body as means of self-expression during the dancing situation. I suggest that this form of enjoyment might have been configured in the intersection of different dancing styles and in the will to explore body movements. All of these dancers have preferred to learn new styles instead of mastering and competing with one specific dance. Additionally, this view might
