Two by Two_Tango, Two-Step, and the L.A. Night by Eve Babitz

Author:Eve Babitz [Babitz, Eve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B07FJLY12R
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2018-08-07T00:00:00+00:00

6

Salsa with Albert Torres and Renée Victor

In the fabulous Broadway Deli, a new landmark on the Third Street Promenade, not too far from his new Sunday classes at the Ash Grove on the Santa Monica Pier, I meet with Albert Torres. He seems to be a mild-mannered man dressed in white, except when he dances, at which time anything can happen.

In my experience, all salsa dancers, unless they are in partnership with another dance teacher, hate all other dance teachers, if not all other dancers anywhere near as good as themselves. It is as though being bitter is a Latin style. I’ve heard people say that one teacher looks too much at their feet when they dance. That another forces his partner into “disrespectful” positions. That an old-style salsa dancer who dances only on the “two” looks constipated because all he seems to be doing is grinding his heels into the floor as if in some kind of digestive pain. I’ve heard a lot of stuff, each camp has its own flag and enemy but really, in salsa, the dance is so basically easy. I’ve seen certain people able to teach someone enough to pick up the step, the whole look of salsa/mambo, in half an hour, like East Coast Swing.

Oh, and that’s another thing. The mambo/salsa thing, which we see a little of in the movie Dirty Dancing (my favorite dance movie), the old-style thing about the mambo, that you had to dance it on the “two.” The two is the second beat, which in the olden days used to be played by a clave (percussive sticks)—which in those days people could hear. Today, due to improvements, you can’t hear the two, so everyone dances on whatever they want except percussionists, who are able to hear everything, but who even so usually can’t dance that well.

In Los Angeles today, there are a lot of places to go Latin dancing and oddly enough, even though it is mixed up in our minds with the dancers in West Side Story, in most dance situations, getting wounded is the last thing on anyone’s mind. Dancers have a sort of Piscean self-esteem, a sort of “let’s go out every night and feel the magic and let’s do it again and again.”

Once anyone ties themselves to any partner dance, their life of criminal behavior has to go. Dancing with a partner requires social skills that have nothing to do with violence, but the opposite—peace on earth and goodwill to the dance place. Partner dancing is a cultured act; once anyone gets into it, they are a step up from violence, they are in civilized survival skills training. A man who can dance with his wife, his girlfriend, or his mother is a man women will protect. Of course, in fact, there are really great dancers who use their chops to acquire women who pay for everything. Gigolos, they used to be called, and still are. But then those women have a lot of money to spend on their own amusement, and money to get their hearts broken.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.