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Salsa Steps Toward Intercultural Education

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Salsa has been referred to as the world's most popular partnered social Latin dance and is likely health-enhancing when participated in for leisure and socialisation purposes. We are unaware of any qualitative research that has explored salsa dance, specifically, through an aesthetic, artistic, and creative practice lens. In this research, we sought to interpret how these elements of dance may contribute to a sense of flourishing, or holistic well-being, as described by Seligman (2011) in his PERMA model, in a positive psychology context. We designed an anonymous fully open-ended online qualitative survey to explore the experience of salsa as it relates to dancers' flourishing. Forty-one salsa dancers completed the survey. Their average experience level was 11 years of dance practice in salsa. We used the reflexive thematic analysis approach of Braun and Clarke (2021) to analyse our data. Our actively constructed themes (A dance of positivity; Dance's cognitive embrace; Healthful bodies in harmony; and Steps, hearts, and spirits coming together) highlighted emotional and physical benefits, cognitive and learning aspects, health and wellness, and community building within the data. We believe these findings illustrate that salsa dance does indeed foster a sense of flourishing in experienced dancers within a community dance setting. The practical applications of our research in terms of promoting dance for health are discussed.
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Salsa has been referred to as the world’s most popular partnered social Latin dance and is likely health-enhancing when participated in for leisure and socialisation purposes. We are unaware of any qualitative research that has explored salsa dance, specifically, through an aesthetic, artistic, and creative practice lens. In this research, we sought to interpret how these elements of dance may contribute to a sense of flourishing, as described by Seligman (2011), in a positive psychology context. We designed an anonymous fully open-ended online qualitative survey to explore the experience of salsa as it relates to dancers’ flourishing. Forty-one salsa dancers completed the survey. Their average experience level was 11 years of dance practice in salsa. We used reflexive thematic analysis to analyse our data. Our actively constructed themes (A dance of positivity; Dance's cognitive embrace; Healthful bodies in harmony; and Steps, hearts, and spirits coming together) highlighted emotional and physical benefits, cognitive and learning aspects, health and wellness, and community building within the data. We believe these findings illustrate that salsa dance does indeed foster a sense of flourishing in experienced dancers within a community dance setting. The practical applications of our research in terms of promoting dance for health are discussed.
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Memoirs of studying with acclaimed dancer-choreographer Moustapha Bangoura in the Republic of Guinea, West Africa, illuminate the significant, yet unspoken role played by the djembefola (lead drummer) in teaching and learning dance. This portrait provides autobiographical and ethnographic insights, gained through attending Le Bagatae Dance and Drum, an international dance school in Conakry, Guinea, founded by Bangoura in 1993. Drawing on a two-decade long mentorship with Bangoura, this study provides dance educators with insights into how a dancer’s musicality is cultivated through the help of the djembefola. How this perspective is related to a decolonial dance pedagogical agenda is also articulated. The study describes the dance pedagogy I experienced as a collaborative process between Bangoura and musicians. The findings reveal that the drummers contribute content and pedagogical knowledge essential for dance learning.
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Salsa is a popular form of partnered social dance with a distinct Latinx identity. In the qualitative literature, the experience of involvement in Salsa has been explored within a community-based setting in a cultural and health promotion context. How students experience engaging with Salsa, as a social dance when instruction is provided within a university environment and delivered as non-formal learning, remains less clear. This research sought to improve our understanding of how university students in the United Kingdom experience Salsa when offered as non-credit group-based dance classes. We collected data using face-to-face semi-structured individual interviews and took a reflexive approach with our thematic analysis. The three themes we developed were: Stress relief and escapism; Challenging at first but amazing after; and Switching partners to meet people. University campus-based partnered social dance provides opportunity to experience subjective well-being, skill acquisition, and social connectedness. We discuss some of the practical implications of supporting Salsa as a means of non-formal learning to enhance mental health through physical activity engagement within higher education.
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Contact improvisation is a form of dance improvisation that involves 2 bodies in contact. Theoretical approaches most used to explain creative behavior in dance are insufficient to explain how dancers createnew configurations of movements during improvisation. The aim of this study was to observe the effects that the manipulation of instructional task constraints has on the creative behavior of dancers while improvising, and also to analyze the spontaneous emergence of specific movements in relation to the task constraints imposed. Three dancers were video-recorded while dancing contact improvisation in duets lasting 480 s and with 3 different instructions (without instructional constraints, with pelvises as close as possible, or with pelvises as far apart as possible). Dance data were recorded using an observational instrument and subsequently analyzed by means of a principal components analysis and the dynamic overlap order parameter (measure capable of detecting the rate and breadth of exploratory behavior on different time scales). The coupling strength between duets was examined by a cross-correlation analysis. The effects of instructional as well as nonspecific constraints were then analyzed by a 1-way analysis of variance. Results revealed that instructional constraints had a significant effect on the type of configurations performed by the dancers, as well as on their creative behavior. Of the 3 conditions, the second instructional constraint (IC2) induced a significantly greater variety of action patterns.
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Since its emergence in the 1960s, salsa has transformed from a symbol of Nuyorican pride into an emblem of pan-Latinism and finally a form of global popular culture. While Latinos all over the world have developed and even exported their own “dance accents,” local dance scenes have arisen in increasingly far-flung locations, each with their own flavor and unique features. Salsa World examines the ways in which bodies relate to culture in specific places. The contributors, a notable group of scholars and practitioners, analyze dance practices in the U.S., Japan, Spain, France, Colombia, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. Writing from the disciplines of ethnomusicology, anthropology, sociology, and performance studies, the contributors explore salsa’s kinetopias - places defined by movement, or vice versa- as they have arisen through the dance’s interaction with local histories, identities, and musical forms. Taken together, the essays in this book examine contemporary salsa dancing in all its complexity, taking special note of how it is localized and how issues of geography, race and ethnicity, and identity interact with the global salsa industry.
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This article theorizes pan-latinidad in action and the classed, racialized codes of femininity that emerge in Los Angeles salsa clubs. Through choreography-based ethnographic analyses, the author reflects on the conditions and possibilities of salsera homosociality–not on the dance floor, but in decentralized spaces such as the bar, the bathroom and cyberspace.
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Studio-based salsa dance in Northern New Jersey has succeeded in creating an ethnically diverse social space in which Latin style represents both a specific ethnicity and an alternative pan-ethnic identity that encompasses and embraces difference. The wide appeal of the dance, however, rests in its dramatic and provocative display of gendered interactions. Attention to dancers' subjective understandings of their own practice provides a female-centered perspective on the emerging cultural scene. Copyright
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It was not until the 1980s, more than half a century after modern dance became the centre of university dance programmes, that dance educators began writing about diversity issues. While some authors have addressed the importance of diversifying curricula and others have written specifically about classes they re‐visioned in a more multicultural way, few have written about how we might go about updating university dance departments in a practical way at the level of curriculum. In this article, two dance professors, one in Canada and the other in Brazil, discuss the ideological foundations of existing university dance programmes to imagine a more inclusive vision for dance education in increasingly globalized local contexts. They then share the model that they have developed for contemporary, intercultural dance curricula at the university level, which is rooted in the principles of dialogue and integration.
Article
Written for the Graduate Program in Communications. Thesis (Ph.D.). Includes bibliographical references.
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Faces of salsa: A spoken history of the music
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Padura Fuentes, L. 2003. Faces of salsa: A spoken history of the music, trans. S. J. Clark. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books.