Many dances popular around the world have originated in Latin America, for example the Mambo, Salsa, Merengue, La Conga, Lambada, Carimba, Macarena, Cumbia.
But the five dances: Samba, Rumba, Paso Doble, Cha Cha, and Jive,
have been singled out and are now danced all over the world in international DanceSport competitions as well as being danced socially.
These dances are for couples, usually each consisting of a man and a lady.
The holds vary from figure to figure in these dances, sometimes in closed ballroom hold, sometimes with the partners holding each other with only one hand.
The figures in these dances are standardised and categorised into various levels for teaching,
with internationally agreed vocabularies, techniques, rhythms and tempos.
But it was not always so. These 'Latin-American' dances were only introduced into Western-European society
in the twentieth century, and have some diverse origins in previous eras.
The Romance languages (for example: Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Rumanian) are derived from the ancient Latin language, and define a culture that has spread over a substantial part of the Americas.
Three dances from this area plus one from Spain/France and one from the U.S.A. constitute the set of dances now internationally standardised as the 'Latin-American' dances.
Note that the term 'Latin-American' here is an abbreviation of 'Latin and American' rather than a reference to the geographic area of 'Latin America' (Lavelle, 1975, 1).
The three dances from Latin America evolved as a fusion of Indigenous, European and Negro forms.
The European conquerors imported Negro slaves from various parts of West Africa into a large part of the Americas at an
early stage, mainly because of the difficulty the Europeans had in persuading the Indigenes to work for them.
The Negro slaves were imported in such number that by 1553, they outnumbered the Europeans in Mexico,
and the Viceroy, Luis de Velasco, urged Charles V of Spain to prohibit further influx (Sadie, 1980, 10/522).
Dancing played a substantial part in all three component cultures: European, Negro and Indigenous.
In 1569, the Viceroy of Mexico ordered the Aztec Calendar Stone to be buried because the main recreation of the Negroes had become dancing around it.
Subsequently, Velasco decreed that dancing be confined to Sundays and feast days only, and then only in the afternoons between the hours of noon and 6 p.m. (Sadie, 1980, 10/522).
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Through the 17th and 18th centuries, a gradual fusion of the three cultures occurred to produce a new culture: Creole.
As European dances were imported into Latin America, they were adopted and 'creolized' (Sadie, 1980, 10/529).
In Cuba, the Contradance became the Contradanza Habanera (i.e., from Havanna) with the adoption of a syncopated rhythm: (Sadie, 1980, 5/86)
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Later, as the music became more syncopated with the inclusion of bars with the rhythm, it became abbreviated to the 'Son'. This rhythm had been used as early as 1795 in Brazil in a Modinha (love song) which had become popular in Europe at the turn of the 19th Century (Behague, 1979, 92). Complex syncopated rhythms are a feature now of all the Latin-American dances. |
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