Friday, July 8, 2011

Zouk to salsa - crossing styles

Yesterday was a pre-opening night for one dance bar/restaurant in Helsinki and we got to open the Cuban styled bar's dance floor with zouking to salsa music! A crime to a salsero maybe but normal to us dance floor - dance partner stealing zoukers ;)

We recently had a discussion about crossing and combining music and dance styles - this started about Papetchulo's Ta Bater, a kizomba song which I fell in love with in one zouk party. For me it's perfect for zouk but excellent obviously for kizomba as well and it's great that a song can be used in many dance styles. I've also come across with some bachata type zouk and salsa songs, and I'm sure there's plenty of other more or less fluent combinations around.

Sometimes we cross styles more deliberately... I've noticed that if you're really dying to zouk, you can zouk to almost anything that has some kind of beat. Often we zouk to reggaeton and sure I could zouk to salsa or even to heavy metal if I really wanted to (and have done that!). I've heard that this is seen in other dance circles as well, mixing the dance and music styles - and I would welcome even more of this! But beware - this is not for everyone, just for us dance-mad people ;)

Dance parties and bars are great venues for this! In Helsinki downtown the list is not very long if you're into salsa, bachata, kizomba, zouk or reggaeton type of jamming but there's something at least a couple nights of the week. In general the places to go to are Cafe Caisa, Coronita, Cuba, Havanna and Pacifico. In addition to them many dance organisations have social dancing at various venues, it helps if you follow groups such as Salsa Borealis, Alppila Latin Dance Social and of course Brazilian Zouk in Finland.

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