Folkloric dances/music

I was spurred by a discussion in a “regular salsa” group to upload a video I filmed in December 2007 at the Changüí festival in Guantanamo.

It was a performance of Tumba Francesa, a dance/music style that developed in oriente after the Haitian migration to Cuba.

What I find particularly interesting about it is that the music is very Afro-Caribbean with just drums and vocals while the dance is very European.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84OS8FaI0B4

The rueda move that’s kind of like square-dancing “alaman”... I have been calling “tumba francesca”.

You are calling the dance with roots in Haiti “tumba francesa”.

I get funny looks when I say that… and you might too … I think we need to switch, right?

The Haitian-rooted dance is “tumba francesca”, the rueda move is “tumba francesa”.... Or we could ignore the funny looks… ;-)

My knowledge of square dancing is pretty much zero so I’ll take your word on the name of the square dancing move.
But the rueda move is called tumba francesa (referring of course the the French) by all the Cubans I know,
and the dance and music are definitely called tumba francesa. In Guantánamo in La Loma del Chivo is la Casa del changüí
and right across the street is Casa de la tumba francesa and on the corner of the same block is Casa del son.
I haven’t noticed any “weird looks” from anyone (especially over the internet) :-)

OK, I guess it was my first teacher that put “tumba francesca” in my head… it’s not going to be easy but I’ll switch ;-)

Maybe your teacher had some Italian woman in mind ;-) Or it could be s simple misspelling. If you search the internet you can find it misspelled at times but the majority of links return “francesa” meaning French.

I really don’t know much (anything) about it but I noticed that the sort of “greeting intro” was in French or at least partly. At facebook Lani said:

“This is masón (and fyi the congas of santiago play this rhythm too—taken from the tumba francesa of course.) Dicen que they used to arrollar to this rhythm with the tumba francesa throught the streets during carnaval.”

I asked if Masón is a particular rhythm and she said:

“Masón is a rhythm and they also call the dance masón, though it’s technically an imitation of the French quadrille I think. TF only play 3 rhythms these days: masón, yuba and frenté. There’s not too much written on it so even more important is your video!”

We are going to put a few of the major categories of dance/music on CubaInToronto.com. It’ll be more from the standpoint if one of us at the site has a personal affection for it than trying to cover everything.

Cuba has already lost some of it’s tradition for sure, but I guess it’s worse in other countries, even Canada, where native and minority tradition still does not get enough recognition even from academics. Cuba will probably come out better than most countries that way.

We were talking about a forum to discuss casino/rueda, looks like the most promising place is Facebook now where there are some groups with 1200 + members. So far. Or maybe the place could be here. Here’s one thought I wouldn’t mind some discussion about.

You see even peer-respected ruedas from Cuba invent moves that cross the clave. The 1 count becomes the 5 count. I don’t know that any of these moves have ever been accepted by other groups and used. I regard them as just simple mistakes, that need to be forgotten, does anyone really think it’s legit ? This comes out of some local face-to-face discussion, some people wanted to add them to a local “reportoire”.

I think you should start a thread on rueda then. I’m sure there are a lot of interested parties. I am not much of a facebook fan myself. I find it messy an full of junk that has to be sifted through to find anything worthwhile.

As for the question, I personally don’t care about crossing the clave. Maybe people should try to do cross-clave moves with songs that break the clave i.e. play the 2 or th 3 side first and then maybe they’ll end up on the right side :-)

A lot of Cubans also dance on three so I guess I’ve never become too stressed about the beat I dance on. The again I’m not a hardcore rueda dancer. I think it can be fun to dance 1 or 2 ruedas a night but that’s enough for me. I prefer couple dancing. And I have no interest whatsoever in performance dancing.

http://salsaglobal.ning.com/events/tirso-duarte…

gracias