Son

I was wondering ho much son is danced in your areas? I find that there are a lot of people here in Stockholm who will choose to dance son rather than casino, usually to obvious sones or to songs by Adalberto etc. Is that the same pretty much everywhere, or are there some cities where the dancers are really just focused no casino or rueda?

I would be happy if here ppl focused on casino or rueda… :) here most popular is LA. Son is very far from being danced on parties. i think in hole Croatia maybe 40-50 ppl know how to dance son and probably only 10 of them come to parties. on parties from our dance school we try to have at least couple of sons during the evening but only few dance then… :(

Very little interest here in Canada… sooner or later, the dance school industry will get to it, market it as “the next thing you have to know to be a good salsa dancer”... then people will become interested.

It’s not much different than old time swing (the street dance, not Arthur Murray ;-). You can chance to go to an event that older dancers go to, and see it done by original “old-timers”. But if it fell on their heads, younger school dancers wouldn’t notice it at all.

Someone who comes to our rueda practice just came back from Mexico all fired up about learning more danzon, still big in Mexico of course. I think she will be able to find lessons in it among the expat cubans here but she will be the only one in Toronto who ever learned it ;-).

That’s too bad. One of the fun things here is that the dancers do really pay attention to the music. Here there are a lot of people who will dance son to appropriately “son-y” songs ranging from Polo Montañez to Van Van to Havana D’Primera etc etc. And once in a while the DJs might play a rumba and there are plenty of people at the Cuban clubs who dance rumba.

One of the things I love about the Revé song “A sancochar boniato” is the way it moves from rumba to timba to son montuno and then throws in some gear changes towards the end, so you can dance rumba, casino, son and despelote all in the same song. You can even throw in a bit of cha-cha-cha during the son if you so wish, but I generally don’t wish to. I don’t particularly like cha-cha-cha or mambo to be honest. I lean towards son, casino, rumba and rueda.