Flipped, Broken, and Paused Clave

This article examines some of the complex interactions between salsa music and dance by focusing on physical interpretations of specific types of metric ambiguities and disruptions. It explores both the fairly frequent displacement dissonances that arise when the established clave pattern is flipped, paused, or broken and the grouping dissonances that are somewhat rare occurrences in salsa music, showing how dancers' responses to these metric disruptions depend heavily on the unique features of each musical context. Annotated videos break down salsa's fundamental dance and musical structures, encouraging readers to contemplate the artful interpretations presented by experienced dance practitioners and to engage with these interesting musical passages more intimately by trying out the dance steps for themselves.

African, Latina, Feminist, and Decolonial

This essay proposes that Marta Moreno Vega’s 2004 memoir, When the Spirits Dance Mambo, is a Latina feminist narrative that foregrounds African diaspora worldviews, thought, forms, and practices as resources for cultivating a path toward decoloniality. In this memoir, Abuela’s spiritual leadership and her introduction of the young Cotito into the practice of Espiritismo become a central prism through which Cotito innovatively apprehends the links between sacred and secular realms in the burgeoning mambo and salsa music scene of New York. Even more importantly, her engagement with this diasporan worldview allows Cotito to critically apprehend prevailing gender norms and their limitations. This essay, therefore, argues that an Afro-Latina feminism emerges in this memoir from the practice of embodied spirituality that also has sonic, aesthetic, and social dimensions in everyday life.

Theorizing Fundamental Music/Dance Interactions in Salsa

Communication between music and dance can take many forms. In salsa, this communication begins with and builds upon two simple but crucial criteria: for music, a metric-rhythmic foundation based on clave and other essential performance strata, and for dance, the flow and metric orientation of one of three basic footwork patterns. Most of the rich complexity of music, dance, and their interaction stems from these fundamental gestures. In this article we analyze the basic structures of salsa music and dance, theorize how they interact, and investigate three scenarios where dancers have to make decisions about how to attend to musical features via their footwork orientations.