Book Review: Salsa for People Who Probably Shouldn’t, by Janet Christie

by Matt Rendell

Mainstream, 240pp, £12.99

Review by Janet Christie

July in Havana. Outside a tropical storm is stotting rain knee-high. Inside, in a dance studio lined with mirrors, I’m having my first ever salsa lesson. The teacher pulls me against him and lifts my chin so we have eye contact. There’s a thrust and we have hip contact too. I look away. “No, you must look into my eyes.” Gulp, ok, then. Last time I gazed this deeply into someone’s eyes I’d just given birth to them. As we ran through the basics I could feel an attack of the Anglo-Saxons coming on. Then I stopped fighting it and danced. Salsa. I was hooked.

That’s why I picked up Matt Rendell’s book, since I’m clearly one of the “People Who Probably Shouldn’t”, but couldn’t resist giving it a go anyway. I wanted to know more about the world’s most popular dance, Latin America’s gift to the world, a phenomenon more addictive than cocaine, bigger than Maradona’s head.

Why is it so rife? What are its origins? And why does it hold such a fascination for so many? By the time I’d got to the end of the book, written by an Englishman married to a Colombian, many of those questions and plenty of others I had been too ignorant to ask, had been answered.

Rendell traces the dance’s roots from Africa to the Americas, Cuba and Columbia in particular, where it was brought by slaves, and explains how its various branches developed independently in parallel, giving rise to different styles of dance. The Africans kidnapped and taken to Cuba, for instance, were taken in sufficient numbers that they were able to keep some of their traditions and identity alive, whereas those taken to Colombia were more likely to be ten-year olds who were dispersed across the country.

Yet still they danced, and a couple of centuries later salsa journeyed back across the Atlantic to Europe. There it took on a very different life of its own, because that’s the thing about salsa; everyone who dances it brings their own culture to bear, which is what I think Rendell means by salsa for those who probably shouldn’t.

Thus at a salsa convention in Zurich that the English Rendell and his Colombian wife Vivi attend, the dance on displays is a whole lot more orderly and regimented. Gone is the Latino family fun aspect as it becomes a performance sport and competitive dance-off for athletes distanced both from their own bodies and a foreign cultural identity that speaks a different body language they could never hope to emulate, since it was never their history in the first place.

Salsa arrived in the UK through economic migrants who came to work in the hotel industry in the 1970s, the Colombians who brought their exotic moves into British dance halls where only 20 years earlier Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock was listed in the Decca catalogue as a foxtrot.

By the 1990s the traditions of kidnapped Africans mixed with the Hispanic culture of the Americas was reaching British ears and filling the dance floors. Rendell explores the clubs, the dancers, the musicians, in such detail that unless you’re a serious salsa geek you’re going to step up the tempo and speed-read a little.

Yet as in the dance, each tiny flick, ripple, turn or inflection has meaning and the minutiae is fascinating. For example he describes the performance of a Palenque in Colombia, where the dancers quiver and shake free of imaginary chains, then brandish rods, speaking of their escape from slavery by groups who defended their freedom and often died doing so – we’re a long way from the Blackpool Winter Gardens, Toto.

Rendell’s wife Vivi embodies the spirit of salsa, uprooted and planted in a cold foreign soil where she and it are greeted with well-meant yet clumsy enthusiasm and misapprehension. Rendell’s view is that it is “rather odd to want to import from someone else’s world, an entire sub-system like a dance, with its music and its vast array of gestures, every element of which, in its original setting, has a history and a meaning which are hopelessly lost in translation.” There are even some in the British salsa movement who blame the Latin Americans for failing to keep abreast of “what’s happening in salsa”, thereby entirely missing the point.

Ultimately there are those who learn salsa through choice and those who learn it through inheritance because it’s about their identity, and those differences will out on the dance floor. But should we worry about that and avoid salsa? No, we probably shouldn’t. And should you read Salsa for People Who Probably Shouldn’t? If you’re remotely interested in salsa, yes, you probably should.