Ever since I started dancing Cuban salsa and discovered the
Rueda de Casino aspect of the dance, I have been fascinated by the fact that
Cuban salsa moves not only have a Spanish name which can be very descriptive, informative,
funny or at times even cheeky, but also that all of these moves have a hand sign
associated with them which often add another humorous or cultural component to
this dance.
There are many advantages of using hand signs in Ruedas, many
of which will be discussed in later posts but the most obvious benefit is the
fact that when the Rueda is large or the music is loud i.e. in a salsa club,
then dancers will be able to follow the hand signs of the cantante - the caller -
even if they do not hear the move being shouted. This factor in itself makes
Rueda signs extremely important as most Ruedas involve big groups of people, and
their surrounding environment is almost always noisy to the degree that using
hand signs will immediately improve the communication between the cantante and
the dancers in the Rueda. I.e. I have rarely been in a Rueda of more than 10
people where I got the impression that every person in the Rueda was able to
hear all the moves being called throughout the entire song. Just a few weeks
ago I went to a salsa night which started with a Rueda class with around
30 students. While the class was well taught and people were able
to follow the moves during class, it all fell apart when the teacher tried to
lead the Rueda a few hours later during social dancing simply
because he did not use hand signs. Even though he was calling the moves as loud
as he could, the noise of the music, the other people dancing, the bar staff
working, people on the side talking to each other etc. meant that only the
couples in the vicinity of the teacher could understand the moves while about
70% of the Rueda could not hear anything he shouted.
This is just one example which demonstrates the importance of
Rueda hand signs and I have therefore always been interested in this aspect of
the dance just as much as the names of the moves or even the moves themselves.
Sadly, it is one of the least known aspects of Cuban salsa and I have been to
many dance schools which never teach a single hand sign or even just inform their
students that these exist. Most of the time the teachers do not know the hand signs
themselves or just know a very small selection of hand signs which they might
throw in randomly. I.e. I have been dancing in Ruedas where the cantante calls “Sombrero”
and signals the move with the correct hand sign followed up by another move
i.e. “Exhibela” where they will call the move without using the hand sign
simply because they only know a select few signs. This type of
inconsistent behaviour is of course misleading and confusing to students and
will mean that in a noisy environment the whole Rueda would only be able to do the moves that they can hear.
I have found this aspect frustrating from the very beginning
of dancing Cuban salsa and have hardly been to Ruedas where all the moves were called as well as signalled during the entirety of the song, but it has
inspired me to collect all the hand signs I could find and ask teachers for all
the details they had around hand signs every time I went to a new class, Rueda,
performance etc. I have been dancing in many different places both at home as
well as abroad since I started my interest in Rueda hand signs. This has
allowed me to collect more of these than any other person I know and through
the dance school I now run with Aimi I have shown them alongside every move I ever taught
making sure that Ruedas contain both the names as well as the hand signs from
start to finish. It is my sincere hope that through this blog and my dance
classes more and more people will come to realise the clear advantages that
hand signs bring in Ruedas so that they find wider acceptance, enhancing
everybody’s experience while dancing in Rueda de Casino.
The first hand sign I want to introduce is the one for “Dame”
where the cantante will use his free hand (usually the right hand) to wave
backwards once as if to say “come closer”. This is a very descriptive sign as “Dame”
literally means “Give me” meaning “give me another partner” so we are
effectively signalling the next person in the Rueda to come closer to their
respective leader. Another interpretation is that the waving hand is supposed
to be taken as having originated from one of the many synonyms for “Dame” that
can be called in the Rueda namely “Botala” which means “Chuck her”. In this
context the idea is that we forget our current partner and move on to the next “chucking
our current partner away” (all part of Cuban humour, do not execute this literally
please!). I.e. it is the same hand sign people use in daily life when you hear
them say “whatever” meaning they do not care about this current task,
situation, problem etc. and want to move on to the next.
