The more I read about Cuban salsa the more I am amazed by the various factors that contributed to the dance evolving into its current form. While it has a very rich culture and history it is still subject to much debate and research due to a lot of factors having never been documented or if so being lost to the international community due to select Spanish documents never reaching the English speaking world i.e. due to the embargo against Cuba. In this blog series I will focus on isolated aspects of the dance and give a historical overview of how they came about rather than giving a complete chronological history of the dance as there are some very interesting stories to be told around seemingly unimportant aspects of the dance that seem to have been largely forgotten by the salsa community overall.
In this first post I want to discuss the close hold used in the Tiempo España formation which to my surprise was introduced to Cuba via Waltz where it had been first adopted. Intuitively, I would have never connected the two dances in any way but there is evidence to suggest that European colonialists danced Waltz on the island as early as 1814. While the close hold was considered outrageous at first it soon became popular and led to the development of Danzón in 1879 which subsequently influenced Son and Casino.
When new students come into my salsa class today few people find the close hold to be a provocative posture, in fact, there are so many moves and gestures in various dances which require much closer body contact and involve more provocative gestures that the standard close hold as such seems like nothing special any more and has been accepted by society overall. Especially in the context of salsa having the reputation of being a more sensual dance it is rather amusing to think that Waltz was once the most provocative dance on the planet and people in Cuba as much as in any other country were shocked and outraged when they first came across this hold. I.e. this can be seen by the Times of London writing in response to the Prince Regent's grand ball in 1816:
“We remarked with pain that the indecent foreign dance called the Waltz was introduced (we believe for the first time) at the English court on Friday last … it is quite sufficient to cast one's eyes on the voluptuous intertwining of the limbs and close compressor on the bodies in their dance, to see that it is indeed far removed from the modest reserve which has hitherto been considered distinctive of English females. So long as this obscene display was confined to prostitutes and adulteresses, we did not think it deserving of notice; but now that it is attempted to be forced on the respectable classes of society by the civil examples of their superiors, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion.”
Similarly, an infamous quote from the English magazine, Belgravia, on the scandalous nature of waltz reads as follows:
“We who go forth of nights and see without the slightest discomposure our sister and our wife seized on by a strange man and subjected to violent embraces and canterings round a small-sized apartment – the only apparent excuse for such treatment being that it is done to the sound of music – can scarcely realize the horror which greeted the introduction of this wicked dance.”
The exact point in time when the close hold was first invented is not known but among the earliest references to this form of dancing comes from Montaigne who wrote that he saw people in Augsburg dance so closely that their faces touched in 1580. Various historical references point to this hold being adopted in early forms of Waltz in South Germany within the 17th and 18th century but it failed to reach international fame until it become fashionable in Vienna in 1780.
