Rueda Formations (Part 3)

While we usually distinguish between the structural formations discussed in this blog series so far, particularly in the recent history of Rueda de Casino many other variations have emerged. These fundamentally change the way the overall Rueda is set-up in one small aspect often making it possible to do all moves from the new position but giving them a new look and feel. For a lack of a better description these are often referred to as formations as well or sometimes also Rueda “structures” and they share the feature with structural formations that once they are initiated all moves have to end up in the same formation again. I.e. if we are in a Rueda Pa’ Fuera and an Enchufla is called then at the end of the Enchufla we should still be in Rueda Pa’ Fuera. The fundamental difference between these new formations and the traditional structural formations is the fact that we can usually still do all the traditional formations after the overall Rueda has changed, meaning that these newer formations change the Rueda generically rather than certain parts of it almost like dancing a different type of Rueda. For instance, if we are in Rueda Espejo then the entirety of the Rueda including all structural formations (La Entrada, Tiempo España, Casino, Para el Medio, El Fin) can be done without having to leave the Espejo formation.

Some of these type of generic formations include:

• Rueda Para El Linear
• Rueda Pa Fuera
• Rueda Espejo
• Rueda En Cruz
• Rueda Contrario
• Rueda Confusion
• Rueda Contratiempo
• Rueda Con Dos Hombres
• Rueda Con Dos Mujeres
• Rueda Combo
• Rueda Dos Parejas

Some of these formations are better known then others and certain differences have arisen internationally as to what people understand with respect to the above names but generally speaking only very advanced Ruedas will know of the existence of these formations and attempt to include them in their calls.

The difficulty of Ruedas including these generic formations increases almost immediately and while it is not necessarily obvious to amateur spectators that something has changed for formations such as Rueda Espejo it is actually tremendously harder to do even simple moves with this additional feature then adding some advanced moves into a standard Rueda.

The Norwegian Rueda standard is arguably one of the best resources for having documented most of the existing formations as well as inventing some new and exciting formations into their Ruedas some of which have caught on internationally. Their current list of formations can be viewed at http://ruedastandard.salsanor.com/rueda-structure.