Dance schools will usually teach a mix of moves from the above categories although many groups have emerged that will only teach one of these types of moves such as focusing exclusively on partner dancing. Due to the lack of documentation around Cuban salsa moves it is impossible to say how many salsa moves there are in total or how many of them fall under each of the above category. Rather than searching for the impossible this post is trying to establish the split between these types of moves instead of making a claim on the actual number of moves themselves.
In order to get an idea of this split I have used the Tiempo España Dance Academy syllabus as a sample population. Like most statistical sample populations this will contain some selection bias due to the fact that many of these moves are popular in the UK as this is where we learned them in the first place although we have taken care to admit as many internationally recognised moves on our syllabus as we could find from the various workshops we attended. That being said we did not set out to favour any category of moves over another so if we have for instance a higher level of Rueda moves than Suelto moves than that is a clear indication that these are taught more frequently and widely and that there is a larger number of such moves in existence.
At this moment in time we have 413 moves on the Tiempo España Dance Academy syllabus out of which 19 can be classified as “Suelto”, 210 can be classified as “En Parejas” and 184 can be classified as En Rueda.
While some of the Suelto steps encompass larger free-style categories that contain significantly more moves this shows that the vast majority of moves taught and performed are in the other two categories. Despite the fact that Ruedas are not as commonly observed social dancing as En Parejas moves these two categories are almost on par in terms of the number of moves in each category.
