Rumba Cafe – The new night in Sydney

When I came to Australia (that was 6 years ago!), the Australia Salsa Scene was at the beginning of its international growth, as not many of our dancers were known overseas yet.

I used to hear about this place called “BJ’s” in Bondi Junction, which was the prime spot for Salseros at the time.  One of the first Salsa competitions in Australia was organized there – “The Best of the Best” –  where big names like Jaime Jesus, Nestor Manuelian, Yvonne G Laycy, Patricia Falciola, Carlos Galiano, Daniel Paredes, to name a few (yes, I’m talking about years ago!), have competed. I didn’t get to watch the competition, but I know it was an important one in the history of Australian Salsa. Read the story »

Bachata dancing is evolving, how about u?

With the growing popularity of Bachata, I have seen, and also been involved in a lot of discussions within the dancing community regarding the different styles of Bachata currently being danced and taught around the world, and which style is considered to be the “correct” style to dance.

The evolution of Bachata begun with a change in the music itself, let’s look the past few decades… In the early 90’s, Luis Vargas and Antony Santos, both from the Dominican Republic, started to popularize Bachata to the Caribbean market. These guys decided to include the use of electric guitars, something that was not done before. In 1992, Dominican born singer Juan Luis Guerra won a Grammy for his album “Bachata Rosa”, his Bachatas blended the traditional romantic Bachata sounds with Bolero. The popularity of his music helped raise the profile of Bachata music throughout the world. Read the story »

Bachata styles and evolution

This article is written to find out more about something that we all love in an effort to standardize the different styles in Bachata. This article is open for discussion as we would like to hear from you.
I will certainly gain more knowledge from this – and hopefully you too! – Peter

For some time I’ve (together with my wife Christine) been organizing events, teaching and watching the evolution of the Bachata dance which we learned to love for so many different reasons.

Personally I love the variety on HOW to dance ANY dance, but I’m starting to be worried when students are asking about styles which for me never would count as a STYLE of (in this case) Bachata. Why? Well… Most of the “styles” encountered today, are just one of the main styles (if you could call them that) that is somewhat expressed differently than another teacher somewhere else in the world teaching the same style – leading to inconsistence; which in turn will lead to the teacher calling the style something of his own – so that you cannot claim the style to be false in any way.

Well… That is ONE way to solve the issue. Read the story »