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The Musicality of Salsa Dancers: an Ethnographic Study

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The Musicality of Salsa Dancers: an Ethnographic Study City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 2-2018 The Musicality of Salsa Dancers: An Ethnographic Study Janice Mahinka The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2565 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] THE MUSICALITY OF SALSA DANCERS: AN ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY by JANICE L. MAHINKA A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Center in Music in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2018 i © 2018 JANICE L. MAHINKA All Rights Reserved ii The Musicality of Salsa Dancers: An Ethnographic Study by janice l. mahinka This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Music in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ____________________ _____________________________________ Date Peter Manuel Chair of Examining Committee ____________________ _____________________________________ Date Norman Carey Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Stephen Blum Emily Wilbourne Howard Meltzer THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT The Musicality of Salsa Dancers: An Ethnographic Study by janice l. mahinka Advisor: Stephen Blum This work analyzes the musical knowledge and aesthetics acquired by improvisatory social salsa dancers who hone close listening skills through corporeal means. The connections that these dancers construct between music, self, and partner make evident an engagement with musicality that can be seen through their demonstration of kinesthetic entrainment, structural feeling of hypermetric conventions, and enactment of expressive microtiming within beat and metric structures. I introduce the concept of timespace to explain how dancers manipulate this physiological experience to create different feelings in a dance, addressing issues that dancers raised in our feedback interviews such as feel, flow, and play. Other issues, such as the flexibility and adaptability of dancers to follow and lead each other, regardless of their role in the leader/follower relationship of the partner dance, demonstrate that the more attentive a dancer is to the multivalent environment, the more rewarding the dance experience becomes. I utilize in- depth feedback interviews with participants of New York City salsa/mambo scenes, instructional videos, and musicality classes, as well as my personal experience salsa dancing for eighteen years, alongside work in music and social theory, and work drawing on phenomenology, to build an analytic foundation of musical knowledge that dancers enact within this popular dance music. This project offers readers a basic musical vocabulary and understanding of concepts that invite both dancers and musicians to make a deeper connection to the dance/music experience. As music is experienced in multiple ways, this dissertation incorporates multiple streams of theory iv and experience. With the help of the participants in the project, I offer the beginning of an intersensorial explanation of the dance/music aesthetics of salsa. v PREFACE: Access to Video Examples This dissertation studies one of the central concerns of salsa dancers, musicality, a set of issues often touched upon in conversations, in the studio, and on the dance floor. Portions of each chapter include analyses of video examples, the easiest technology to capture participants in action. The videos of participants social dancing were gathered with their permission prior to the feedback interviews conducted at a later date. The feedback interviews were also video recorded; excerpts of the feedback interviews are also included as video examples, although most interview transcriptions were integrated into the body of the dissertation text, where applicable. Since these videos should not be easily downloadable or viewed on websites such as YouTube or Facebook, as per the IRB guidelines I discussed with my participants, I created a website where these video examples could be streamed for viewing only. All of the examples are organized by chapter and accessible to stream through the website created especially for this purpose at salsa.commons.gc.cuny.edu . The reader and viewer may watch any and all of the video examples as many times as they wish as long as they have an active internet connection. It is my intention to keep this website active until I secure a publisher that will likewise house the video examples on a similar streaming website. The library will live-capture a copy of this website, as well, to accompany the official dissertation submission. The videos are, for the most part, unaltered. Many video examples are excerpted from the entirety of the song, as the whole dance was not needed to explain the issue analyzed. In the rare case a video was altered, it was to improve the sound (often to make the music louder) and/or the lighting (often to increase the exposure for videos taken in low light clubs), although there are exceptions where other interventions seemed necessary. The small video recorder did not use an attached light, and was most often mounted on a tripod, when space allowed. vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I express the utmost gratitude and love to Daniel, my spouse, for standing by me as I followed the inspiration that embodied itself on our second date and still drives my scholarly ambitions into our eighteenth year—even, and especially, through times that seemed incomprehensibly difficult—to the culmination of this document. I hadn’t planned on this adventure taking so long and creating such hardship; I would not have finished without my family’s financial and housing support in these final years—I am grateful for their generosity. I thank the Baisley Powell Elebash Fund for supporting me with numerous grants; their support of scholarship of the arts of New York City funded the majority of my work on this project. I am also indebted to the time-honored tradition of mentorship. Professor Blum, thank you for taking me and my project on despite your “retirement.” The attention to detail that you have demanded of my work and candor with which you approach learning resonates in my own teaching. It is my hope to find a place where I am valued as much as you are here at the Graduate Center. Doctor Johnson, thank you for guiding me over these past fifteen years. Willa Cather wrote, “The end is nothing; the road is all.” The end to this journey definitely feels like something, but the very bumpy road that I traveled would have seemed impassable at times had it not been for your wry humor and realism. Your style of advisement is unique; I strive to emulate your amiable yet reticent technique when I mentor my own students. I thank Katie Straker for her patience and computer skills that made my transcriptions, even the most challenging ones, clear and professional looking. Last, but not at all least, I thank the participants in my study (and all of my friends that did not formally participate but entertained dances, conversations, emails, texts, or other informal scrutiny). The people I have met while salsa dancing have changed my life—even if we only shared one dance and were never introduced. The love that I have found in the shared vii moments of magic, even if fleeting, lives inside the music and our bodies. The salsa communities I have been part of have inspired me to research and write this dissertation. This dissertation is dedicated to the dancers and musicians whose lives would not be complete without salsa/mambo music and dance. Thank you for sharing your love of this world with me. In turn, I offer this labor of my love to you: dive in, delve deeply, discover. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures . xi List of Videos . xv Introduction . 1 Chapter 1: The Embodiment of Patterns . 24 The Eight-Beat Cycle . 24 Different Salsa Dance Styles . 30 The Acquisition and Embodiment of Salsa . 44 Accommodation and Flexibility . 51 Chapter 2: Dynamic Attending and the Manipulation of Timespace . 58 What Do Dancers Hear? . 59 Dynamic Attending . 68 Timespace . 72 The Feeling of Flow: Timespace Manipulation . 85 How Dancers Manipulate Timespace . 88 Chapter 3: Hypermetric Expectations and Structural Feeling . 103 Typical Salsa Form . 107 Expectation and Play . 113 Improvisation, Reward, and Learning on the Social Dance Floor . 124 Hypermetric expectation or memorization? . 137 ix Chapter 4: Expressive Microtiming and Tempo Rubato . 143 Feel as Corporeal Intention . 144 Expressive Microtiming . 151 Tempo Rubato . 161 Participatory Discrepancies and the Conversations That Draw Us Back to the Dance Floor . 165 Chapter 5: Clave, Clave Breaks, and the Rhetoric of Listening On-2 . 170 The Concepts of Clave . 170 The Half-Measure Interruption . 174 Case Study: The A section of “Trucutú” by Tommy Olivencia y su Orquesta (1975) . 178 Clave Changes: Breaks, Flips, and The Fake-Out . 187 The Discourse of Clave and the Rhetoric of On-2 Dancers . 195 How On-2 Dancers Listen (and Don’t Listen) to Salsa Music . 200 Conclusion . 213 Glossary . 219 Bibliography . 223 x LIST OF FIGURES Chapter 1 Figure 1.1: Correspondence of 2-3 son clave with dancer’s measure. 24 Figure 1.2: Grouping of two 4/4 bars are perceived as one measure consisting of eight beats to the clave-sensitive musician and dancer. 25 Figure 1.3: Common eight-beat harmonic progression found in salsa clásica. 27 Figure 1.4: Correspondence of the “feel” of whole-body motion/direction to the measure. 28 Figure 1.5: Salsa on-1. 31 Figure 1.6: Salsa on-3. 32 Figure 1.7: Medial transposition while dancing on-1. 34 Figure 1.8: Palladium-style on-2.
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