SalsaSelfie.com 🇨🇺

Rueda de Casino is great fun, good for socialising, a nice way to say hello to new comers as well as to old friends. But Rueda de Casino is also hard-wired choreography with no decision making, no leading and following, no improvisation, no creativity and no musicality.

If we dance a lot of Rueda de Casino, the burden of the Rueda Body Memory can not but have a devastating negative effect on our ability to dance socially.

As long as we dance like a one couple Rueda with the Lead as Caller, and even as long as we mainly use Rueda moves in our social dancing, the body memory of Rueda de Casino is so strong that we dance in a straitjacket, making it impossible to grow and progress as social dancers.

For many years I have tried hard to escape the Rueda Prison of Brain Death Dancing. I have systematically unlearned almost everything I have learned in Rueda-centric dance schools and workshops. Escaping the Rueda Prison does not mean that you suddenly become a good or even a better dancer but it unlocks the full potential of Cuban Salsa as a social dance.

The most important is to take charge of your own learning process, and to develop a style and mode of dancing tailored to your level, talent and abilities. A style that sets you free.

The video clip is from my Practica Dancing with Mona, Copenhagen, Denmark, April 2023.