‘Watch and do what I do’: ethnographic fieldnotes from the online salsa class

ABSTRACT

Restrictions on movement and requirements for social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic have triggered an almost total shift to digital creation, teaching, and promotion in the field of dance. By employing an ethnographic lens, this article explores collective and individual embodied knowledge acquired through online dance classes, with a particular focus on Cuban social dance genres. Music and dance were core components of the Cuban tourism industry, an important pillar of the Cuban economy which was brought to a halt by the pandemic. Dancers’ participation in the global dance market through transition to online dancing was hindered by the struggles of everyday life in Cuba, yet their resilience and resourcefulness allowed them to transform their previous routines and pedagogies following the same mechanisms that lead to the emergence of a Cuban dance market in the first place. The article reflects upon the disruptions of old dynamics and emergence of new ones, by focusing on shifting methodologies of Cuban dance, strategies for monetising creative labour, and the female dancing body as transformative space.

KEYWORDS:

• Salsa
• dance
• online teaching
• Cuba
• dance pedagogies
• dance labour
• COVID-19

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The dance market in Havana developed overwhelmingly around the promotion of ‘salsa’, referred to at times as ‘Cuban salsa’, and less frequently as ‘casino’, which is the original name of the dance, and the one Cubans use most often outside of their interactions with tourists. The international salsa community uses primarily the term ‘Cuban salsa’ as well.

2. My focus in this article is on salsa dance as leisure pursuit of dance aficionados with various levels of experience, who engage in classes and parties and actively participate in the international salsa community with non-competitive, non-performative goals.

3. Professional dancers or people with access to dance studios did not dance exclusively from home.

4. Casa particular is a type of private accommodation or private homestay, similar to a bed-and-breakfast, and an alternative to hotels, which are state-owned.

5. This is due to the fact that Cuba has one of the lowest Internet access rates in the Western hemisphere (Henken, 2017), with costs so high that these services are rendered unaffordable for large parts of the population. In addition, it was only in late 2018 that a 3 G data service was rolled out for cell phones, but it remained prohibitively expensive.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Uniwersytet Warszawski - Inicjatywa Doskonałości Uczelnia Badawcza [PSP 501-D131-20-0004316]; National Science Centre, Poland - Narodowe Centrum Nauki [2017/25/N/HS3/00315 and 2021/40/C/HS3/00086]

Notes on contributors

Ruxandra Ana

Ruxandra Ana (PhD University of Warsaw) is an anthropologist whose research focuses on cultural heritage in relation to entrepreneurship and social change in Cuba. Her doctoral dissertation is an ethnography of dance-related practices as part of alternative networks of economic and emotional exchange that emerge in touristic spaces in Havana. Currently a postdoctoral researcher at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, she is conducting a research project that analyzes dance labour in migratory contexts.