There are several figures in casino whose main purpose is to move the centre of the couple, rather than doing flashy armwork. They are called desplazamientos (“displacements”). These figures are made for letting the dance breathe, for claiming space, and in crowded spaces, for getting to an emptier part of the floor without stopping the dance.

Anyone who has made social partner dance their hobby has inevitably made long-term connections with people of the other sex. Furthermore, every dancer with any critical sense will rank-order these people by their competency. So then, the question naturally arises: does it make sense to date those dancers with whom you develop a good personal connection and who are so competent that you like dancing with them more than most others? I will argue here that paradoxically, the more you admire someone’s dancing abilities, the less it should determine whether you date them, or even, the less you should consider them for dating.

In dance, a follower hammerlock involves both hands being held, with one arm of the follower crossing behind her back and coming out the other side. The hammerlocking vuelta/vacilala is the first two-handed casino figure you learn as a beginner. This figure is the start of an entire family of figures that are variations on the famous setenta (70), which is surprisingly large. This hints at the observation that hammerlocks are a fantastic branching point for adding variety to the dance. Here is a list of all the things you can do with them.

Beginners are cursed with not finding the count and being off count without knowing, which bothers onlookers. Improvers are cursed with knowing how to find count in most songs, and hence they are the first to feel discomfort when falling off count. You can’t just defibrillate the dance with a hard stop, like you would a heart to restart the pulse. So, here are some of the ways I get back on count – fixing the car while driving it.

As I have explored in previous articles, all casino figures transition between three positions. One of those, caída, is rather starved compared to the other two (and certainly abierta, from which most figures start); the choice is basically between doing an exhibela or a DQN. There are two ways to alleviate this: by substituting caída with a figure, and by substituting the last bar of DQN. There is a very nice relationship between both, and in fact, by assuming symmetry between them, you can logically deduce the existence of new figures.

I have written in the past about the positional system that underlies casino dancing and why it works so well as a model that predicts what works and doesn’t work. Such modelling had already been done even before I knew casino existed, probably because positions are mainly footwork, and footwork is what everyone, beginner or not, needs a good understanding of before anything else. Conversely, at higher levels, not much new footwork is learnt, and armwork becomes the focus. Since arms can move so freely, it would seem impossible to model them discretely at first glance, and so nobody has managed to do so. I will do exactly that, and integrate it into positional theory. Introducing bibrachial theory.

As a beginning leader, all you care about in the music is the count. Yet, as David Linares blogged about almost a decade ago, and as was recently reiterated by Steven Messina and Robin Campbell, a good leader conditions his figures and positions on the energy of the music. I will go one step further and argue that true musicality requires that your dance follows the emotion expressed by the lyrics. So, let’s learn some Spanish lyrics.

If you’re a Cuban salsa leader, I’m sure this has happened to you before: you’re at a salsa social and ask a woman to dance, to which she responds she has never actually danced salsa (for example, because she is a bachatera), or alternatively, she dances LA style. You could just tell her “Nevermind…“, but, if she tells you she’s open to it, you could teach her, like a man. How will she ever catch up on the dozens of hours of classes you’ve had? Here’s the secret: all follower movement can be reduced to a very small set of prerequisite patterns. I’m about to give you a script I’ve used many times over to teach followers from zero in just 15 minutes.

One of the problems I have struggled with when dancing casino is that I have to actively plan which figure to do next, and this planning takes up so much bandwidth that the dance stalls in guapea in the meantime. This is excruciatingly boring for followers (and therefore also takes away the fun for me as a leader), and I’m going to call this pathology guapeitis. As for all maladies, there is a need to remedy this.

In my first article about casino (a.k.a. Cuban salsa), I started by describing the three main positions of the couple (abierta, cerrada, caída, a.k.a. open, closed, perpendicular) and organised the rest of the article into a taxonomy of figures starting in a certain position and ending in a certain position. I’ve noticed, however, that two of the three positions, namely abierta and caída, can look different depending on the dance school. Since doing one differently often goes hand-in-hand with doing the other differently, there really exist entire positional systems for dancing casino, which nobody ever points out. For beginners trying to look up basic figures, this difference is not trivial, so let’s point out two such systems.