Treating my guapeitis in Cuban salsa

"It is a sickness of the highest order, and therefore, we do not want it. Hustagafulizaha."

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.

  1. Background
    1. Why guapea is evil
    2. A different perspective
    3. Approach
  2. Better defaults
    1. Vuelta
    2. Vacilala
    3. Sencillas
    4. DQN
      1. Shines
      2. Caminala
      3. CBL
      4. Peinala
    5. Cerrada
  3. Decision points
  4. Conclusion

Background

Why guapea is evil

Just about everything that could possibly be wrong about a figure is wrong about guapea. To start: people can’t agree on whether guapea should be backward-forward, rightward-leftward, or semicircular. In any case, all three versions are equally boring: they take 8 counts to oscillate pointlessly, arriving where they started, with no change in position or handhold, and no momentum created. Indeed, as has been argued by Daybert Linares, even just the name guapea (“show off”) is a failure, because out of all figures you could execute, the only one that shows off precisely nothing is guapea. Not even the onlookers who know nothing about salsa will see a guapea and think “Wow, I wish I could do that”. And really, if we are dancing with intention, why would you ever intend to push on a lady anyway?

A different perspective

I’m going to argue that guapea is not fundamental to casino en pareja. It is not a necessary part of the dance. That is: you could teach a person all of casino except guapea, and this person, completely oblivious to the existence of guapea, would somehow be able to keep the dance going without gaps. If I am right about this, then those dances will be infinitely more interesting to followers and onlookers.

It’s not obvious that you would even stop to consider what casino would be like without guapea. It’s the first step you learn. Casino and guapea go together like houses and overhead lighting. Yet, plenty of very nicely designed houses avoid overhead lights like the plague, and get by much better with just uplights and decorative lighting. Such is the nature of guapea too.

Fundamentally, the cause for defaulting to guapea as filler can always be led back to rueda. In rueda, idling is a necessary part of the dance between leader and follower, because the leader is waiting for instructions from the cantante (the “supreme leader”) who is cooking up the instruction to call out. Now consider the format of partnerwork classes: everyone pairs up in some shape, the teacher initiates the count, you do indefinitely many guapeas until the teacher announces that it’s time to do the new figure you just learnt. You return back to guapea and the cycle continues. In other words, your teacher is a supreme leader who instructs leaders on which move happens next (except it’s always the same move) and you are expected to idle in guapea meanwhile. That’s just rueda without the circle!

Thus, you are training your body and brain to dance casino en pareja as if it is rueda. And then, when leaders get to the dance floor, we understand that there is nobody to call out instructions, but instead of presuming the role of a casino en pareja leader, we presume the role of a rueda cantante, just in our own heads. That means, until we instruct ourselves to do a particular figure, we return to a guapea. Meanwhile, your follower is getting bored because unlike in a rueda, she’s not paying attention to the cantante. She’s paying attention to you. And she can’t read your mind.

I’d argue that there exist four correct roles one could play in casino:

  1. Follower: follows a leader.
  2. Delegate: leads a follower, is led by a cantante.
  3. Cantante: leads a follower, and leads delegates.
  4. Leader: leads a follower and is connected to only her.

Classes inadvertently turn aspiring leaders into widowed delegates, not leaders. This is bad. Casino en pareja is not a baseline of guapeas with figures on top. It is a sequence of figures. If you do use guapea, you should view it as an explicitly chosen figure in the sequence, not as the “home position”. There is no home.

Approach

The way I’m going to approach remedying this is to use videos of advanced casino dancers, and trying to look for when I expect a guapea (e.g. after a DQN, when the position opens) and it never ends up happening.

Two things can be true in that case: either the leader is so experienced he never needs time to idle for the next figure, or alternatively, he just has one or more default figures that are more interesting and may be longer than one phrase so that they buy him more time. The former takes a long time to cultivate, the latter can be copy-pasted instantly once we pinpoint what those defaults are. It is those I’m hunting for.

Better defaults

Vuelta

In this video, multiple leaders dance with the same follower at a dance festival. No guapeas are done, whilst almost all of the leader default to the same crutch: a right-on-left vuelta.

In this video, Axel Dardón (who is at most 12 years old when it was filmed), relies on right-on-left vueltas, hammerlocking left-on-right vueltas, and two-handed vueltas which he untangles with an enchufla, to never do a guapea. In fact, for a lot of the dance, he keeps a two-handed hold, so a guapea becomes impossible.

I do have to caution against doing vueltas too often as a replacement for guapea, because I have found from personal experience that it may become a reflex after your DQNs, essentially turning your DQN into one 16-count figure, which is bad because (1) the vuelta becomes predictable, (2) vueltas do slow down the flow of the dance since they happen in-place and don’t progress the position, and (3) it basically locks you out of all figures that start with a vacilala because the transition from one to the other just brakes the flow too much. Hence, in my experience, defaulting to vueltas basically results in many DQN-vuelta-enchufla sequences (you can also see this in the first video above), so you better know enough figures starting in enchufla.

Vacilala

In Erick Berninzon’s most-watched video, you’ll see that every guapea automatically leads to either a (hammerlocking) vacilala or some variation on a siete (i.e. a half-vacilala). I don’t notice this in his other videos, so it may have been a temporary habit or some commonly understood agreement with that specific follower; in any case, converting all guapeas into vacilala signals makes the dance have no dead moments.

This technique is also very friendly to those of us who are just starting to cleanse away our guapeas: if you forgot to start a vuelta in the first bar, you can deploy this as a last-ditch effort. All you need to do is start pushing a little harder on 6 – when you realise you’ve gone almost the entire phrase without deflecting the impending boredom of a guapea – and launch at 7, which is just an exaggerated form of the guapea step you were about to do anyway. The late signal means that you can afford to have done zero planning all along, and during the next three counts, you can decided which one of the vacilala variations you want to go into: vacilala sin mano to start a shine, dile que si to close the position, sombrero to start a plethora of figures, or vacilala con mano with one hand behind the back to go into any figure that starts with a hammerlock (e.g. 70 if left-handed or 84 if right-handed).

Sencillas

There is an infamous café in La Habana de Cuba called la Bodeguita del Medio where you’ll find salsa music playing (often live), and salseros dancing to the music. You may encounter one particular wizardly character in the street next to la Bodeguita, whom I’ll call Cuban Santa.

In this video of Cuban Santa, he dances with two followers. With the second follower in particular, you’ll notice that he uses two figures quite often: one is the vuelta-setenta, and the other is a sencilla abajo (an alternating sequence of enchuflas and behind-the-back counterclockwise turns).1

In a previous article, I myself proposed and advocated for the sencilla mezcla, which consists of up to 4 enchuflas in a row with up to 3 enchufates in between, each being either arriba, atras or abajo. I stand by this.

DQN

I noticed that, after I had collected all the different stalling strategies featured in this article, one particular set of methods seemed to come down to the same core principle: generating DQNs. It makes some sense: even if you had not read the start of this article convincing you that guapea is evil, would you rather have done 100 DQNs, or 100 guapeas? I certainly don’t have to think twice about this choice. And yet, us aspiring leaders may have the misconceived notion that DQN is a true figure in its own right – something we would never think of guapea – and feel embarrassed for doing too many DQNs because it is supposedly repetitive, like doing too many exhibelas would be repetitive. We don’t blush at doing the same amount of guapeas, which is a much larger sin. We have it backwards.

Now, it’s possible to just use an enchufla (followed perhaps by an exhibela) for generating DQNs, but the issue with this is that enchuflas create physical and figurative tension. They heighten attention. They are the first step in the buildup to some kind of climax. The DQN that follows an enchufla announces that the climax has passed and resolves the story arc. When you let your enchuflas be followed by DQNs immediately after, it is reminiscent of premature ejaculation. Don’t be that guy.

Below are more palatable ways in which I’ve found people generate DQNs.

Shines

On a vuelta doble or a vacilala, either partner can decide to not reconnect and instead start doing shines. Some followers really don’t like being left alone – in which case you should only do shines that involve her, e.g. spiralling around each other – and some followers are so poor at following that they prefer doing a whole song shining.

The way to get out of a shine and reconnect with each other is with a DQN, just like when followers are exchanged in a rueda, the way to start the connection with the new follower is to do a DQN. In pair, the leader can do this whenever he likes, provided the follower shows herself to be open to reconnecting during her solo. He then moves closer to her and steps in front of her while putting his hand on her back, initiating a DQN.

The point of dancing as a pair should not be the shines, so you should still not drag them out. The budget is larger than for guapea, though. Sufficient to replace guapea are 0-phrase shines (i.e. you disconnect during a single-phrase figure like vuelta doble or vacilala, do solo styling, and immediately position yourself such that you can reconnect with a DQN at the end of that same figure) and 1-phrase shines (disconnect, shine for 8 counts, immediately reconnect) because neither of these ever looks or feels like a separate part disjunct from the rest of the dance together.

The advantage of replacing guapea by shines is that “guapea” is a figure whilst “shine” is a placeholder for an infinite amount of possible solo figures. So, you could replace 20 identical guapeas by 20 distinct shines, which don’t even feel like they break the dance.

Caminala

In this absolute classic, Daybert Linares does a four-minute dance with no shines and exactly 2 guapeas. The way he does this is simply by replacing them by caminala (also called paseo), a box-shaped desplazamiento.

The king of caminalas, however, is Piotr Agassi Chajkowski. I can’t remember ever having seen him do a single guapea in all the videos I’ve watched. His whole style, which is at least as smooth as his bald head, centres around caminala: whenever he’s not doing a figure, he’s walking his follower around, even when he’s holding her at the neck or when he has her in hammerlock. Watching his videos, you could forget that guapea even exists.

You start a caminala coming out of a DQN. The leader doesn’t do his final 90° counterclockwise and thus opens up the couple towards the right of guapea. He puts his right foot forward on 7 while pulling the same way with his left arm (the opposite way of a vacilala, so the two can’t be confused).

  • Leader steps:
    • First bar: looks a lot like the follower’s second bar in a DQN.
      • 1: left foot forward.
      • 2: right foot forward but rotated 90° counterclockwise.
      • 3: left foot forward and rotated another 90°. In total, you’re turning 180°. It’s hard to turn fast enough if you walk straight, and this way it’s much easier. In Daybert’s video above, the long pointy shoes neatly show the 90° turns during his caminalas.
    • Second bar: second bar of paso basico, but putting your right foot forward on 7.
      • The backstep in paso basico allows you to catch any momentum you got from the 180° turn.
      • The forestep is needed so you can stay ahead of the follower.
  • Follower steps:
    • First bar: walk forwards and make a 90° turn right on 3.
    • Second bar: second bar of DQN, but turn faster so that you turn 90° extra (270° rather than 180°) and end up facing the same way as the leader. It helps if you do the tap on 4, because your body may otherwise think (since you start in caída and haven’t seen the leader do the first bar of DQN) that you are in the first bar of DQN.

This basic caminala has two variations: one that stays left-handed, and one that becomes right-handed. You can continuously switch from one to the other in the second bar. In the left-handed version, on 3, you either grab her other hand with your right (like in the video) or just put it on her back. You let go again on 7. To get into the right-handed version, you do half a caminala and then switch hands on 3. From that point onward, you’re holding her right-on-right, and you both alternate in establishing a frame with your free hand: in the first bar, you guide her forward with your left hand on her right shoulder. In the second bar, she keeps her left hand on your right shoulder as long as she can to stay close to you.

In the two videos linked for these variations, Steven Messina shows how you can transition from caminala into other figures seamlessly without ever passing through a guapea: in his examples, the second bar of a left-handed caminala can turn into the second bar of a Coca-Cola, whilst the right-handed caminala can be followed by any right-on-right figure like a sombrero, for which the hand switch could now have happened many bars ago.

You can spice up your left-handed caminala with a reina by raising your arm in the second bar so she can walk under it. In this case, unlike a DQN and thus also unlike a normal caminala, she rotates clockwise by 90° rather than counterclockwise by 270°, resembling an exhibela that never U-turns. (Leading this is very natural since it’s physically impossible for her to turn the usual way when you raise your arm.) When you hold both hands while doing a reina, you can use it to go into a hammerlock without ever needing a vuelta.

CBL

In this video of Cuban Santa (see if you can predict the sencilla abajo!), you’ll see that he often goes from abierta straight into the second bar of DQN by just turning his body 90° counterclockwise in the first bar. The follower doesn’t seem to realise that her steps now come down to just walking back and forth. I don’t know the Spanish name for this figure, but to me, there is no difference between this and the cross-body lead (CBL) which LA-style salsa is built around.

You could argue that what he is doing is reminiscent of caminala, but that’s really not it because the follower is not walking with him. In caminala, leader and follower walk parallel in the first bar, and then the follower makes a 90° turn to do the second part of DQN. In CBL, the follower is unaware of the leader’s intention and does guapea steps in the first bar. The leader crosses her track to position himself in caída, and then she just walks forward.

Peinala

As another example, this boy, whom us starting salseros should all aspire to be like, does infinitely more complicated turns than I’m able to do (they’re too fast for me to even name them), but one thing that does seem apparent is that he does a CBL with peinala whenever he can. His follower gladly shows off her ability to spin fast without getting dizzy in this case, so it worked out.

The follower being so fast and sensitive is also a happy coincidence to avoid all guapeas: the few times this couple gets into abierta, the leader seems to fully pause for the first bar, and then quickly decides, signals and executes the entire phrase (e.g. a prima, a hammerlocking vuelta, …) in the second bar.

Cerrada

One more interesting way of avoiding the repetitiveness of guapea is to replace it with the repetitiveness of a closed step, tricking the follower into thinking something interesting is happening (rather than you stalling) due to being in her personal space.

This video features two leaders from the 02:00 mark onward: one is wearing a blue-and-white checkered shirt, the other a shirt with flower print. The man with the flower shirt in particular doesn’t even have the reflex to raise his right hand in abierta, which indicates that he has no guapea muscle memory. These leaders have two strategies: both make use of shines to generate DQNs, but additionally, you’ll notice that these leaders both move to cerrada when they want a break from thinking, which they keep energetic by doing a paso son rather than a paso basico, moving their entire body.

Erick Berninzon, in the video I already discussed above, also makes heavy use of posición cerrada to connect with his follower. He doesn’t use paso son, but the even closer cedazo,2 where the leader’s right leg is between the follower’s legs and he turns the couple clockwise around that axis.

However, to fully develop cerrada, I’ll get back to you with a separate article.

Decision points

Every phrase in abierta overlaps with a window of 8 counts. On most of those counts, you can start a figure that avoids guapea. As I see it, here this is how those decision points are laid out:

  • 7: caminala
  • 8: Cubanita
  • 1: enchufla/prima
  • 3: vuelta
  • 6: vacilala/hold

When the next 7 hits and you have not taken any of these branches in the decision tree, you have condemned your follower to a guapea.

Conclusion

I set out to collect better figures to default to than guapea when truly leading a casino dance, and came across several techniques by watching videos of other casineros: defaulting to vueltas, vacilalas or sencillas, chilling in cerrada, and lastly, generating DQNs using shines, caminalas and CBLs (with or without peinala).

I have since started to apply these techniques and lo-and-behold, guapea has vanished almost completely out of my dances. How to keep the figures you do do fresh, is a topic for another day.

  1. The last 10 seconds are insane though – I should learn that. ↩︎

  2. There are many names for this figure. The less extreme version is called adiós by both SalsaSelfie, Steven Messina, and Nashville Rueda. The tighter version seems to be referred to as cedazo unambiguously e.g. here and here. Son Y Casino synonymises cedazo and adiós. The term pressure turn also exists according to SalsaYo, but with very few search hits. In the LA community, it seems both backspot turn and around the world or even just 360 are used. ↩︎