Cuban followers are a RISC: build your own in 15 minutes!

under Posts / Tutorials / Dancing about Salsa, Casino

A script to let any uninitiated woman bootstrap casino figures in no time.

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.

  1. Overview
  2. Step 1: Recognise the 3 positions
  3. Step 2: Musicality
  4. Step 3: Mirroring the basics
  5. Step 4: The four patterns
    1. Vuelta
    2. Walking vuelta
    3. Vacilala
    4. Dile que no
  6. Figures this follower can follow
  7. Conclusion

Overview

Here is the reduced skill tree a follower needs to complete if she wants to follow all the figures you’ll see in 10-20 weeks of beginners classes.

  1. Recognising the 3 positions: open, closed, perpendicular.
  2. Learning to step on the beat with right-left-right, pause, left-right-left, pause.
  3. Mirroring you in open basic (guapea) and closed basic (paso basico and paso son).
  4. The four essential step patterns: vuelta, walking vuelta, vacilala, and dile que no.

The mirroring and vueltas should come naturally to her, so the only practice will be needed for vacilala and dile que no. There is no need to teach her anything about enchuflas (regular, or even the enchufla abajo that starts a Cubanita) because these are all tension-led.

Leading and following are hard in their own respects. It’s not because the foot patterns for followers can be reduced to a small set that followers are inferior to leaders. If following was easy, leaders could not discern between strong and weak followers. Besides, we all agree that most errors made during the dance are the leader’s fault, and unless you believe men are fundamentally more incompetent than women, we should also agree that doing more things that actually go wrong is explained by doing more things that might go wrong, which by extension comes down to doing more things. So, agreeing that leaders are more at fault implies agreeing that there is less prerequisite knowledge for following.

Now let me pretend like you are one of these uninitiated followers. Start the clock!

Step 1: Recognise the 3 positions

All figures in the dance transition between three positions.

  1. Open position: I’m holding your right hand and we are about 2 footsteps apart, looking diagonally past each other.
  2. Closed position: we are facing each other up close, holding a solid frame. Solid means (1) your right arm is rigid, (2) your left arm pulls my shoulder blade towards you, and (3) your left elbow pushes down on my elbow.
  3. Perpendicular position: your feet are perpendicular to mine. I’m on your left.

Being aware of the current position anchors you throughout the dance. You don’t know what’s coming next, but at least you know where you are.

Step 2: Musicality

Salsa music has repeating patterns of 8 beats. You can find these patterns by counting 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8 and listening if you can repeat this without the instruments shifting to different counts. The 1-2-3-4 should sound like a “musical question” and the 5-6-7-8 should sound like a “musical answer”. If there is a cowbell in the music, it will indicate 1-...-3-...-5-...-7-... for you. If you can’t find the count, follow your leader’s count or ask him to count out loud. If you can find the count and your leader can’t, gently count for him.

Cuban is danced by moving on 1-2-3, pausing on 4, moving on 5-6-7, and pausing on 8. The same foot always hits the ground on the same count: right foot hits the ground on 1, left foot on 2, right on 3. After the pause, the left foot on 5, right on 6, left on 7.

Do this in-place with the music. No matter what happens, make sure your feet hit the ground RLR-LRL until the dance ends.

Step 3: Mirroring the basics

Pretend there is a mirror between us. When nothing else is going on, mirror me. In closed position, we’re stepping backwards with alternating feet.1 In open position, we step forwards on 5-6-7 and push on each other for communication.

It’s a good idea to only teach her the guapea from simétrico. That is: remove all linearity from open position. You ask her to march in-place RLR-LRL, and then ask her if she can do this while rotating in small angles back-and-forth. By offloading the basic step to her ability to just walk, minimal coordination is needed and she can worry about pausing on 4 and 8.

Step 4: The four patterns

Vuelta

In open position, when I raise my hand before the pause (1-2-3), you do a single 360⁰ 3-step turn over your right shoulder after the pause (5-6-7).

Things to pay attention to:

  • A turn is not a spin. You still keep stepping left-right-left through the turn: left foot forward and tilted 45⁰ to start giving momentum, right foot 180⁰ to face away from me, and a swing of your left foot to finish.
  • On 3, don’t yet start turning your body.
  • On 7, your left foot should land in the exact same place you were before the turn.

Walking vuelta

Any time I lift my arm in an arch, you walk under it and then U-turn to where you were. Your center of mass moves back and forth on a straight line and you should be able to repeat this forever.

You use the same rotations as vuelta, but when your right foot turns 180⁰, you push it forward to cover distance, and the last step of your left foot also covers distance (putting your feet in a line rather than together).

Things to pay attention to:

  • End in the same position on 7 as you started.
  • End in the same orientation on 7 as you started.

Vacilala

When we are in guapea and I push myself off of you (so that we both end up looking to your left), you do a double walking turn, from my left side to my right side: a first 360⁰ on 1-2-3, a second 360⁰ on 5-6-7, along a half-circle (not a line like before) around me.

Things to pay attention to:

  • If you don’t push back on me in guapea, you can’t feel when I push harder.
  • Don’t step back on 1. Your first foot is in my direction. I will pull you forwards.
  • Don’t rotate counter-clockwise. It’s clockwise like all other turns.
  • Don’t go too slowly: on 3, you should be facing me with your back, having done a full 360⁰ already.
  • Don’t spin. It’s still two walking turns.

If she's a quick learner, you can tell her about the other vacilala signals.

  • Reach behind your back with your left hand on 3 so that I can catch it.
  • When you feel me pass your hand to my other hand, make a "hands up" gesture with your left hand during your walking turn.

Dile que no

Whenever we are in perpendicular position and I step in front of your face, we do a DQN. Imagine walking from my right side back to my left side using straight lines. You step backward, in-place, and rotate, and then walk forward in a line to get into open position. I’ll guide you through by telling you “backwards-step-step, and walk-walk-walk”.

Things to pay attention to:

  • Don’t step back on 5. It’s back on 1, forward on 5. (Do a tap on 4 to help.)
  • Don’t turn clockwise. DQN is not a walking turn, so it is done counterclockwise.

Have patience. Remember that she’s working with only a couple minutes of experience. Do emphasise that DQN is the most important movement in all of casino, and that it appears so often that she should be ready to do it whenever she is perpendicular to you.

Figures this follower can follow

Once the follower understands that she should keep stepping RLR-LRL, she can follow enchufla, enchufla doble, any sencilla, and even Kentucky, Cubanita, Cubanito, and doce.

The vuelta allows her to do a vuelta doble too, as well as a hammerlocking vuelta, which can lead into a 35, a vuelta-setenta, or something like Santiago on slow music.

The walking vuelta allows her to follow exhibela (from caída or closed) and sácala.

The vacilala allows her to do a dile que si and a dedo. Once she starts offering her hand behind her back, you can lead setenta. Once she understands the sombrero signal, you can lead sombero and montaña.

Conclusion

I am convinced that beginning followers are reduced instruction set computers which can be bootstrapped to participate in a solid casino dance with a learning curve of 15 minutes.

Unfortunately for men, learning to lead actually does take many months. I can’t teach you in 15 minutes and there is a reason why I haven’t run out of content for writing articles about leading casino either.

Now, go on and spread the joy of casino!

  1. Paso son requires too much coordination for someone who has never danced casino. Paso basico is much more accessible. ↩︎