Abstract
While salsa takes many forms within individual dancing communities, two fundamental styles have developed and spread worldwide—“On-1” and “On-2”—so-named after the metric location of changes in direction in the basic dance step. Practitioners note the differing movement qualities and debate the artistic merits of each style; however, the question of why these styles produce such contrasting effects has not been sufficiently addressed. Continuing work I began with Chris Stover (Music Theory Spectrum 2019), the first half of this talk examines how these small differences in fundamental footwork reverberate through the larger movement patterns of the dance. While subtle, these differences in timing feel significant as they open up spaces (in different metric locations) for improvisation—spaces wherein dancers may express individuality, explore style, and interact with each song’s unique musical features.
In the second half of the talk, I delve deeper into larger-scale dance-music interactions, exploring the hypermetric shifts in the music that result from flipping, breaking, or pausing the clave. I build on my previous case-based research (Journal of Music Theory 2021) by discussing the preliminary results of an in-progress corpus study of salsa music that aims to show how prevalent these types of metric changes are in the genre as a whole and where they tend to be placed in relation to the typical formal structure of salsa song arrangements. Finally, I survey whether and how dancers navigate such shifts, showing that the nature of the physical response depends heavily on the specific features of each unique musical context.
Bio
Rebecca Simpson-Litke is Associate Professor of Music Theory and Head of Music Research in the Desautels Faculty of Music at the University of Manitoba, Canada. Her current research explores rhythmic interactions between music and dance, focusing on the Latin social dances she has taught and performed in her spare time for over 20 years. Her salsa research is published in Music Theory Spectrum, the Journal of Music Theory (for which she was awarded the 2020-21 David Kraehenbuehl Prize) and the forthcoming edited collection Making Music Together (Oxford University Press); her tango research is published in The Cambridge Companion to Tango.