67. Reaction to Cuban Son Demo. Luis Duarte & Vero. The Macho challenge of Cuban Son and Casino

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This Video Demo of Cuban Son, 2021, is good to illustrate a few things about Cuban Son and Casino. The demo dance is five minutes long. The first four minutes are good even excellent, the last minute, 20 percent of the dance, is a disaster. Before I explain why, let me say a few things about Cuban Son in general.

The way we look at Cuban Son today is mostly formed by contemporary demo dances, like this one, and show dancing with focus on entertainment, stunts and complex choreographies. But the look and feel of a one couple performance show, alone on a big dance floor, has most often very little in common with how Son was once danced as a social dance more than fifty years ago before the arrival of Casino or with how it should be danced today.

The dance demo of Luis Duarte from Portugal, and Vero is no exception. Very showy and theatrical. There is no audience but we can feel it is there, this dance is not private, it is to be seen. This “putting on a show”, so to speak, has almost become the signature look and feel of Son as it is most often presented today.

What impresses me the most in the demo dance of Luis and Vero is that there is a good balance between the Lead and the Follow in the first four minutes of the dance. They are equal partners, they are in it together. Especially I like that the Tornillo figures of the Lead and of the Follow are equally difficult and interesting in the first four minutes of the dance. This is rare.

Last minute disaster

Unfortunately, and now we come to the last minute disaster, Luis Duarte ends up like nothing but a Cuban-Macho-look-alike. For the last minute of a five minute dance, Luis Duarte out-dances his Follow, reducing her to an assistant, a dance prop, an excuse for own self-promotion.

The Leader is high-jacking the dance for himself. His Macho Tour de Force is technically excellent but a bad model for how to dance Son. The Lead ends up with the biggest applause, the Follow is already forgotten. She was only allowed to participate in the baseline of the dance but the highlights and culmination, the Grand Finale, was for the Lead only.

This is not what Followers want. They want to be true partners. If Son and Casino is mainly a dance for Leaders with the Followers mostly as helpers and assistants, the good Followers move on to other more Follow-centric dance styles where they are equal and fully appreciated. Like Jazz and Swing dances, Lindy Hop, West Coast Swing, Tango, Brazilian Zouk, Bachata Sensuel, and even X-Body Salsa, etc. Cuban Social Dances, Son and Casino, have a terrible reputation of being the most Lead heavy of all social dance styles.

The challenge for Son as a modern dance is that because of its Macho past, there is a back catalogue of fantastic things the Lead can do but there isn’t much of a repertoire for the Follow.

We count on good dancers like Duarte and Vero to make Son more Follow-Centric. The first four minutes of this Demo was promising but they failed at the end, completely.

A social dance should be about how good a Lead can make the Follow dance with him on equal terms with main Focus on the Follow.