Juliet McMains

Brownface: Representations of Latin-ness in Dancesport

The overwhelming stench of alcohol hovers in the hotel bathroom as my dance partner lathers a fourth layer of brown body paint onto my belly. “You have to learn how to apply your tan properly,” he admonishes sternly as I squirm under the sting of chemicals burning my skin. After rejecting twelve self-tanning products, I have finally found one that stains my fair skin dark enough for me to “pass” as a professional Latin dancesport competitor. Dancesport refers to a highly stylized version of ballroom dancing performed in competition circuits across the United States, Europe, and Asia. International Style Dancesport encompasses both the standard category, comprised of dances most readily associated with aristocratic ballrooms (e.g., waltzes and foxtrots), and the Latin division. Among the many rituals I scoff at in this sport I love to hate is the mandate that any competitor who wishes to be taken seriously must cover his or her body with brown paint. At twenty-seven dollars a bottle, the German made PROFI-TAN-Intensive-Latin-Color is my product of choice. After three generous coats of the bronze elixir have absorbed into my skin, my “brownface” is complete, and I am ready to withstand an entire evening of competition cha-chas.

Salsa Steps Toward Intercultural Education

Address correspondence to Juliet McMains, PhD, Dance Program, University of Washington, Box 351150, Seattle, WA 98195. E-mail: mcmains@uw.edu Arguably the world’s most popular partnered social dance form, salsa attracts devotees far beyond the Latino communities in which this pungent “sauce” was brewed. The cross-cultural appeal of salsa, which celebrates its mixed origins in the Caribbean and Spanish Harlem, makes it a prime candidate for inclusion in university dance curricula. I have been teaching salsa in university dance departments since 1999. In this article, I share pedagogical strategies I have developed over 15 years in hopes that they can be of use to other educators striving to address recent calls to decolonize dance curricula (McCarthy-Brown 2014). Salsa music was “born” in 1970s New York, where Puerto Rican musicians began modernizing Afro-Cuban mambo and son music to reflect a rising urban Latino pride movement. Salsa dance evolved over the next decade as Latino music fans incorporated hustle turn patterns into mambo dancing. By the mid-1990s, popularity of a softer, less politically charged style of salsa music—salsa romántica—that was more accessible to crossover audiences helped to spread salsa music and dance outside Latino communities, leading to the emergence of an international salsa dance craze. I began salsa dancing in 1997. My first love was the L.A. style, but over the next decade as I spent more time on the East Coast, I was converted to a New York-style fanatic. I now teach both styles and their predominant rhythms (on-1 and on-2), as well as basic casino (Cuban-style salsa). Although I was hardly an expert when I began teaching salsa, I was already deeply invested in a salsa community and maintained a commitment to educating myself about salsa history, both of which I believe are essential prerequisites for any teacher of the form.