Balboa Park Dancers NewsNotes

Foxtrot is a smooth dance, traveling around the line of dance. The long walking movements involve a subtle rise & fall action. Turning movements are similar to Waltz, but with a more moderate rise and fall, and more length-wise action. The Foxtrot is danced to music written in 4/4 time with the first and third beats of each measure more heavily accented. It is danced in combinations of slow and quick steps, with each slow step taking two beats and each quick step one beat of music. Foxtrot is extremely versatile and can be danced to a variety of musical styles and tempi. Foxtrot music has a tempo of 29 to 34 measures per minute.

The dance was premiered in 1914, quickly catching the eye of the husband and wife duo Vernon and Irene Castle, who lent the dance its signature grace and style. The exact origin of the name of the dance is unclear, although one theory is that it took its name from its popularizer, the vaudeville actor Harry Fox. Two sources credit African American dancers as the source of the Foxtrot: Vernon Castle himself, and dance teacher Betty Lee. Castle saw the dance, which "had been danced by negroes, to his personal knowledge, for fifteen years, [at] a certain exclusive colored club".

Salsa

Salsa is a popular form of social dance that originated in the Caribbean. The movements of salsa have origins in Puerto Rican bomba and plena, Cuban Son, cha-cha-cha, mambo and other dance forms. The dance, along with the salsa music, originated in the mid-1970s in New York. Different regions of Latin America and the United States have distinct salsa styles of their own, such as Cuban, Puerto Rican, Cali Colombia, L.A. and New York styles. Salsa dance socials are commonly held in night clubs, bars, ballrooms, restaurants, and outside, especially if part of an outdoor festival.

In many styles of salsa dancing, as a dancer shifts their weight by stepping, the upper body remains level and nearly unaffected by the weight changes. Weight shifts cause the hips to move. Arm and shoulder movements are also incorporated. It generally uses music suitable for dancing ranges from about 150 bpm (beats per minute) to around 250 bpm, although most dancing is done to music somewhere between 160.220 bpm. The basic Salsa dance rhythm consists of taking three steps for every four beats of music. The odd number of steps creates the inherent syncopation to the Salsa dancing and ensures that it takes 8 beats of music to loop back to a new sequence of steps.