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salsa舞进化从街头升级

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以下文章轉貼自Rebacca的部落格她的文筆超棒有很多世界知名salsa舞者的介紹大家一定要去看看喔!

台北的天空很SALSA部落格: http://blog.yam.com/princesspea/trackback/11437557

發表於2007年8月6日聯合報，由張佑生先生所譯的「騷莎舞進化從街頭升級」一文裡，介紹目前美國新上映的salsa電影，同時也譯介了一篇深具價值的好文章。

我無意僭越張先生的妙筆生花的譯文，但在我細讀原文之後，發現Julie Bloom在這篇文章裡，清楚的論述了salsa在紐約地區的發展歷史及現況，而這演變的軌跡，又恰是台北salsa發展的良好借鏡，甚至某些部份也和台北salsa圈有些類似，閱讀後，頗有似曾相識之感。尤其原文中對New York Style的ON2 SALSA有很精闢的說明，對有心學習ON2 SALSA的舞棍們來說，具有相當的參考價值。

所以我嘗試將其內容譯出，文筆不佳但求翔實，希望能和同好們共同切磋，在學習salsa舞步的同時，也能多多瞭解salsa世界的潮流變化，感受salsa音樂及舞步的背後，蘊涵深刻的文化精髓。

譯文如下:

在8月3日(譯註：北美上映時間)上檔的最新傳記電影“El Cantante”中，由馬克安東尼（Marc Anthony）飾演的傑出salsa歌手Héctor Lavoe , 才抵達紐約，即發現自己置身於布朗克斯區（Bronx）一個充滿活力的場景：在夜總會裡的擁擠人群裡，每個人都汗溼淋漓地的隨著康加鼓的節奏舞動著。這一幕，是60年代晚期紐約夜生活的最佳寫照，在當時，舞蹈才是街頭活力的真正展現。

但從整個70年代至80年代初期(即Mr. Lavoe的全盛時期)開始，至今salsa舞有了戲劇性的轉變，當時紐約地區上百家的俱樂部裡，擠滿了從波多黎各(Puerto Ricans)、多明尼加（Dominicans）、古巴（Cubans）來的和其它拉丁人，夜復一夜的隨著知名歌手如Mr. Lavoe, Willie Colón和 Ray Barretto的音樂起舞。

隨著“El Cantante”電影、即將上演的百老滙音樂劇“In the Heights”，及晚間電視節目“So You Think You Can Dance”的播出，Salsa見證了一個流行文化的重新復甦。但這種舞蹈形式卻已完全從它的誔生地--紐約夜店中消失無蹤，Cheetah Discotheque、Ochentas、 Corso等這些舞廳早已關門大吉。一直硬撐到最後的Copacabana也在本月初（譯註：2007年7月）正式歇業。

如同其他許多變動不息的舞蹈潮流，salsa夜店的困境有一部分是因為時代的改變，Hip-hop開始吸引年輕新一代的拉丁裔美國人，同時國標舞者也開始將salsa納入當成一種嚴肅的舞蹈形式，此舉使得愛上夜店的年輕人更不想跳salsa。今天salsa能夠在紐約及全世界繼續存活，依賴的是一群深具熱忱的半職業舞者。

『感覺上似乎有愈來愈多的人學習salsa，但過去從街頭啒起、並深切瞭解salsa音樂的人卻不再跳舞了。」一名播放salsa音樂，資歷超過30年的資深DJ -- Henry Knowles說道：「在80年代和90年代，你可以每晚都出門狂歡，在紐約就有四、五個地方可以去，而且每一家都有現場演奏的salsa音樂，但現在你就是找不到salsa了，尤其在Bronx區也找不到，那裡過去可是眾所皆知的salsa聖地。」

在電影“El Cantante”中負責salsa舞場景設計及編排的Maria Torres ，跳salsa及編舞已有二十多年的經驗，對salsa的演變有很深刻的體會，她現在世界各地教salsa舞和她獨創的拉丁爵士。出生並成長於紐約布魯克林區（Brooklyn）的Ms. Torres，現住在紐澤西，她坐在家裡附近的古巴式咖啡館裡，回憶起salsa出現在她生命中的那一刻。

「我父親是演奏康加鼓的樂手。我母親會在週六下廚，然後我們五個人會用整個晚上的時間來跳舞。」她談起她60年代的童年時期：「音樂和舞蹈是一個標準，年幼的我當時就知道，我將來想要成為一名職業舞者。」

當她12歲時，她拜託母親提早在工作證明文件上簽名，雖然法定的許可工作年齡是13歲，但這樣她就能賺錢去付舞蹈課的學費，「但是當時並沒有salsa舞」她說道，「有非洲舞、芭蕾、爵士，就是沒有拉丁舞。」

在70 年代中期以前，當時15歲的Ms. Torre和她的同伴們開始結合mambo的舞步、律動及街頭風等，那種風格反映出Mr. Lavoe等那些歌手對salsa所做的改變，成就了salsa更鮮明的輪廓。

她說：「直到那個時候，都還只有mambo 和cha cha這二種拉丁舞的主要類型廣為人知」「我去參加一個自由風的舞蹈比賽，當時他們跳的是mambo，我笑了出來，因為我很喜歡，但你不知道這些孩子在做什麼，因此我開始跳我拿手的街頭風。」

隨著在新自由風俱樂部表演的背景和正式舞蹈訓練，Ms. Torres和其他人的舞蹈，意味著拉丁舞新時代的來臨，也就是今日我們所熟知的salsa。

當時Salsa仍是一種街頭舞蹈，只能意會卻不能言傳。這種情形一直到1987年才開始轉變，Eddie Torres (與Maria Torres女士並無親戚關係)將salsa從街頭帶進了舞蹈工作室。Mr. Torres在曼哈頓區經營一家以自己為名的拉丁舞蹈工作室，他在哈林區（Harlem）成長，80年代時都在紐約，和著名的拉丁舞者Tito Puente一起擔任表演舞者。

「在70年代期間，想要學會salsa舞的人非常多，我就是眾多人當中的一個，但卻沒有任何一個地方有在教學。」他在電話採訪中說道。

1987年，Mr. Torres在阿波羅劇院完成一部戲劇的編舞之後，他開始將salsa當作一種舞蹈技巧進行教學，「我從夜總會中精挑細選了大約60 位舞者，我開始教他們練舞，之後我留下其中12 位舞者，我們成立了一個舞團--Eddie Torres Dance Company。」

Mr. Torres讓這些舞者到夜總會及街頭上去表演，同時他也在salsa上做了一個細緻地改變，即是更強調在salsa音樂中第二拍的舞步, 這個就是現在大家所熟知的 on2 salsa。

他說：「在拉丁音樂中，有一種節奏分段叫做“tumbao”，那是在康加鼓樂手演奏的時點上，你會在那兒聽到一個強音符，而且這個時點總是在第二拍，這就是Tito Puente認為on2較流暢自然的原因，聽音樂時，自然地會將身體的重心放在第二拍。」

Mr. Torres的舞者們，很快就開始成立他們自己的舞蹈學校，大加推廣這類較為正式的salsa，也就是現在大家所跳的salsa。

對salsa舞蹈技巧的強調，卻在夜總會裡產生負面影響，在”Taj Lounge”這家印度餐廳裡尤其顯而易見。過去幾年裡，這家店在每週一晚上，已成功地轉型為紐約市裡少數現場演奏salsa音樂的夜總會。

在一個週一的夜晚，一位男士用指尖帶領著舞伴在舞池中性感地舞動著，現場由Spanish Harlem Orchestra和知名的樂手 Bobby Allende及 William Torres等人所組成的salsa樂團，為在場不超過15位以上的舞客演奏，所有這些人都在舞池中相當熟練地跳salsa。

那位D.J-- Mr. Knowles對這批新出現又認真學舞的舞客，卻沒什麼興趣，因為他們大部份都把注意力集中在跳舞上，他們不重視社交也不在酒吧消費，他說：「夜總會得要依賴人們在吧台的消費才能維持下去呀！他們應該要瞭解，想要有好的跳舞場地，就買幾瓶酒支持一下吧！」

一位職業舞蹈教練Franklin Ayala，晚上會到夜總會去表演salsa，他十分懷念salsa才開始流行的那個年代。他啜了一口梨酒說道：「在salsa舞的新時代裡，salsa 的靈魂卻消失了，大部份的人缺乏對salsa文化素養的認知，現在，關於salsa的任何事都要從舞蹈教室裡去找了。」

但 Mr. Torres相信這些改變都是為了讓salsa更好：「年輕的salsa舞客們變得更有跳舞的架勢，所以他們不想喝酒或克藥，這就像我們在許多年前所做的一樣。」

他承認這些具有優秀舞技的舞客還滿嚇人的，他說：「你看這些舞客一旋轉起來，就像是在天上飛一樣，又做一些令人驚嘆的律動，這使得salsa更為深奧了。以前我們帶女士跳舞時，只要這裡轉一下，那裡再轉一圈就可以了，現在，我們在第一小節裡，就要讓她轉個十四圈！」

除舞蹈教室以外，SALSA舞的興盛也在”騷莎舞交流大會（salsa congresses）”中不停地成長，有數以千計、從世界各地來的SALSA愛好者，參加這些為期數天的盛會，活動內容包括研討課程及大型表演會等。

史上首次舉辦的salsa congresses，是在1997年的波多黎各（Puerto Rico），現在世界各大主要城市都爭相舉辦salsa congresses，例如：洛杉磯、芝加哥、英國、羅馬尼亞、杜拜、以色列和日本等地。一年一度的紐約salsa congresses則是於每年的8月30日至9月2日在希爾頓（Hilton）飯店舉行。

John (Choco) Knight，一開始是在salsa congresses活動現場內販賣T恤，這些年來則成為紐約salsa congresses的推廣者，他希望SALSA在流行文化中的地位，可以讓年輕人回到俱樂部裡，再重現蓬勃發展的生機。他說：「現在年輕人都喜歡hip -hop，所以我們必須告訴他們，這些也可以成為SALSA的一部份，並且要教他們學習如何演奏康加鼓（congas）。」他繼續補充道:「其實 SALSA就是新的hip-hop。」

托雷斯女士也贊成Mr. Knight 和 Mr. Knowles的意見，她希望SALSA在主流文化的復甦，可以吸引那些以前跳SALSA的人再回頭來。她表示：「我告訴人們，這可不只是5,6,7,8 的拍子問題，儘管閉上你的眼睛吧！不要管是對還是錯，只要隨著音樂舞動，你絕對不會想停下來的。」

「我可以感覺得到，現在和以前不同了，這個世代想要回歸過去那種生活，我們要讓SASLA更簡單、更不受拘束，那麼SALSA的時代就很有希望可以再度降臨。』

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Salsa Spins Beyond Its Roots - New York Times

By JULIE BLOOM

Published: July 29, 2007

SOON after Héctor Lavoe, the great salsa singer, arrives in New York in the new biopic, “El Cantante,” he finds himself immersed in a vibrant scene in the Bronx: a nightclub crammed with bodies drenched in sweat moving to the pounding beat of congas. As the film, which is to open nationwide Aug. 3 and stars Marc Anthony as Mr. Lavoe, shows, it could have been any night in New York in the late 1960s, when dancing was a genuine physical manifestation of the energy of the streets.

But salsa dancing has changed dramatically since the heyday of Mr. Lavoe, whose career thrived throughout the 1970s and early ’80s, when hundreds of clubs throughout New York were packed nightly with Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Cubans and other Latinos dancing to the music of people like Mr. Lavoe, Willie Colón and Ray Barretto.

Salsa is experiencing a revival in popular culture, with “El Cantante,” and “In the Heights,” the Broadway-bound musical that’s set in Washington Heights, along with moves spotted nightly on television shows like “So You Think You Can Dance.” But the dance form has largely disappeared from the New York clubs where it was born. The Cheetah Discotheque, Ochentas, Corso Ballroom have all long been closed. The last holdout, the Copacabana, was shuttered early this month. Like many mercurial dance trends, the demise of salsa’s club life was due in part to the changing times. Hip-hop began to attract young Hispanic-Americans who might otherwise have gravitated to Latin music. At the same time ballroom denizens began to embrace salsa as a serious dance form, which further alienated young clubgoers. Today salsa is kept alive by an ardent band of semiprofessional dancers, not only in New York but around the world.

“Salsa has gotten bigger in the sense that more people are taking lessons, but the people who came up in the streets and know about the music aren’t dancing,” said Henry Knowles, a D.J. who has been spinning salsa for more than 30 years. “In the ’80s and ’90s you could go out every night of the week in New York and have four or five places to choose from, and all of them had live music, and you don’t find that, especially in the Bronx, which used to be known as the barrio of the salsa.”

Maria Torres, the woman responsible for bringing the dance scenes in “El Cantante” to life, has lived through the evolution firsthand through 20-plus years as a salsa dancer and choreographer. She danced on Broadway in “Swing!” in 1999, choreographed “4 Guys Named José ... and Una Mujer Named Maria!” in 2000 and now teaches salsa and her own brand of Latin jazz throughout the world.

Over cups of café con leche at a Cuban coffeehouse near her home in Edgewater, N.J., Ms. Torres, who was born and raised in Brooklyn, recalled the days when salsa emerged.

“My father played the congas and on Saturdays my mom would cook and then we would spend the rest of the evening, all five of us, dancing,” she said of her early childhood in the ’60s. “The music and the dancing was a norm, and I knew young that I wanted to be a performer.”

When she was 12, she got her mother to sign her working papers early — the legal age was 13 — so that she could earn money to take dance lessons. Still, “there was no salsa at the time,” she said. “There was African, there was ballet, there was jazz. But there was no Latin.”

By the mid-1970s the 15-year-old Ms. Torres and her peers had begun to fuse mambo steps and movements with a grittier street style that reflected the changes people like Mr. Lavoe were making to salsa, giving it a harder edge.

Until then, she said, there were primarily only two styles of Latin dance known to the public: mambo and cha cha. “I went to this competition, it was freestyle, they were doing mambo, and I started laughing because I was like, ‘You don’t know what the kids are doing,’ so I started doing street stuff.”

With a new freestyle club background and formal dance training, Ms. Torres and others represented a new era of Latin dance, what has come to be recognized as salsa today.

Still, salsa remained a dance of the street, not taught but absorbed. That changed when Eddie Torres (no relation to Ms. Torres), brought the street into the studio in 1987. Mr. Torres, who runs the Eddie Torres Latin Dance Studio in Midtown Manhattan, grew up in Spanish Harlem and performed as a dancer with Tito Puente in New York throughout the 1980s.

“During the ’70s there was such a need for the education of this dance, and I was one of the guys that wanted to learn this, but there were no schools available,” he said in a phone interview.

Mr. Torres began teaching salsa as a dance technique after he choreographed a show for Puente at the Apollo Theater in 1987. “I hand-picked about 60 dancers from the nightclubs and I started teaching these dancers a routine. Afterwards I asked 12 dancers to stay with me and we formed the Eddie Torres Dance Company.”

For the most part Mr. Torres taught the dance as it was performed in clubs and on the street, but he made it more sophisticated by changing the emphasis of the steps to the music’s second beat, now known as breaking on two.

“There’s something in the rhythm section in a Latin dance called the tumbao,” he said. “It’s a time pattern that the conga player plays, and you’ll hear an accent, and it’s always on the second beat. This is why Tito Puente said breaking on two is natural, there’s a feeling in that beat that you gravitate to.”

Mr. Torres’s dancers soon started their own schools, spreading the more formal approach to salsa that is practiced today.

All the emphasis on technique has had a negative effect on the clubs. That change is evident at the Taj Lounge. For the past year this Indian restaurant in the Flatiron district has converted itself every Monday night into one of the city’s few remaining salsa clubs with live music.

Under billowing saffron canopies one recent Monday, one couple moved seductively around the dance floor, the man guiding his partner with his fingertips. The band, members of the Spanish Harlem Orchestra and well-known salsa musicians like Bobby Allende and William Torres, played for no more that 15 people, all at some point expertly spinning and snapping around the dance floor.

Mr. Knowles, the D.J., was lukewarm about this new, serious breed of dancer. Most focus more on moves than on socializing and drinking. “The clubs depend on the bar,” he said, adding that if the dancers “want nice venues to go to, they need to understand what it takes to run a venue and support it and buy a few bottles.”

Franklin Ayala, a professional dance instructor who had come that night to perform a salsa routine for the other clubgoers, was also nostalgic about salsa’s grittier beginnings. “In the new age of dancing salsa mambo, the heart and soul are disappearing,” he said, sipping a bottle of Perrier. “Most of the people lack the cultural knowledge. The Copa used to be really great. Now everything is in the studio.”

But Mr. Torres said he believed that the changes are for the better. “Young salsa dancers are becoming Olympians, athletes in the dance, so they’re not thinking of drinking and doing drugs, like we did years ago.”

He admits that dancers with such strong technique can be intimidating. “You see people spinning like tops and flying in the air and gyrating, and doing this amazing movement and you want to run for your life,” he said. “It’s gotten so sophisticated. Before, we’d give the girls a little turn here, a little turn there. Now we start her off with 14 spins in the first bar.”

Besides the studios, salsa dancing is also thriving at salsa congresses, several days of workshops and performances that attract thousands of dancers from around the world. The original Salsa Congresso started in Puerto Rico in 1997; there are now congresses held in places as diverse as Los Angeles, Chicago, Britain, Romania, Dubai, Israel and Japan. New York’s annual congress is set for Aug. 30 to Sept. 2 at the Hilton New York.

John (Choco) Knight, who started as a vendor at the salsa congresses selling T-shirts and is now the promoter for this year’s New York congress, hopes that the presence of salsa in pop culture will encourage young people to return to the clubs and reinvigorate the scene. “The youth like the hip-hop culture,” he said, “so we have a program for kids all over New York City and part of this is going to be the basics of salsa dancing and the other part is showing the kids how to play the congas.” The name of the seminar, he added, is “Salsa Is the New Hip-Hop.”

Ms. Torres joins Mr. Knight and Mr. Knowles in hoping that a resurgence of salsa in the mainstream draws back people who have turned away from it. “It’s not about 5, 6, 7, 8,” Ms. Torres said, “I tell people, ‘Close your eyes, move.’ Right or wrong, with that music, you can’t help it. I feel that, now more than ever, this generation wants to go back. We need to relax, simplify it, and hopefully it will come back here.”

Source: New York Times, www.nytimes.com

Related: Web Site: ‘El Cantante’ (Includes Trailer)

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