Brian Slattery Photo
Tuesday night’s Salsa session on Central Avenue’s one-block “patio.”
Jason Ramos of Baila Con Gusto moved fluidly between English and Spanish as he stood before a group of about 20 students Tuesday evening on the newly closed-to-traffic Central Avenue Patio between Whalley Avenue and Fountain Street.
“This class is para todos,” he said.
The group was gathered there to learn the basic steps to salsa, and Ramos was there to teach and kick off a night of dancing in the street that turned the heart of Westville into a salsa club — and promises to do so every Tuesday night through the summer and into the fall.
Salsa on Central Patio — sponsored by Alisa’s House of Salsa and the Westville Village Renaissance Alliance — has been introducing outdoor salsa to Westville since June.
The weekly event takes place on the short block of Central between Fountain Street and Whalley Avenue. The city recently closed off that block to through traffic as a short-term experiment in reclaiming a road for pedestrian use and communal gathering, a pandemic-born opportunity that municipalities across the country seized to rethink public space. The idea was to create a public square in Westville Village. For now the closure is temporary, under a permit granted to WVRA.
Tuesday night Salsa has shown how a reclaimed block can come alive.
The evening begins with a salsa lesson for beginners at 6:30 p.m. After novices have been introduced to the basic steps, the street opens up to anyone who wants to dance until 9:30 p.m. — and as it turns out, quite a few people want to dance.
Ramos.
Alisa Bowens-Mercado of Alisa’s House of Salsa has taught past introductory lessons, but this Tuesday lessons at her own studio kept her late. So Ramos ably stepped in. The 27-year-old grew up in Meriden, the child of Ecuadorian immigrants, and began dancing in college at Central Connecticut State University. He credits a cousin’s wedding, where “I danced all night,” he said, with pushing him into dancing as a career, as friends and family deemed him good enough to teach. He has been teaching for five years; he started Baila Con Gusto in 2017 and currently teaches from a studio in the Church of Saint Paul and Saint James in Wooster Square.
“It doesn’t matter the level,” Ramos said Tuesday evening as he encouraged the students to line up in the street.
He knew he could get them moving. As he taught the first, basic step, he explained that salsa derived its rhythms from West African and indigenous patterns that were brought together in Cuba. At the heart of those rhythms was the 3 – 2 clave, a “slow, slow, slow, quick, quick” rhythm that underpinned music all over Africa and Latin America. The Cuban rhythms emigrated to New York, where musicians injected them with jazz and a lean, stripped-down style that became salsa. “The rhythms of the African diaspora combined to make salsa,” Ramos said. “It’s a dance designed to be danced in clubs, with a partner, and very energetic.”
Along with the basic pattern of steps, he introduced the hip motion that he called “the Cuban roll,” which he explained could be understood as a countermotion to the feet. It was a dance meant to engage all of the lower half of the body in motion; he said he sometimes imagined himself crushing grapes when he did the steps, or pushing off from the pavement.
“You’re using the ground to birth your steps,” he said. “Push, return, push, return. That’s the sauce of the dance,” he said, which drew an appreciative laugh from the students. “Everything else is extra.” He taught two more step patterns that let a dancer move side to side and turn. “With these three steps you can do most of the songs we’re going to play tonight,” he said. “The other ones may be too fast, but that’s OK. Practice is progress.”
Some students had caught on to the steps fast — or had taken the lesson before and were refreshing themselves.
“For those that are more advanced, we’re going to try the grapevine,” Ramos said, a traveling, foot-crossing step that many caught on to when he demonstrated it, and then laughed when they saw that, in actuality, it needed to go twice as fast once set to music.
But soon Ramos had the class moving together, introducing a few more steps and then combining and recombining them. He encouraged the students to feel how their feet were making a rhythm of their own that fit like a puzzle piece into the music
“Pretend that your feet are the hands on a drum,” he said.
Finally, he said, salsa had a “freestyle” element to it, in which dancers could leave the established steps. “You can do what you want,” he said. “You can push. You can say ‘thank you’ to the day,” he said, as he raised his arms. In this way, the style itself could grow and move forward. “How do you think the steps got started?” he asked. “Somebody made them up.” Steps that others liked could become part of the tradition. The freedom also made it more inviting, easier for novices to start doing it.
“It’s a community thing that is fun,” Ramos said, “and hopefully it can bring some joy in your life.”
As the lesson drew to a close, the students clapped. By then, a group of more experienced dancers had already shown up and took their place on the pavement, dancing with their partners with strength and grace.
“The goal,” Ramos said of the event, “is to make it someplace interesting, a place to play.”
By that count, the event succeeded wildly. As the sun set and the street darkened, the number of dancers grew. Just before 9:30, when Alisa Bowens-Mercado, who had joined the party after her lessons were done, called for the last dance, the scene was at its most vibrant, as dancers from New Haven, Bridgeport, Hartford, and as far away as Danbury came together to step and spin in the night air, until next Tuesday, when it would all happen again.
Visit the Westville Village Renaissance Alliance’s calendar of events for details of the next Salsa on Central Patio and other community events.