Audio
Bailando Juntas: Salsa Dancing Beyond the Binary
Transcript
Please note: This podcast features terms including LGBTQ+, non-binary, and queer. The LGBTQ acronym has multiple forms. The Q generally stands for queer or questioning. Sometimes A (asexual), I (intersex), and + is added in recognition of additional non-straight, non-cisgender identities. In this podcast, the word queer is used by individuals to refer to their own identity. Nonbinary is used to describe a way of dancing.
00:21 Hermán Luis Chávez: Buenos días y welcome to Oíste?, a National Park Service podcast. I’m Hermán Luis Chávez Luis Chávez…
00:28 Melissa Hurtado: … and I’m Melissa Hurtado Hurtado. In the Oíste? podcast, we explore the salsa stories of Afro Latin music in the United States through interviews and conversations.
00:39 Hermán Luis Chávez: In today’s episode, “Bailando Juntas: Salsa Dancing Beyond the Binary,” we’ll be discussing salsa dancing by speaking with non-binary dancers and organizers who believe in making Afro Latin dance a more inclusive space.
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1:02 Hermán Luis Chávez: In salsa, dance is like a conversation. Dancers move together and respond to movements in the body, while listening attentively to the rhythms of the percussion as they move. Dancing salsa is often when many of us come together to form communities as we move together in happiness and expression.
1:21 Melissa Hurtado: Of course! And dancing takes place in certain spaces—although some places like clubs are regular salsa spots, locations like homes and restaurants are transformed into sites of salsa community where people come together to dance. There are many types of salsa dancing, from ritualistic to ballroom dancing—all of these bring people together. A space for professional salsa is the salsa congress, a multi-day festival and competition experience that started with the Puerto Rico Salsa Congress in 1997.
1:57 Hermán Luis Chávez: In a traditional professional setting, salsa dancing is led by a man and followed by a woman. Although this format may work for heterosexual dancers, it means that LGBTQ+ people who also want to dance salsa may feel uncomfortable in, or excluded from, joining dance communities.
2:17 Melissa Hurtado: Today, we’ll be speaking to Angie and Audrey, a dance couple whose activism is creating space for more inclusive dancing.
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2:35 Hermán Luis Chávez: Saludos to Audrey Guerrero and Angie Egea, who are also known as “The Kueen & Queen of Non-Binary Afro Latin Dance” in their city of Austin, Texas where they perform and teach salsa dancing. Angie and Audrey are a married, queer, non-binary dance couple. Angie is from the coast of Colombia and Audrey is from the Dominican Republic, and together they specialize in Afro-Latin dances. By uplifting Afro-rooted art forms and breaking the traditional binary roles in partner dance, they aim to be representation for, and to inspire, queer and trans people of color who want to be leaders in inclusive and creative spaces.
3:13 Melissa Hurtado: Hola, Angie! Hola, Audrey! How are y’all doing today?
3:17 Angie Egea: We're doing amazing. We're so excited to be here today! This is Angie.
3:26 Audrey Guerrero: I’m Audrey, thank you for having us!
3:29 Melissa Hurtado: Thank you, we are so honored to have y’all here in this space. What are your individual stories? And how did they bring you two together?
3:39 Angie Egea: I actually first started dancing salsa more socially back in Colombia. It was part of what we did with, our parents, our tíos and tías. It was just part of our regular day-to-day. But when I started to really dance salsa in a way that was more professional, it was here in the United States about 12 years ago. Before that I actually trained many other styles. I did so many things, but once I actually started to train salsa a little bit more serious, I realized that it was the love of my life.
4:16 Audrey Guerrero: Yeah, similar to Angie, I think for me, same thing at home, you know, being Dominican, you’re always, every party or every weekend, you're just dancing in your living room. For me the biggest thing as a dancer was making the shift from being the best dancer in my house, in the living room, to the standardized dance studio, counting and sort of making it more into a professional thing that can be a lot more technical. And that shift for me, I will say, I think at some point I felt like I was losing myself, like I was losing the love, the rhythm, the connection. I felt like I had to drop a lot of that to learn technique, to learn, counting to learn to pass this along. And so I think now I am fully now that I’m doing my own work and trying to teach others, I find such a big importance in including the part of just enjoying the music. I met this one [Angie] in martial arts, actually. We were taking Afro Brazilian martial arts, kicking each other, and I knew she did Salsa. So, when I wanted to kind of go back into dancing again, “what are you doing? drag me out to your spaces!” Angie was very connected at that point in the salsa scene in Boston, and that's how I got involved.
5:46 Melissa Hurtado: That's actually amazing! I actually studied a little bit in Boston, and I remember, to find that community that I was missing, I would go to Salsa spaces.
5:58 Hermán Luis Chávez: Thank you so much for saying that Melissa Hurtado, too. I think it says a lot about how these spaces do become places that bring people together, and where you find community so much. And so I guess I just wanted to ask is that where you all started dancing together in this sort of dance style that you've now continued and turned into your career?
6:19 Angie Egea: Yeah, it was in Boston. Actually, we started to pretty much train together the same style in a dance company. It was mostly binary in the way that choreographies were, how things were taught in classes. But once we really fell in love and we started dating, that's when we decided that we wanted to create a choreography where I could lead them, and she could lead me. That's kind of how it started.
6:45 Hermán Luis Chávez: In another interview you mentioned that your “mission is creating the queer dance community and spread the non-binary idea that is lead and follow rather than male and female.” So this is a super inspiring mission that really challenges the aspects of, for example, machismo and heteronormativity, that you might find in some dance spaces. So I’m really curious to hear more about how you conceive non-binary dance and what you've learned through this process of resisting norms in Salsa dancing.
7:22 Audrey Guerrero: It took a lot of courage. I think it just started 5 years ago or 6 years ago, when we were starting to dance. It took a lot of courage for people to do it. But it's just still, very few. You can go to a Congress that you only see one or two of those, and 40 other dancers are binary. People are really trying to take it outside of those spaces and build new space, like the queer Afro Latin dance festival, and it's blowing up. On the social dance floor, there’s a lot of weird stuff because of the binariness that partnering dance has been over centuries, right, that comes from ballroom in Europe. For so many years now it's just so engraved into the culture and into the aesthetics of it that now, when you are a new dancer and approaching the social dance floor, and you are a person who not all the time do you want to fit the box that is of your presenting body, so people will show up to the social dance floor—and I’m speaking from personal experience—and I felt extremely uncomfortable in the way that I have to wait on the side lines and wait to be picked out to dance. That is just not my vibe. I am a person who, over the years, it's taken so much courage to understand that I do have, I am entitled to walk around and look at dancers, and be the one who chooses a dancer. Whatever the gender, whatever they want to do: are they a lead, are they a follow? It's getting close to 10 years for me. For me to have spent almost a decade not feeling comfortable, it's a lot. So I think that that's really it. That's like the molds that we're breaking right now, regarding misogynistic and binary “the man does this, the woman does that.” It's a tough thing to crack, but we are getting there, and we’re gaining momentum, so that's a good thing.
9:18 Hermán Luis Chávez: That was so beautifully put. I think that this concept of discomfort actually is definitely something that I think about a lot, especially as a genderqueer person myself. I always feel so uncomfortable as someone who wants to follow. It's so amazing to see that even though this discomfort is there—and it doesn't necessarily go away—that it leads to the creation of new things. I think a really inspiring thing about you two is that aspect of education, taking this concept and spreading it out through students and workshops and these other different spaces that you enter into to kind of disrupt the normative elements. I would love to talk a little bit about what that sort of community space looks like. How would you describe the energy or the environment of your studio space when students come in to learn about non-binary dance? How is the place where you teach sort of unique for this type of community?
10:17 Angie Egea: When we first started doing this work, I thought, okay, this is gonna be a beautiful space for people who are queer, who are non-binary, people who identify differently from the binary to come into this space and feel empowered to choose what they want to do. They don't have to stick with one, which I love that about our work, is that we teach lead, follow, and switching. I believe that everybody carries different energies within them, and feminine and masculine are just energies. It doesn't really have to do with sexuality or gender. It's just energies that we see in nature. For example, when we think feminine energy, we think flowy, we think nurturing. When we think masculine, we think diligent, responsible. All of those things are important for the aspect of partner dance. So there's that beautiful aspect, but I think it was also really surprising to see that people who do identify like “cis” or “straight,” they have also found empowerment within exploring those energies. I had a student that came to us, and she was like “I always felt like I wasn't always necessarily a feminine person. I like to take charge, I like to express differently, and I never felt like I could do that through dance.” I think that we’re also very heavy on thinking about dance as a tool. It's like a language. For example, I am pretty introverted myself. I think what dance has provided for me and for many people that is a language, is a way of speaking, is a way of processing, healing. It's just such a beautiful tool, and I think that in our community we really foster that.
12:00 Melissa Hurtado: Just hearing you all talk about that really warms my heart and gets me excited, because these are spaces where people can come and not, like you said, not just learn about dance in and of itself, but learn about yourself, and the energies that you feel comfortable with and your space in the world. Y’all are making—really shaping—history in terms of salsa, but also the way we feel dancing as a whole, just dancing, and the energies that we feel around that. I think that is so beautiful and really what makes your space unique. I'm just excited for this to be well-accepted. Audrey, you were saying how it's trending right now, right? But it's not necessarily well-accepted. I really am hoping for the day where this is well-accepted, specifically in living room spaces. Audrey, you were talking about sort of starting this in your living room, and Angie you as well, like dancing with your tías and tíos. I know that space can be very intimidating at first, and when we think about salsa and the connections that a lot of us have to salsa, it does sort of start at the home right? It starts in these living rooms. It starts in these backyards, in these very family centered spaces. And so I really am hoping, one day, for these family centered spaces to accept the form of dancing and the way of being that you all are teaching, because I know that it will heal a lot of us. I just want to bring it back to space in general, and a lot of collective memory of salsa lives in our brains, right? A lot of these connections sort of stay at home, and are generally not seen as much in public spaces. You danced in front of very iconic Austin sites like Capitol Building, locally beloved murals, the Love-Hate sculpture, and on Congress Avenue Bridge. What does it mean for you to have the opportunity to connect your dancing to the places that represent Austin, and really bring it out of these living rooms, in Austin, and to the public?
14:21 Angie Egea: It gave us the opportunity to really understand the culture and the environment in Austin. For example, the capital was something that we were a little bit scared. We were like, okay, how is this going to be received? You know, two femme queer dancers doing salsa with these beautiful blue dresses, but in front of the capital. I'm not sure what we're gonna get back from this. It was very surprising because we feel very welcomed. People who were watching were very, really respectful. It empowered us to be like this is a city where we can create that community that we're looking for.
14:54 Hermán Luis Chávez: You’ve talked about, obviously, wanting to create this this space for yourselves and enter into community with the city, with other people. Obviously you travel and you perform at Congresses, you do workshops all over. I am really curious to hear about what these community members that have learned from you, or that have engaged with you, what they have shared with you about the impact of your work on them.
15:22 Audrey Guerrero: One thing that we hear is people saying like this feels like church. [laughs] It's kind of like that energy they need to start off their week. I think the reason they say that I think it's because it's become like a judgment-free—like a first, for them—judgment-free space. Dance is one of those things that it's one very competitive, and two it’s all about the aesthetics and appearance of like how your body looks and what you're doing with it. They come, they do not just the exercise, but the art that they love, and they express through it. They don't feel bogged down by it at the end of the day. If anything it’s like, uplifting. I'm happy that we've been able to so far keep that energy. But I think it's not just us. The people who come and get drawn to us are holding that energy, and its sort of all of us together that create it. So I’m just kind of hoping and grateful that it continues to be in that high frequency. We just started a semi-pro team, and we had a lot of our members who started with us on team one make it, and new members. I think there's some people in the community that's been teaching in Austin for years before we got here, and they're in this semi-pro team. For them, particularly one story I can think about is someone who migrated from their country. When you're an immigrant, and you live through that as a kid or a teenager, you're very aware of the sacrifice that your family kind of does to be here to find more opportunity. This one's like hitting home. [laughs] But I think that you end up thinking that you're not allowed to. We think of it as like not a profession or not something that it's going to get your family out of poverty, you know? You think that pursuing dance, even though that's your love and your passion, it's like a downfall for your family. We have people who have shared that story, and like very emotionally, about feeling like we gave them a space to feel like in their adult years they can still pursue dance. We have a wide age range in our student body in general, in body shapes, and everything. And so for us, it’s very important for Angie and I that we're creating a space that is permanent for us and feels sustainable for us. We don't imagine that when we're having kids or growing old, that we're going to stop dancing. We don't imagine that the way that the industry has tried to tell us. So for us, we create a space for people—you’re like whatever, 40 or 30 and 60, and you were married and you’re like “what now I’m pursuing dance? like I'm taking it and learning technique. I'm becoming a professional.” They feel really touched by just having the opportunity to explore with something they’ve always love and have a passion for, but they have heard throughout the years that they don't belong there.
18:26 Angie Egea: One more story that like really reminds me of how beautiful this work is: We have a dancer that in the company that she was part of they always forced her to wear what the what the women were supposed to wear. Actually, the way they express is more androgenous in the way that they like to dress. Over and over and over she felt very shut down and that led for her to stop dancing completely. When she moved to Austin, she found us, and since then she has been so inspired to start training again. Eventually she wants to teach. When she came to talk to us, she said “I just can't believe that I’m able to perform and wear something that I feel comfortable in.”
19:07 Audrey Guerrero: She said, “I didn't think y’all were gonna let me.”
19:10 Angie Egea: Yeah. I know. I think it's something simple as like what you're wearing on stage— which is a big deal—can change the way that you have your relationship with dance. So I just I love that so much.
19:22 Audrey Guerrero: Yeah.
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19:35 Melissa Hurtado: Thank you so much to Angie and Audrey for sharing your experiences with non-binary salsa dancing.
19:41 Hermán Luis Chávez: To wrap up our episode, we asked our guests to share what you can do to make your own salsa dancing a more inclusive form of expression. This is what they said:
19:51 Audrey Guerrero: There's the practical things by saying lead and follow in your classes versus like “the woman, the guy.” Guy! Changing your language goes a long way in making people feel included.
20:06 Angie Egea: Also, going along with what the world needs right now, which is thinking about consent. Before even that dance like you can ask somebody, “hey, do you want to lead? Or you want to follow—”
20:15 Audrey Guerrero: Or, we have added: “do you wanna switch?”
20:18 Angie Egea: Can we switch in the middle of the dance floor as well? And it's scary, but I think that, really understanding that, leaning on that courage, and wanting that space for themselves and for others—just do it. It's scary. But you just want to start with something like if it's a class at a dance club, if it's just a regular weekly class. If you're maybe doing videos online with you and your partner. Anything that starts to put it out there that this is normal, and this is amazing, and we can do it, and we can have the community in our spaces.
20:59 Audrey Guerrero: I like when Angie used the work courage, because I think courage also for your own un-learning and your own re-learning, and your own evolution. I think people are very afraid, especially people who have worked really hard at preserving the art. Salsa is passed down through storytelling, and because it hasn't been documented, a lot of the older generations feel a big responsibility to hold on to what they know of it, because they feel like, if you're changing it, then you're also changing the story. And the thing is that the story has always belonged to all of us, and there's just misconceptions about that. How we can continue to explore the art isn't necessarily going to kill it. The evolution of it, it might help it grow if anything. One important thing in salsa is the inclusion of Black people and Black voices. Salsa was so, is so, Latine, Latino, right, like Latinx, so colonized, and essentially we push out a lot of Black voices. We don't make enough room. I think it's people with that have been popular over the years, and that sometimes results to like either money or whiteness, who are carrying the voice of salsa. Sometimes it excludes. On the dance floor it's a big topic. It's starting to be a big topic—its not as big as it needs to be—how much Black women feel left out of the story, and how much Black women made up the story. Black people created this. I don't want to separate the battle of Black inclusion from queer inclusion, because the two go together. One big thing that we have in our company is to want to amplify and uplift Black voices, and that's why we call ourselves Afro Latin because we want to showcase the Afro part [laughs] of Latin jazz and Latin culture.
23:02 Angie Egea: I think that’s way we talk about preserving the arts. That's part of it, is understanding where it came from, which mainly is Africa. It moved around and developed and then salsa, what we see today, was born in New York City. But the roots and the background, and what really everything gives it the spice of salsa, is Black. Being non-binary in dance is not necessarily a new thing, like when you think about dance, and Afro dance, it wasn't about gender. Even when you think about the evolution of tango, which is also African, it was men dancing with men. It was more about being bad***. The world took a turn where it became really binary and really machista and it really amplified, and that really influenced the way that salsa developed. If you want to preserve what the dance and the music is all about, its including Black people, including non-binary and queer people—that's where it comes from.
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24:14 Melissa Hurtado: I think the next time I go salsa dancing I'm going to try to be assertive, and whether I want to lead or follow, and make sure people don't just assume that I want to follow. I'll also make sure to really ask consent with whoever I’m dancing with because I think we have these pre-conceptions of who wants to lead and follow, and although I always try to not think in binary terms, it's so engraved in our society that I’m really going to challenge my perspective whenever I go salsa dancing and regardless of the space I’m in.
24:50 Hermán Luis Chávez: Absolutely. I definitely feel the same way. I think something that I want to work on when it comes to Salsa dancing is being more vulnerable with myself and with the people around me, because it can be hard as a queer person sometimes to want to let loose in a dance style that can oftentimes be in this binary way, like you just mentioned. And so I want to make sure that, at the same time that I’m asking consent in the people around me, and being open to dancing with as many people as I can, I also need to make sure that I’m treating myself with that same consent, and asking myself what I am and am not comfortable with, and being willing to experiment with myself and with other people.
25:45 Melissa Hurtado: I also want to be experimental in the way that will want to be in tune with what I feel and what energy I’m exerting that day, because I don't necessarily have to come into a size of space and be like I'm going to lead, or I’m going to follow. I'm just going to try to be in tune with myself and see how I feel.
26:09 Hermán Luis Chávez: A big part of salsa dancing is listening to our own bodies, and I think something that Angie and Audrey inspire me to do is to not be afraid to listen to my own body.
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26:04 Melissa Hurtado: Thank you and gracias for listening to Oíste! I’m Melissa Hurtado…
26:08 Hermán Luis Chávez: …and I’m Hermán Luis Chávez. To learn more about Oíste, American Latino heritage, and Telling All Americans Stories at the National Park Service, please visit nps.gov/subjects/tellingallamericansstories
26:25 Melissa Hurtado: And, tune in to our next episode, “Ritmos, Communidad, and Oral Histories” where we talk with Marcos Echeverria Ortiz, director of the Where We Were Safe project, about his experience with documenting salsa oral histories.
Description
Dance is a vital element of salsa culture, as people express themselves in spaces from family homes to national competitions. However, salsa dancing can often be restricted to binary gender roles. In Episode 3: Bailando Juntas: Salsa Dancing Beyond the Binary, we interview non-binary dance couple Angie Egea and Audrey Guerrero, who share their personal and professional stories of transforming salsa dancing. This podcast features terms including LGBTQ+, nonbinary, and queer. (Music © No Más - La Banda)
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