Rumba Review: The Dance Britain Learned Is Not the Dance

Cuban rumba is drums and voices and no melody instrument at all, and what we call rumba is something else entirely

Rumba on Shaftesbury Avenue holds a 3.7 from two thousand six hundred and eighty-six people, charges ten to sixty pounds, and it is a late-night Latin bar.

And the dance in the name is not the dance anybody in Britain thinks it is.

The real rumba

Cuban rumba is a secular Afro-Cuban form, and it developed in the poorest neighbourhoods of Havana and Matanzas among people of African descent, in the nineteenth century.

And it has no melody instrument at all.

It is drums – conga drums, and cajones, which are wooden boxes, because when the drums were banned people played the packing crates that the fish and the codfish had come in.

And voices. And clave, which is two sticks.

That is the entire instrumentation. There is no guitar, no piano, no horn, and no melody in the European sense.

The three rumbas

And they are distinct and Cubans are precise about it.

Yambu, which is slow, and which is danced by an older couple, and in which the man does not attempt to conquer the woman – the phrase used is that in yambu, one does not vacunar.

Guaguanco, which is faster, and in which he does – the vacunao is a gesture, a pelvic thrust or a flick of the hand or the foot, aimed at the woman, and the entire dance is her evading it.

She covers. She turns. She blocks with her skirt. And the whole thing is a game of attempt and refusal, conducted at speed, in front of a crowd who are entirely aware of what is happening.

Columbia, which is fast, which is danced by a man alone, and which is a display of virtuosity and occasionally of physical danger – dancing with knives, or on bottles.

What Britain got

Ballroom rumba, which is a slow, smooth couples dance taught in dance schools, and which derives from Cuban son rather than rumba at all.

So the dance that the English call rumba is a modified version of a different dance, taught by an English dance authority in the 1950s, and it has essentially nothing to do with three men and a packing crate in Matanzas.

We have found this in five postcodes and it never stops. The word arrives. The thing does not.

The 3.7

Which is a late-night venue with a door, and we have written about exactly this at Archer Street and at Soho Residence and at Freedom.

Late is punished. The reviews are written the following day by people who feel terrible.

Verdict

Fine bar. And go and listen to some actual rumba, which is drums, and voices, and nothing else.

The cajon

Which is the detail that ought to be famous.

Drums were banned or restricted for enslaved and free black populations in various parts of the Americas at various times – because a drum carries, and a drum can signal, and the authorities understood that perfectly well.

So people played the boxes. The crates that the codfish came in. The drawers out of a dresser. A wooden packing case, sat on, struck between the knees.

And the cajon became an instrument in its own right, in Cuba and in Peru, and it is now made deliberately, sold in music shops, and used by professionals all over the world.

An instrument invented because the real one was forbidden, which outlived the prohibition and became permanent.

Alan Nafzger

Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]