"I heard the song "El Perdedor" (The Loser), by Aventura and fell in love with the music," Truong, a 32-year-old finance major at San Jose State University, said Sunday. "Then, about seven months ago, I took my first Bachata dance class."
Truong and Kristin Young, his friend and dance partner, had taken Salsa dance lessons before they switched to Bachata, a genre that sprang in the early 1960s from the bolero-inspired music played in the bars and the barrios of the Dominican Republic.
"After I started dancing Bachata, I forgot all about dancing Salsa," said Young, 27 and an event market planner. "Salsa dancing is all about technique and patterns. Bachata is a great combination of those, but it also gives you that connection with your partner. There's a lot of sensuality to the dance."
The second annual Reno International Bachata Festival at the Silver Legacy Resort Casino gave fans the opportunity to see some of the world's top instructors and performers, said Young, who has attended similar festivals in San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
It's a dance that keeps evolving, Truong said.
"There are always new moves, new techniques and styling to learn," he said.
Reno dance instructor BB Flanders co-organized the festival with Rodney "Rodchata" Aquino, an international dance instructor from San Francisco.
Flanders estimated that about 500 people attended the festival, which featured dance classes in the morning, competitions and performances in the afternoons and social dances in the evenings that sometimes lasted until 4 a.m.
"These people really do dance their brains out," Flanders said.
Bachata is a relatively new form of dance, he said.
"It's a more intimate dance than Salsa, but the music is very popular now in the Latin world," said Flanders, 29. "It's very romantic music, and it's a very happening and a fast-growing dance. The nice thing about Bachata is it's very available to the beginner. It's much easier to learn than Salsa."
It would take only one or two lessons for most people to feel comfortable dancing the Bachata, said Joe Figueroa, a 35-year-old dance instructor from Philadelphia who was selling his instructional DVDs at the festival.
"Salsa is extremely difficult in comparison, but Bachata is a much easier dance, so that is its initial allure," said Figueroa, who started at age 16 as a hip-hop and modern dancer and appeared on MTV.
"However, the sensuality of Bachata is sometimes off-putting at first, especially for women," he said. "But when they get more into it, the connection grows, and then it's fine."
Trackback: RGJ.com
