Tri-State dance fest comes to Stamford after a year’s absence
STAMFORD — It's not a night in Havana or New York's Copacabana club or even the Palladium, but for one weekend, the Stamford Hilton will do.
The newly minted Tri-State Dance Festival will explode onto the local dance scene from Thursday to Monday. Tri-State's predecessor, the Connecticut Salsa Festival, was a staple of the local dance community, founded by Stamford dance instructor Lou Lopez. Lopez passed the festival torch to Tri-State Dance Organizer Jeff Taveras after his retirement.
But Taveras and his team want to make something new.
After a yearlong break (or rather, a pandemic-related cancellation), Taveras — a professional dancer himself who now helms Lopez's Latin Moves Dance Studio — decided it was time to grow. The Connecticut Salsa Festival featured workshops, competitions and performances for salsa performers and amateurs alike for 15 years. The event, according to its organizers, marked "the unofficial start of the summer" for area dancers. Most notably, it was the only area dance festival open to youth dancers.
In turn, Taveras asked, "Why not give them more to do?"
The event isn't changing in name only: The festival this year becomes more than a salsa festival. Taveras added two more styles, bachata and hustle, to dancers' repertoires during his takeover with his new co-organizer, pioneering hustle dancer Billy Fajardo.
"We wanted to open it up," Taveras said. "We didn't want to just solely focus on salsa. We wanted to open it up to the bachata community; we want to open it up to the hustle community. And we want to potentially open it up to hip hop, and maybe even the ballroom community going forward."
Salsa, bachata and hustle all intertwine with each other. All popped up in the 20th century, all have evident Afro-Caribbean roots and all are fundamental social dances. The steps were born out of joy and the community of nightclubs and parties, according to historians.
In the lexicon of dance, salsa came first, from the musical genre of the same name. When people conjure up an image of Latin-influenced dance, its smooth steps and dramatic flourishes come to mind, all tracked to iconic Caribbean salseros in New York City like Cuba's Celia Cruz or the bombastic Puerto Rican bandleader Tito Puente.
When people think salsa, they think often imagine Puerto Rico, but its most direct influences come from the Cuban side.
In contrast, bachata is a Dominican style of social dance that's become more popular in the last 10 or 15 years.
"It's on the uprise," Taveras said. Musically speaking, the genre first exploded alongside salsa in the 1960s, though an ocean away in the Dominic Republic.
In a way, hustle sits somewhere in between.
Think Saturday Night Fever. Think house parties in the South Bronx crowded with Puerto Rican teenagers whose parents came up dancing to big band music. Think drama and performance and a whole lot of sequins.
Longtime Connecticut Salsa Festival participant Kathryn Johanessen thinks the theatrical nature of the style is integral to its executing. Salsa and bachata are about the connection, about the moment, she said.
Hustle — a style invented alongside Broadway performers who participated and helped influence the genre -relies on the pizzaz.
"Not only am I dancing with you," Johanessen imagines one hustler saying to another, "but I'm also dancing for the crowd."
For the first time since 2019, all the dancers from the region will be together like the pioneers of their styles intended to dance. And dance all night they will.