Cuba dance

The Rumba is both a family of music rhythms and a dance style of Cuba. This music is the complex root of Africa.  There are three main variants of the complex known as Cuban rumba dance:

The instrumentation includes three tumbadoras rumba (the drum is a tumbadora invented in Cuba, unlike Africans it has keys and can be tuned), and two sticks with a wooden box. Two of the drums (the first and second tumbadora), mark the basic rhythm, the third tumbadora called “fifth” (which is tuned higher), blows improvised flourishes to the dancers.

The Guaguanco

Of the three alternatives the most elaborate is guaguanco, both musicalu and in regard to the texts.  The dance is typical of the black neighborhoods of the city of Havana. The other two variants (Yambu and Columbia) are rural and from the province of Matanzas.

The singing is done entirely in Spanish instead of African expressions or slang vocabulary from the slums. Within the meaning of the texts guaguanco is closely related to the “point of Cuba,” which took shape in Cuba improvisation (Canarian and Andalusian).

The tempo of guaguanco is slightly slower than the Columbia and faster than Yambu. Guaguanco The musical also has some connection with “deep song”.  In its primitive form the guaguanco consisted of three sections:

The first part was the “target”, a melodic fragment in which the singer, with great aplomb, improvised “tralalala Lala”, with no textual meaning, but in order to hum the melody that would develop during the song.  As a group guaguanco has no melodic instruments, the human voice is in charge of the whole melody.
Later the singer introduced the theme of the song, the text. The text related to anything from daily developments or specific persons or things.  The verses could be tenths or even prose.
In the third section, all members broke into a rhythmic frenzy.  It is an overwhelming joy to offset the sadness of the subject, is relative to the misfortune that makes the joy of life. In this section, as in all forms of call and response, the chorus repeats a pattern, refrain or system of sentences, while the singer improvised.

In recent times, the vocals of Guaguanco has overshadowed the dance component.  Outside of Cuba (in New York, New Jersey and Miami), modern versions of guaguanco dance have no resemblance to the original. Now it is danced by couples or multiple “wheels” that are free to make a variety of rhythms.