Salsa Dance Competitions & Albert Torres’ Fiasco

Salsa Dance Competitions has had quite a change in the last few years. The annual World Salsa Championships with their large sums of money prizes of today bleaks in comparison with the small Salsa Dance competitions organized at Salsa bars all around the world before the 90’s.

There are no official Salsa dance competitions worldwide. The people organizing Salsa Dance Competitions offer substantial money prizes to attract as much competitors as possible. 

Salsa is a social dance form with no official set of rules and regulations. One of the main driving forces for millions of people around the world dancing Salsa, taking Salsa Dance Classes, and attending Salsa Dance Workshops is to be (one of the) best on the dance floor. This drive often results in anti social behavior: dance couples ‘making’ dance space by bumping against other dancers, dancers in search of attention from the ‘audience’ instead of looking at their dance partners, and leaders ‘forcing’ followers into intricate and uncomfortable Salsa Dance Moves they do not master. Using Dips, Tricks and Aerials on the social dance floor can cause bad accidents (and they have).

There are two solutions for the problem of dancers taking ‘cheap shots’ and/or seeking needed attention on the dance floor without considering (or adhering to) the social aspects of Salsa Dancing: to perform on a stage, or to enlist in Salsa Dance Competitions as Salsa Dance Couples/Teams. The first option (performing a Salsa Dance Routine) is the safer of the two. Salsa Performers are content with the amount of applause they receive after they finish their shows. Salsa Dance Competitors take a bigger risk by willingly putting themselves under heavy scrutiny, follow strict rules & regulations, and by risking the chance of not getting the ranking they hoped for by a jury of experts.        

Salsa Dancing, which is not an official Dance Sport, has several kinds of Salsa Dance Competitions. The most basic one is the ‘Jack & Jill’ Dance Competition. The competing couples join through a random selection of their names pulled out of two hats. They dance together with only a couple of minutes to prepare. The Jack & Jill’s take place on the music selected by the DJ, and the public is the jury. Another kind of competition is the Freestyle Salsa Dance Competition in which the dance couple enlists together and has had a significant time to practice beforehand. They ‘freestyle’ on the music being played by the DJ, and the amount of applause from the public select the winners. 

Popularity issues combined with the way the dancers look weigh heavily on the outcome of both of these types of Salsa Dance competitions. This development prompted organizers of Salsa Dance Contests into the introduction of pre-selected juries to avoid ‘false’ competition and popularity mishaps. Better-structured and appealing Salsa Dance Routines soon made their way into these Salsa Dance Battles. Albert Torres took personal care of helping Salsa Dance Competitions get ‘global’ with the introduction and worldwide implementation of his heavily structured World Salsa Championships.

However, Albert Torres Productions made one crucial mistake during this whole process: the basic structure supporting his WSC is very fragile. If contestants and jurors all around the world are to be disciplined enough to follow his countless rules and regulations, than they have to get familiar with this manner of competing from the very moment they start taking their first Salsa Dance classes. His ‘top down’ approach has to make way for a more ‘bottom up’ structure. 

The fallibility of Albert Torres' approach became painfully evident during the final Dutch Open Salsa Championships held in the Netherlands in 2009. Torres’ American representative single handedly turned the height of the evening into a big fiasco. Some of the more popular contestants broke some rules; the jurors did not know how to cope with the situation, and the representative of the WSC did not have a clear notion on how to deal with the problem. Instead of analyzing, revising and changing the whole structure of the WSC, Torres now decided to come and supervise a preliminary round for himself. He will be present at the Limburg Salsa Festival held between 6 and 9 of May 2010. The preliminaries of the Dutch Salsa Championships 2010 held at the Congress would show Albert a combination of his own ‘top down’ policy and the Ballroom/Latin ‘bottom up’ way of organizing dance competitions.

Perhaps the way of Salsa United (the official Dutch council for Salsa Dance Instructors) will inspire Albert Torres to start talking to all Salsa Congress Organizers. Seminars have to be held on how to get Salsa Teachers worldwide to educate their students for competing just for the honor and glory of winning instead of them competing to earn large sums of money. Or else, Salsa Dance Competitions will only be possible for the (ex) ‘Latin Dance Elite’ instead of the social salsa dancers worldwide.