Salsa is a fusion music genre that mixes Afro-Caribbean rhythms such as son cubano, rumba, and guaguancó with jazz and blues, born out of intercultural encounters in the United States, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Colombia, since the 1960s. It is associated with different partner dancing styles, most often permeated with a heteronormative attribution of gender roles. The workshop aims at offering an entertaining safe space to learn basic salsa steps and give a try to non-heteronormative partner dancing. We will try both leading and following roles in a fun collective formation of Cuban salsa called Rueda de Casino.
The workshop is explicitly designed for those who want to explore Queer Salsa and primarily addresses women*, queers and non-binary persons. The workshop intends to create a safe and intimate public space and is limited to 20 participants. Priority is given to those identifying as Black, Indigenous and People of Color, queers and women*. Cis men are welcome to join this workshop. However, the workshop will play with traditional gender roles to queer these and therefore expects everyone to explore their queerness.
Lucie Naude [she/her] is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at CEU. Lucie is a feminist ethnographer interested in the transnational feminist solidarities between Colombian and European NGO activists. As there were too many girls enrolled in a salsa class in 2016, Lucie started learning the role of leader. Since then, she truly enjoys transgressing the heteronormative norms of the social salsa venues she frequents in her leisure time.
The workshop is part of the queer feminist and trans-cultural student-led event that presents an integrated performative and experimental workshop series on bodies, corpor(e)ality and empowerment. It takes place during international women’s history month, celebrated at Central European University (CEU) and will close a month full of feminist, critical, decolonial and subversive activities. The workshop series we offer aims to create a safe, intimate and queer feminist space. It wants to co-create a space for diverse sensations through art and craft possibilities for practicing and celebrating forms of non-normative embodied experiences and collective empowering ways of relating. Therefore, the workshop series is not exclusively focused on the question of queering gendered, heteronormative and hegemonic bodies, or celebrating rainbow-glitter aesthetics. It focuses more on the queer and feminist role of art to empower us in the necessary encounter of our own diverse embodied presence and corporality and through the re/appropriation of public space such as the University as intimate public space.
This event is part of the Art_Trans_Formations - A Workshop Series on non-hegemonic Corpor(e)ality & Empowerment.
This event is organized under queer feminist and anti-sexist ethics. We do not tolerate sexist, ableist, fatphobic, queer- and transphobic, racist, antisemitic, islamophobic, or any kind of discriminatory behaviors, nor misogynistic dogmas. We expect all the atendees to respect this consensus.
During the event, pictures and shorter videos will be taken. If you wish not to be recorded, please let the workshop facilitator and organizers know this in the beginning.
If you wish to participate in the queer feminist Art_Trans_Formations Workshop Series please sign up until the 29th of March.