Ofelia Jarl Ortega

OFELIA JARL ORTEGA
CASINO
Studio presentation as part of the ‘36 Hours of Dance’ event on 24 October, 10.00–14.00

‘Casino’ is the name given to salsa dancing in Cuba, referring to the place where you go to dance. ‘Casino’ is also the title of this piece.
In *Casino*, the Swedish-Chilean Ofelia Jarl Ortega, Nina Sandino from Nicaragua and Jao Moon from Colombia move across a fictional dance floor set in a Latin American club for couples. Each dancer brings their own personal connection to salsa, allowing it to resonate through their bodies via a repertoire of historical and personal memories.
Through the dancers’ interaction and the sounds of their footsteps, the music is present even in its absence. In a subtle, restrained, detailed and playful way, the three dancers connect – and fail to connect – simultaneously.

Putting salsa into context in Sweden

There was a major Latino boom internationally in the 1990s and 2000s, bringing artists such as Shakira, Jennifer Lopez, Ricky Martin and Marc Anthony into the spotlight. Of course, there have been Latino booms before and after that as well. “Latino” is, as we know, not a genre in itself, as Latin America stretches from Chile in the south to Mexico in the north. In Sweden, the Latino boom of the early 2000s made salsa very popular. Everyone was dancing it, including the Latin American diaspora.

Chileans have never really had salsa as a national dance. Instead, it was hugely popular in Cuba, Colombia and the Caribbean. There, every dinner ends with salsa dancing, and every birthday celebration is a dance. In Chile, the traditional social dance has been the cumbia, or the folk dance known as the cueca. Nevertheless, salsa gatherings amongst Chileans became hugely popular in Sweden. The phenomenon grew in Sweden due to the large number of Chileans living in the country following Pinochet’s dictatorship in the 1970s to 1990s. For the exiled Chileans, salsa became a way of reconnecting with their Latin American heritage. It became a subculture within the diaspora. And to be Latino, you had to know how to dance salsa – a cliché that still haunts us in this piece.