Ofelia Jarl Ortega

OFELIA JARL ORTEGA
CASINO
Studio presentation within 36 hours of dance October 24th 10.00–14.00

Casino is what salsa dancing has been called in Cuba, referring to the place where you go to dance. Casino is also the title of this piece.
In Casino, Swedish-Chilean Ofelia Jarl Ortega, Nina Sandino from Nicaragua and Jao Moon from Colombia, move on a fictitious dance floor set in a Latin American club for couples dancing. Each dancer brings with them their own relationship to salsa, letting it reverberate in their body through a repertoire of historical and personal memories.
By the engagement of the dancers and the sounds of their steps, the music is present in its absence. In a subtle, restrained, detailed and playful way, the three dancers connect, and fail to connect, simultaneously.

Contextualising salsa in Sweden

A big Latino boom took place internationally in the 90s and 00s, shedding light on artists like Shakira, Jennifer Lopez, Ricky Martin and Marc Anthony. Of course, there have been Latino booms before and after that too. “Latino” is, as we know, not a genre in itself, as Latin America includes from Chile in the south to Mexico in the north. In Sweden, the early 00s Latino explosion made salsa very popular. Everyone was dancing it, including the Latin American diaspora.

Chilenos have never really had salsa as a national dance. Instead, it was very big in Cuba, Colombia and the Caribbean. There, every dinner ends with salsa dancing, and every birthday celebration is a dance. In Chile, the social dance has been cumbia, or the folk dance cueca. Nevertheless, salsa gatherings among Chilenos became huge in Sweden. The phenomenon grew in Sweden due to the big number of Chilenos living in the country post Pinochet’s dictatorship in the 70s-90s. For the exiled Chilenos, salsa became a way to connect to the Latin American background. It became a subculture within the diaspora. And to be Latino you needed to know how to dance salsa, a cliché that still haunts us in this piece.