Photographer: Mariano Hernandez

Couple dancing enabled greater intimacy between the dancers, spontaneity built a secure magical space of freedom for the performance, where dancing transcended human touch, morbidity, to become a gasp, a dream, a sublime process.

With time dancing and passion become part of everyday life and Caribbean identity. Embraced-dancing, as it happens often in merengue and bachata leads dancers to know each other better and it is at times the beginning of many a love story.

Photographer: Pedro Genaro Rodriguez

Photographer: Mariano Hernandez

The fullness of the realization that dancing produces is joy, an exceptional existential and spiritual catharsis that transcends towards the sublime feeling of love found, reconciliations of beings that love each other, in a free, spontaneous, legitimized space, that breaks with traditional social prejudices. Dancing is the ecstasy of life!

Photographer: Mariano Hernandez

Dance is an integral component of spirituality. Dancing in honor of the gods, in the case of Dominican popular religiousness of the “mysteries”, spirits and metresas in a syncretism where the saints of the Catholic liturgical calendar also participate.

Dancing, like singing and music humanize the deities. They themselves participate in the festivities by dancing. In this case, it is African heritage. According to the Cuban scholar, Fernando Ortiz, even the gods dance in Africa.

Photographer: Mariano Hernandez

The fullness of dancing is used to thank the gods, for commemorations and festivities, for social catharsis, to reconnect with ourselves, others and nature. Dancing is the recreation of freedom: We dance when we can, with whomever we wish to dance with and wherever we want to dance. It is the sublimation of being!

Photographer: Pedro Genaro Rodriguez

In Dominican folk dances that are performed as a couple, those who dance follow the rhythm of the music with the movement of their feet, waists and arms. These moments are not only for gathering those who dance as members of the same society, but also grants each couple the opportunity to add new movement variants according to their own creativity. The party is an essential component in the way that Dominicans cope with their lives, and when it occurs, it involves most of those who are present.

Photographer: Pedro Genaro Rodriguez

It does not matter if it is a Merengue, Son, Salsa, Bolero or Bachata, to dance in the Caribbean and feel good, the most important element is the rhythm, the movement of the feet is essential. The body, including the hips, depends on the feet. An old Son dancer would repeatedly say that all those who dance Son do it with their feet, regardless if his or her eyes are closed.