Salsa Dips
Get ready to shake your booty with all the salsa, tango and flamenco events coming to town. Asia Lindsay gets her groove on.
Chase away the winter blues and turn the heat up with a little Latin flava at the Hong Kong Salsa Festival, held from Feb 1-Feb 7. And if that’s not enough to send the mercury soaring, there are several flamenco and tango events on as part of the Hong Kong Arts Festival. What are you waiting for? This is the year to get your dance on!
Sizzling Salsa
The Hong Kong Salsa Festival (HKSF), is held every year in various locations around Hong Kong.
The event is packed full of salsalicious activity, and it’s guaranteed to get your body moving and your hips swaying. Besides being hot fun, it’s good for you too. According to Joseph Ennin, director of the HKSF, salsa introduces you to new cultures, allows you to meet interesting people and is a great workout to boot.
Despite its widespread popularity, salsa is a relatively modern phenomenon. The style we know today only started back in the 1960s, a result of the cultural melting pot of Hispanic immigrants in New York. The infectious rhythms developed from the music of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic with some African influences mixed in for good measure. In fact, the name salsa itself hints at its multicultural background because salsa is made up of lots of different ingredients, all working together in a spicy fusion, just like the sauce it was named after.
Ennin describes the festival as the “Rugby 7s of dance,” featuring seven days of toe-tapping excitement ranging from club nights, workshops, a street party and the Asia-Pacific Salsa Open Championships. The event boasts forty performers from locations as far away as Cuba and Argentina, and attracts visitors from all over the world. 3,000 people are expected to attend this year.
Tantalizing Tango
For those who need of a fix of tango, The Hong Kong Arts Festival is bringing the Latin Grammy Award-winning group Café de los Maestros to town March 5-7. Hailing from Argentina, a nation known for good wine, excellent steaks and, of course, the tango, the orchestra transports the romantic, impetuous music all the way from the barrios of Buenos Aires to the concert hall of the Cultural Centre for your listening pleasure.
The group, who present themselves as an orquesta típica (a traditional tango orchestra), is comprised of stalwarts of tango’s Golden Age, an era when the style was so popular that the orchestras sometimes couldn’t hear themselves play over the audience’s thunderous applause.