Bachata Styles Breakdown
This blog comes from a FB post I made on my personal timeline. I am copying it here for wider sharing and so it can be a resource for the future.
Lately I've been getting a lot of questions from dancers in my scene that express confusion over the many names of Bachata. What's Dominican Bachata vs. Traditional Bachata vs. Modern Bachata vs. Sensual Bachata?
Let me explain.
Bachata is the dance from Dominican Republic. It is actually currently evolving with each new generation and is as modern and evolved as other styles claim to be when you compare it to where it has come from. (Bachata began evolving from Bolero Campesino, a rural guitar music in DR, around the early 60s.) Dominicans continue to call this dance Bachata, and thus, I call my dance classes and events by this name, too, as I try to always honor the culture it comes from.
Hallmarks of Bachata on the island are a focus on using a variety of basic steps to create intrigue and to use grounded body movement to create the feeling of the dance. Decorations include deeper body movement of the hips and footplay. It’s important to add that different regions of the island can dance differently, but I think I spoke generally enough to still be accurate, at least for the most part.
The names Traditional/Dominican/Authentic Bachata are attempts by congress organizers to distinguish this style of dance from the westernized counterparts (that I'll get to in a moment). However, in the congress world, workshops with these names rarely resemble what's happening on the island. Many (thankfully not all) workshops with these names have become fusions of Modern Bachata and Dominican flavor, often taking all the possible decorations from the island and producing a style almost exclusively relying on these decorations. Sometimes it's almost completely Salsa footwork to Bachata music. I will not name names, but I'll let you do more research on your own, maybe visit the island if you're able, or just follow Dominicans living on the island on social media to learn to see the difference.
Okay, okay, so what's Modern Bachata? Modern Bachata is the dance that was created when social dancers in westernized countries/areas like the US, Australia, and Europe began to have greater access to Bachata music (thanks to the booming success of Aventura in the early 2000s) but did not have much access to the dance or to Dominicans. These dancers admit to have used the little they learned from Dominicans (step step step break) and what they already knew of Salsa and other dances to create basically something brand new. They continued to call this dance Bachata, even though it did not resemble the dancing in DR very much. Hallmarks of this style are using 1 or 2 basic steps (side to side and maybe forward-and-back) and adding a lot of turns, spins, hammerlocks, redirections, and dips to create the intrigue. The hip movement also starts to change with a focus on taking wider steps. Most dance classes unfortunately labeled as "Bachata" are actually Modern Bachata or a mixture of this style and the next one I will describe. (This is what I first learned when I started dancing Bachata. It was fun!)
Sensual Bachata is a style of dance that was created by a single couple in Spain, Korke and Judith. This dance is based entirely off of Modern Bachata, but with the addition of "sensualized" torso isolations in the form of body rolls, body waves, and other upper body isolations, as well as tricks to form this style. The focus of this dance is on the hips-up. While it has a lot of similarities to Brazilian Zouk (another fusion dance), Judith and Korke deny having known about Brazilian Zouk at the time they created Sensual Bachata. B-zoukers openly doubt and criticize this.
When it comes to music, yes, some people do try to label music as "Traditional" vs. "Modern" but rarely are these labels used with any consistency. Sometimes they mean it by decade (i.e. the music from the 90s = traditional and 2000s and up = modern), sometimes they mean it for music composed in the original evolutionary strand vs. the music influenced by R&B that started with Aventura, but most of the time I hear people use these terms really to denote the difference between Bachata music that uses live musicians and instruments vs. DJ-produced music.
Musicians and Dominicans will tell you there's only 3 categories: (1) Bachata, music originally composed to be Bachata, (2) covers, music originally composed as another genre that a Bachata musician re-composed and produced as Bachata, and (3) remixes, music originally composed as another genre that had some basic Bachata rhythms added later.
Remember, it's appropriation to let an outside culture take a cultural art form and be the one to carry the torch of "modernization." The dance and the music are still evolving just fine within their native culture.
Resources: I have a lot of sources that provide this information in the Bachata Library on my website: www.fortheloveofbachata.com/library
*PLEASE DO NOT DISPARAGE ANY STYLE IN THE COMMENTS* This is an educational post for new dancers trying to understand what they're seeing and not meant to be an outlet for anyone's drama. I will delete any comments that disparage a style.