A reference, not a lesson
The calls you will hear in a rueda
In a rueda, one person calls the next move over the music and everybody in the circle does it at the same moment. The calls are in Spanish, they come fast, and for the first few weeks they sound like one long word.
How it works
How calling works
The caller shouts the name of the move, usually on the last bar before it happens, and often with a hand signal because a hall is loud. Everybody hears it at once, so everybody moves at once. Most calls send you on to the next partner around the ring.
You are not expected to know them. In a Monday class the caller is teaching, so the call comes with a demonstration the first few times, and the circle is full of people who will steer you.
The calls stay in Spanish
Everywhere. A rueda in Havana, in Berlin and at Robina on a Monday all use the same words, and nobody translates them. That is not ceremony, it is what makes the dance portable: the call is the same sound wherever you are standing, so a circle of strangers can dance together without a shared language.
So you will never hear a call translated on a dance floor, and you should not learn them as English. The words do mean things, though, and knowing what they mean is good fun even though it will not help you dance them. They are below for that reason and no other.
This page is not a lesson
- None of these is explained here.
- The only way to learn a call is to dance it in a circle.
- Open level, 7:30pm Mondays.
Seventy, eighty, eighty-eight
Why so many numbers
Setenta is seventy. Ochenta is eighty. You do not count to either of them, and that catches out everybody who works out what the words mean before they work out what the moves are.
The account usually given traces them to Havana’s streets. Rueda took shape in the social clubs of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and Miramar, the neighbourhood where a good deal of that happened, numbers its streets rather than naming them. Calle 70 and Calle 84 were where people danced. Moves invented there took the number of the street with them.
After that the numbers turned into a filing system. Setenta worked, so its variations did not need names of their own: seventy-one, seventy-two, seventy-five, each beginning the same way and finishing differently. Eighty is a separate family that grew the same way. Eighty-eight is the one people remember, because the couple walks a path shaped like the two digits.
Like the rest of the history on these pages, that is the usual account rather than a documented one.
The naming has not stopped
One of the calls we teach is Bexley. Not a Havana street: a suburb in southern Sydney, where Buena Vista Dance ran classes every week and where Stephen was one of the teachers. The move was made in that room and it took the name of the place, which is exactly what happened on Calle 70 sixty years earlier.
Buena Vista Dance is El Moro’s school, and El Moro is the Cuban who taught Stephen rueda.
So this is not a tradition we read about somewhere. It is one we were standing in. Ask us who the finest Cuban master teaching in this country is and you will get one name.
And then it keeps going
- Our syllabus runs through four levels and well over ninety calls.
- We are not going to publish the whole thing. A list is not the useful part.
- The useful part is the Monday where a call stops being a word and becomes something your feet do.
The ones you learn first
The foundations. Almost every other call is built on them, and you will hear all of these in your first few Mondays.
- Guapea
- A Cuban and Caribbean word for being proud in a boastful, self-promoting way. It is not in a Spanish dictionary, so translation tools reach for guapo and give you “handsome”, which is wrong. Nobody seems to know how it ended up naming the figure the circle returns to between calls
- Dile que no
- “Tell her no”
- Dame
- “Give me”, meaning give me the next partner
- Enchufla, sometimes written enchufa
- From enchufar, to plug in. The partners connect and swap positions, which is exactly what plugging in sounds like
- Enchufla doble
- The same, doubled
- Exhibela
- “Show her off”
- Al centro
- “To the centre”
- Vamos arriba
- “Let’s go up”, meaning forward
- Rompela
- “Break it”
What comes next
Once the foundations are steady, these are the ones you will hear most often. A selection, not a list of everything.
- Adios
- “Goodbye”
- Dile que si
- “Tell her yes”
- Setenta
- “Seventy”. Not a count, and the reason why is above
- Ochenta
- “Eighty”. Also not a count
- Vacilala
- From vacilar, to tease, to flirt, to check someone out. The leader watches and admires while the follower travels and turns on her own
- Pasaela
- “Pass her”
- Sacala
- “Take her out”
- Dame dos
- “Give me two”, so you skip a partner
- La prima
- “The cousin”
- Mentira
- “Lie”, because the call is a feint
- Un fly
- A fly ball, from baseball. It goes up in the air and you catch it
- Enchufla con cero
- Enchufla with a zero, named for the shape it draws