Paper short abstract:

This paper focus on the steps done to transform narratives obtained from amateur and professional salsa dancers in a scientific narrative around salsa dancing. The "reading" of dancing bodies on salsa dance floors also is part of the ethnographic work required in a research on salsa dancing.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focus on the steps done to transform narratives obtained from amateur and professional salsa dancers in a scientific narrative around salsa dancing. The "reading" of dancing bodies on salsa dance floors also is part of the ethnographic work required in a research on a global practice such salsa, that will be reviewed here.

I return to my ethnographic work and use the idea of the body as a file proposed by André Lepecki, from the performance studies. Lepecki departs from Michel Foucault's archive concept in The Archeology of Knowledge. The body as a "transformative archive" in relation to his "idea of dance as a system of incorporation of excorporations and incorporation of excorporation" (Lepecki 2013: 72). While choreography (literally "dance writing") is bodily communication, dance understood as a system, according to Lepecki, has much in common with the description of the personal intercommunication model that several North American researchers of the late twentieth century known as the Escuela de Palo Alto have proposed: a retroactive circular system where feed-back is a central element (see Winkin 1994). The models proposed by Lepecki and theorists of communication are useful to establish the analogy between dancing and speaking.

On the background there are the relations dance-ethnicity and language-ethnicity, which allow us to establish an analogy between dancing and speaking, and which have a common factor that is the body.