Casino

In Casino, three performers with various perspectives within the broad Latin-American diaspora come together through salsa. Both fulfilling as well as breaking with salsa’s conventions, the trio moves across the dance floor and through the ambivalent global entanglements of this popular social dance.

Casino is what salsa dancing has been called in Cuba. In the piece of the same name, Swedish-Chilean choreographer Ofelia Jarl Ortega, caterina daniela mora jara from Patagonia, and Jao Moon from Colombia meet on the fictional dance floor set in a Latin American club for couples dancing. The three dancers bring their individual relationships to salsa to the dance floor and let the many stories of this social dance reverberate in their bodies. Ofelia Jarl Ortega herself was not born into salsa dancing, because in Chile, her parents’ country of origin, cumbia is much more common. But a growing Latin American community in Europe, exiled by political upheaval, led to salsa becoming more popular throughout the diaspora. In Jarl Ortega’s experience, the pop cultural ‘Latino boom’ of the 1990s and 2000s seemed to also spread the cliché that all Latinas and Latinos are good salsa dancers. Casino navigates these and other ambivalent global entanglements of salsa in a radically subtle and playful way. Between the rhythm of their steps, the three performers connect and sometimes fail to connect through dance in their different post-migrant and diasporic realities.