The Mambo

The Mambo

The Mambo was invented by Perez Prado and was popular in the 1940s and 50s Cuba, Mexico City, and New York is completely different to the modern dance that New Yorkers now call ‘Mambo’. The original mambo dance contains no breaking steps or basic steps at all. The Cuban dance wasn’t accepted by many professional dance teachers. Cuban dancers would describe mambo as “feeling the music”in which sound and movement were merged through the body.[ Professional dance teachers in the US saw this approach to dancing as “extreme,”"undisciplined,”and thus, deemed it necessary to standardize the dance to present it as a sell-able commodity for the social or ballroom market. The modern dance from New York was popularized in the 70s by Eddie Torres and his contemporaries who were 1st or 2nd generation Puerto Rican immigrants. This style is not danced to Mambo music, for which it is poorly suited, but instead to Salsa music.