Anyone here somewhat experienced with Cuban Rumba?

Has anyone here perfected their "mollello" yet?

I'm not quite understanding mine. Jose Alberto Carrion suggests in his DVD that it's a simultaneous knee-building, bounce action. Do any of you guys find this hard, awkward and quite frankly ugly-looking at much faster tempos?
 
achilles007 said:
Has anyone here perfected their "mollello" yet?

I'm not quite understanding mine. Jose Alberto Carrion suggests in his DVD that it's a simultaneous knee-building, bounce action. Do any of you guys find this hard, awkward and quite frankly ugly-looking at much faster tempos?
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Do you have a video? YouTube searches (with various spelling combinations) didn't turn out anything. Never heard this term so I'm curious.
 
AFAIK, the term is "muelleo", which comes from "muelle", "spring". It refers to a springiness in the knees, most often taught as a light bounce, and it is absolutely essential to virtually all Afro-Cuban dance (rumba, Yoruba, arara, palo, etc, etc).

There are different types of muelleo depending on the dance. The yambu/guaguanco muelleo is a downward-directed light bounce (the accent is down, and you are not jumping up and down but sinking down on each beat to return to the same level. . .hard to describe in words). It will only work correctly if you are inclined forward in the right posture, weight over the ball of the foot, and there are a lot of important details about how your body is and is not supposed to sway. . .

Basically forget learning it without a teacher to correct you in person. It is one of the hardest and most essential aspects of Afro-Cuban dance. Even many of the Cuban students studying folkloric dance at the Instituto Superior de Arte struggle to get it quite right in their first years.

At high speeds it becomes more and more subtle until it's barely perceptible -- but it must remain there as a springiness in the knees or else the dance starts to look stiff. For guaguanco, men can skip doing it when doing the essential "guagua" version of the basic step, where instead of stepping with muelleo, you cycle your knees open and closed constantly like the covers of a book.
 
TSC said:
AFAIK, the term is "muelleo", which comes from "muelle", "spring". It refers to a springiness in the knees, most often taught as a light bounce, and it is absolutely essential to virtually all Afro-Cuban dance (rumba, Yoruba, arara, palo, etc, etc).

There are different types of muelleo depending on the dance. The yambu/guaguanco muelleo is a downward-directed light bounce (the accent is down, and you are not jumping up and down but sinking down on each beat to return to the same level. . .hard to describe in words). It will only work correctly if you are inclined forward in the right posture, weight over the ball of the foot, and there are a lot of important details about how your body is and is not supposed to sway. . .

Basically forget learning it without a teacher to correct you in person. It is one of the hardest and most essential aspects of Afro-Cuban dance. Even many of the Cuban students studying folkloric dance at the Instituto Superior de Arte struggle to get it quite right in their first years.

At high speeds it becomes more and more subtle until it's barely perceptible -- but it must remain there as a springiness in the knees or else the dance starts to look stiff. For guaguanco, men can skip doing it when doing the essential "guagua" version of the basic step, where instead of stepping with muelleo, you cycle your knees open and closed constantly like the covers of a book.
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This is really brilliant.

You sound just like my teacher down here in Miami!

Salsaforums really needs to open up a Cuban Rumba sub-thread so we can discuss this matter and exchange more knowledge!

Everything you've stated is 1000% exactly as one of my teachers who I take privates from says also!

I've noticed also --as you said-- not only in high speeds, but in live demonstrations of the much slower Yambu the muelleo "bounce" still isn't there, but they still keep the "springiness" of the knees alive, which is bizarre. Are they doing this by bringing the heels up off the floor?


Here's a good example at 00:05 of a man demonstrating the "bounce" that I'm looking to avoid.:

No offense to anyone who may dance like that, but I suspect that way of moving in that above video is more so for exaggerating the movement to a beginner rather than the way it is actually danced. Doing anything like that would look ugly as hell on me.
 
Actually, Dionisio (the teacher in the first video) does do the muelleo in the first video you posted! It's subtle, as it should be, but it's very clearly there. It's a light sort of springy bounce in the knees. (Dionisio was one of my first rumba teachers in Cuba years ago, although I only took a few classes from him).

In the second video, that might be a bit exaggerated for show, but some people do dance like that and it is fine. . . but it is also fine to make the muelleo more subtle and elegant, which I also prefer. To learn it, though, you may need to start with the exaggerated version and make sure all your body mechanics are working right.

;) haha, and what can I say, your teacher in Miami sounds pretty smart ;)
 
TSC said:
Actually, Dionisio (the teacher in the first video) does do the muelleo in the first video you posted! It's subtle, as it should be, but it's very clearly there. It's a light sort of springy bounce in the knees. (Dionisio was one of my first rumba teachers in Cuba years ago, although I only took a few classes from him).

In the second video, that might be a bit exaggerated for show, but some people do dance like that and it is fine. . . but it is also fine to make the muelleo more subtle and elegant, which I also prefer. To learn it, though, you may need to start with the exaggerated version and make sure all your body mechanics are working right.

;) haha, and what can I say, your teacher in Miami sounds pretty smart ;)
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Okay. Even though I don't want to look like a Salsa dancer, I want to make sure that my muelleo looks like Dionisio's.

I can't help but notice how he brings his heels up off the floor while doing his, though. Is this acceptable?

The way I was taught and in that Youtube video I posted-- they both advocate keeping the feet flat on the floor.

What has been your experience?
 
Re. the heels -- I've been taught both ways (acceptable vs not). I do lift my heels as part of the moelle a lot of the time, especially in the traveling basic (the step Alberto Valdes calls marco abre -- marco cierra).

But the heels aren't even the most crucial part of the muelleo. There are so many things about it that one has to get right that talking about it online really isn't going to be that helpful. Lots of classes + record your own dancing + observe, adjust & try again is my recommendation!
 
YourDaddy said:
Muelleo is a term that describes the wrong action. The problem with Jose Carrión, and many other Rumba instructors, is that what they do and what they teach are very different things.

Although very competent dancers, they are unable to articulate the techniques of what they are actually doing. Hence they tell beginners to use a bouncing action, which results in an ugly "baby chick" effect that does not reflect the crisp and sharp motion seen in Rumba. Part of the mistake is that they conflate the slightly hunched posture with bent knees, which are appropriate, witch having to bounce. In reality although the knees are bent, a Rumbero does not flex down, it's the opposite.

Muelleo is what is commonly seen when salseros and tourist try to dance Rumba as shines, and are never able to capture the look and feel of an authentic Guaguancó or Yambú basic step.

So good luck trying to ever achieve the effect Muelleando.
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Wait, I'm a bit confused. . . just the other day you posted a thread saying you are looking to learn Latin dance and that you are a complete beginner and that salsa looks too complicated. . . but you are a rumba expert? Or was that a joke thread?

Many rumberos do indeed dance with hardly any muelleo at all, but it's not the same as saying that no one uses the muelleo -- or that it's not a legitimate part of the learning process. I know it for a fact it is taught to Cubans looking to become pro dancers, not just tourists or people who don't have a clue. Some of the Cuban pros I know personally were taught rumba with a very pronounced muelleo as children (in a dance school in Santiago, for example) and only later evolved their own more subtle style. Whether you can get the end result -- a subtle, cool rumba style -- without exploring the muelleo at any point in your development is, of course, an interesting question; personally I think it wouldn't quite look or feel right.

That tourists and salseros generally look terrible dancing rumba is another matter entirely. . . but then again very, very few tourists or salseros ever develop the body control to look good doing any kind of Afro-Cuban dance.
 
Ok I understand what you guys mean by muelleo, the "bounce". I was taught this too in the rumba classes I took in the US, along with the lateral-and-back-in-place "basic step", and vividly recall thinking it felt very weird and for the life of me I couldn't get that bouncing movement to feel or look like the rumba I saw Cubans dance (btw one of those classes was with a Cuban teacher). I recall I ended up doing some Orishas-style chest pumping movement during the bounce in my desperate attempt to actually add some upper body movement, because that bounce step felt so devoid of the beautiful upper body movement I saw rumba dancers had. That lateral-and-back bounce step we were being taught felt so strange that I actually resigned myself to thinking I just don't "get" rumba and will never be able to dance it.

Then I went to Cuba and saw lots and lots of great rumba dancers, both men and women. And none had the up-and-down bouncing movement, instead it was very obvious that the energy from each step was being used to move their hips and torso and shoulders laterally in a figure 8, combined with a "twisting" of the upper body in a continuous stepping movement, rather than bounce up and down or step laterally-and-back. My teacher in Santiago from the Conjunto Folkorico de Oriente didn't teach me any muelleo; and with her I was finally able to start to learn the rumba stepping and movement in a way that actually felt and looked like how I was seeing the good rumba dancers dance. Looking back, I now realize that the reason she was such a good teacher is because she didn't "dumb down" her (beautiful) rumba movement into the muelleo in our lessons, which is what I saw a lot of Cuban teachers do. She kept dancing as she normally did, just slower, in order to teach me.

This is a very good explanation and demo of how the muelleo and "lateral and back in place" basic are not actually used by rumba dancers and don't actually help beginners to learn the rumba at all. He does mention that, as you said @TSC , they are indeed taught to dancers, including in Cuban schools. It seems to be a case of trying to break down a complex movement for beginners but ending up with something that does more bad than good as it is not actually used in the real dance and the student is left to figure out how to evolve this into actual rumba.


 
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Wait, @YourDaddy, so are you a beginner dancer or an expert -- which is it?

The videos seem to be typical of Yoel Marrero's approach to dance -- which is to pick one (admittedly decent) approach and say everything else is wrong or obsolete.

The big up-and-down dancing bear-like muelleo is obviously ugly and unnecessary, but that's a straw man argument. Muelleo has a place in rumba and can look quite good (as in the Dionisio vid higher up in this thread).

:) but everyone's an expert on the internet and I don't want to argue in circles so I'm going to make a video instead explaining my view of how muelleo should work in rumba. Then people can watch and decide if it makes sense to them/looks good to them or not. Might take me a day or two to get it done, so I won't argue the point until then.
 
achilles007 said:
I've noticed also --as you said-- not only in high speeds, but in live demonstrations of the much slower Yambu the muelleo "bounce" still isn't there, but they still keep the "springiness" of the knees alive, which is bizarre. Are they doing this by bringing the heels up off the floor?

No offense to anyone who may dance like that, but I suspect that way of moving in that above video is more so for exaggerating the movement to a beginner rather than the way it is actually danced. Doing anything like that would look ugly as hell on me.
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Yeah, the muelleo looks ugly not just on you but on anyone.

Here's YM demoing Yambu (dancing starts after 2:00). No muelleo. He raises the heels as you said.

 
An old Folklorico Nacional video, watch from 2:30 and 21:00. No muelleos. And I know you guys are obsessed with men's rumba :p but watch the women's beautiful rumba movement, and you can see even better than in the men how they are using the energy from the floor from their smooth continuous stepping (no lateral-and-back stepping) to generate both the upper body and hip lateral 'figure 8' movement--there is no up-and-down muelleo going on in any of them.

 
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Here's my vid. Sorry about the bad sound quality and the lighting -- I didn't have time this week to shoot this at our studio.

I'm not a rumba master, nor do I claim to be.This vid reflects my best understanding after years of study with a series of Cuban pros (including a year spent studying at ISA) and social dancing in Cuba.


As supplemental material, here are two vids I uploaded of yambu and guaguanco being danced by Conjunto Folklorico dancers. In the yambu vid both dancers dance with muelleo. In the guaguanco vid, the first one uses muelleo, the second doesn't.



Now you could argue that:

-- the conjunto folklorico isn't what it used to be back in the day (true)
-- the dancers are young and not the most experienced (true)
-- etc, etc

But these are still among the top dancers in the Conjunto Folklorico, the historical "gold standard" company of Cuban folklore.

The point is, a lot of relatively skilled Cuban dancers _do_ dance with muelleo and (to my eye) make it look good. Many others do dance without any perceptible muelleo. There's no One Right Way (TM) to dance rumba (which is a folkloric dance, the form of which is determined by how people actually dance, not how people are "supposed to dance").

Whereas YM is another (pretty skilled) dancer/teacher who believes he alone knows what's right and everybody else in the world is too dumb to get it. He claims this about casino, about rumba, and about everything else where he has an opinion.

Which, admittedly, is the case with a lot of teachers, in Cuba and abroad. Many famous, well-regarded folkloric teachers I've had have taught me radically different "truths" about Cuban dance -- while claiming their way is the only way.

In folkloric & popular dance, that's not how it works.
 
You probably won't get the answer, as he was banned in the meantime.
I'm not sure that banning is a good idea, although it's very likely that he was indeed reappearing member in some connection with YM.
But at least we got some interesting new info in this and other thread through discussions of other members with him and so far he was behaving relatively well, except that his member name was insulting ...
Dance teachers claiming their way is the only correct are quite common in various genres, not only in rumba or casino ...
Just my 2e-2 $

I liked the clip btw
 
:) thanks. The point isn't to get an answer from YD (from the first moment I noted his inconsistent post history, I figured he was either YM or a surrogate) -- I'm genuinely interested in discussing the issue and hearing others' thoughts.

The truth is, while I knew not everybody does a muelleo, I hadn't noticed just how many rumberos don't use a clear & visible muelleo when dancing and this discussion drew my attention to it -- so I'm happy we had the discussion. At the same time, I think it is important that beginners and others looking for info realize that this isn't a black-and-white case and that there is indeed a role for muelleo in rumba. . .
 
TSC said:
:) thanks. The point isn't to get an answer from YD (from the first moment I noted his inconsistent post history, I figured he was either YM or a surrogate) -- I'm genuinely interested in discussing the issue and hearing others' thoughts.

The truth is, while I knew not everybody does a muelleo, I hadn't noticed just how many rumberos don't use a clear & visible muelleo when dancing and this discussion drew my attention to it -- so I'm happy we had the discussion. At the same time, I think it is important that beginners and others looking for info realize that this isn't a black-and-white case and that there is indeed a role for muelleo in rumba. . .
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Curious, have you ever seen a female rumba dancer use muelleo? Any videos?
 
TSC said:
Here's my vid. Sorry about the bad sound quality and the lighting -- I didn't have time this week to shoot this at our studio.

I'm not a rumba master, nor do I claim to be.This vid reflects my best understanding after years of study with a series of Cuban pros (including a year spent studying at ISA) and social dancing in Cuba.

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Very nice video :)

However, you're not doing the mollello in your dance demo. :) If you look at your guaguanco demo from 4:05 -- when you really get into it :) -- what you call "small mollello" is really the action produced by raising your heels off the ground, which is exactly the action we see in good rumberos (and YM's vids) So great job with that. :) It is that raising of the heels action that is creating the nice springy effect (as you call it, the folkloric look). Whereas a mollello would mean that your head is lowering and rising along with the rest of your body as your knees bend because your whole body is going down then back up, with your heels down (no matter how small the lowering is, your head still goes down if you're doing a mollello--you can see it when you demo mollellos earlier in the video). But if your knees bend because you are raising your heels rather than because you are lowering your body (which would be the mollello), and your head remains level while your heels go up, that is a very different action from a mollello and is exactly the action that I see used by the good rumberos. (So again, awesome job with your rumba :) ) The difference between that raised heel action and a "small mollello" is subtle but it makes the difference between nice rumba movement and an "ok" version, so I think that if we are discussing the mollello we need to be clear about and acknowledge this distinction.

I suppose the mollello is a way to teach beginners how to "fake" that action. Whether it is indeed the best teaching method, I'm not sure. For me personally, if anything it made whatever rumba movement I already had worse. So it makes me think: what if rumba beginners were taught directly how to step, without mollello, and as they get more advanced, how to use the heel raising action, smaller at first of course, like the experienced rumberos do?

Another observation: I keep pointing out the female dancers and it's because the basic rumba movement is the same in men and women, except of course men's is sharper and with more accented upper body movement and accents whereas women's is softer and with more accented hip movement. I think it is the men's sharper movement and somewhat stronger raised heel/springy knees action that is confusing this whole issue of the mollello (in light of the distinction I highlighted above). But if you look at the female dancers, it becomes very clear that there is no down-and-up mollello action anywhere in their dancing.

So the next, obvious question is: is men's basic rumba stepping action so different from women's that it requires a mollello whereas women's movement does not? To me the answer is no. Also, men and women are generally taught to step the same way in beginner rumba classes, and it is usually with the mollelloed sideways-and-back basic, as I was taught as well.
 
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I am actually doing the muelleo, but my definition may not match yours. Muelleo is springiness -- a constant springy bounce in the knees. There is also a bit of weight going up and down, though due to the geometry of the body motion when the muelleo is small the head barely moves.

This is not just an issue of semantics. Just picking up and putting down heels does not reproduce the effect. When doing the muelleo, there is a definite spring in the knees -- my body going down and up on the knee joint as a car goes up and down on its springs. It's small enough that it's hard to see clearly from the outside, but trust me, on the inside the difference is 100% clear.

I do insist that the difference is there. Take a look at this video of Domingo Pau, a legendary figure of Cuban rumba, who does _not_ show substantial muelleo in the first part of the vid (at least none that can be seen from the outside). He does the heel up and down but his weight stays very stable and there is little springiness in the knee (I mean this in a technical sense -- a spring produces a constant & smooth oscillating motion around its position of rest). Toward the end there are a few moments where there's a hint of muelleo, but overall there is very little that I see:


Contrast this with the first guy in the vid I posted above:


His head also stays fairly stable, but his knees & weight are in a slight but almost constant spring/bouncy action (interestingly -- he doesn't lift the heel much to achieve this).

I'm not saying one is better or worse than the other -- Domingo Pau is a master, and the other guy (who probably takes classes from Pau at the Conjunto) looks pretty good to me too. They are both dancing rumba but they are doing so quite differently.

If the definition of muelleo is the dancing bear step, then sure -- that doesn't really belong in rumba. That is, if your point is that beginners are not being taught in the best possible way, then I'd say -- possibly so. But I do figure you have to start teaching an exaggerated version to make it stick -- you can't just start with the small motion. All except very, very talented students will not pick up on the subtle version. (It doesn't have to be the dancing bear version, though).

Which is DEFINITELY true -- and which is a problem I do see in Europe -- is that teachers are not doing their job in terms of explaining that the dancing bear version is not the real thing and looks ugly. Which leads to a lot of. . . eyesores at festivals and socials.

Re. your note about women -- that's something I've wondered about, actually. I've definitely seen women dance with muelleo, but aesthetically you may be right -- a clearly visible muelleo typically it doesn't go that well with the female version of the dance.

There are plenty of differences between how men and women dance rumba, though -- the basic step is similar but not quite the same. An example relevant to this thread -- one ISA prof told me that women should not pick the heel up from the floor like we've been talking about while men can. Perhaps this also explains some of the difference in muelleo.
 
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