Shining Star
It's a carnival street dance, a ballroom competition dance, a 1930s classic movie number, and a powerful workout for your pelvis. Samba is a Brazilian dance with African roots and a global fandom, often performed in little more than sequins and feathers, but always with a mix of attitude and abandon.
Samba dance is a little bit of this and a lot of that. Originating in Brazil in the 19th century, samba owes its rhythm and moves to the African slave dances on the Brazilian sugarcane plantations. The traditional African circle dance with a lone central performer relied on weight shifts, rapid steps, and slides to a 2/4 percussive beat, and a fairly still upper body with arms and hands responding to the hip and leg movements. Once slavery ended, the dancers migrated to the favelas or shantytowns outside of cities, where freed slaves put together dance troupes for carnival. The performances were boisterous and uninhibited, generally frowned upon by Brazil's Portuguese upper crust. But samba proved irresistible, its popularity spilling across classes and borders, its gyrations richly colored by regional and international influences. Today, it would be impossible to imagine carnival without samba.
Fred Astaire and Delores Del Rio danced a version of samba, the carioca, in the 1933 film Flying Down to Rio. Carmen Miranda, a Brazilian dancer who samba'd her way through That Night in Rio, became synonymous with the dance worldwide. The 1939 World's Fair cemented the American love affair with samba when the music and dance was featured in the Brazilian pavilion. Today, the many iterations of samba are a mainstay of pre-Lenten carnival in Rio De Janeiro and of Latin ballroom dancing everywhere. Now it's a solo dance, a couple's dance, a street-dancing exhibition, and a hybrid, merged with rock, acrobatics, and even reggae.
There has never been one definitive samba; the dance is as fluid as the pelvic isolations that keep it hot. Solo samba and partner samba styles work off the same rhythms with fast or slow percussive beats. You just have to concede you know it when you see it.
Samba no pé is traditional solo samba dance with simple, recognizable steps spontaneously inspired by the music. It follows a 2/4 count with three steps in every measure, a basic step-ball-change.
Men dance the samba no pé on the flat of the foot. Women, who wear high heels, dance on the ball of the foot.
Samba Axé is a modern variation of the solo dance -- very bouncy with elements of aerobics. Music groups release new songs with choreography tailored to each song as part of a marketing strategy. So samba axé is always changing, with specific moves dependent on the lyrics. Typically the dance will start slow and progress to a rapid tempo.
Partner samba is one of the popular types of Latin dances in ballroom competitions. Before samba became a ballroom dance style, there were original partner samba dances, the most common of which is the Samba gafieira.
Samba gafieira is described as a cross between a waltz and a tango. Because it is a more spontaneous dance than the tango, the posture of the dancers is more relaxed. Samba dancers are infectiously happy, not dramatic and intense, but samba grafieira does have some common elements with tango. Originally, the dance was a simple partner dance that drew many of its characteristics from the Brazilian maxixe, a more genteel version of tango that evolved in Brazil as the tango took hold in neighboring Argentina.