The Portuguese explorers who first sailed along the coast of South America one January morning discovered the beauty of a series of bays with golden beaches, fed by a fresh river running through lush tropical peaks and they named that idyllic spot “January River”, or Rio de Janeiro in Portuguese, they could hardly have imagined what the future had in store.
Portuguese settlers soon settled and, as agriculture prospered, slaves were brought from the Portuguese controlled areas of South Africa to work in the plantations of Bahia, in the north east of what would later become Brazil. Samba began to develop here as a response to the strong percussive rhythms of a type of drums called “Batuque” which the slaves had brought with them from Africa.
The hypnotic beat of the drum enabled the early Samba dancers to escape for a while from their everyday troubles and dance bare foot, a tradition still upheld today in the Samba de Roda. In the language of those slaves, the word for dance is “Samba”, a word that was destined to pass into folklore of Brazil as the proud name of the national dance.
Samba is now danced in the celebration of joy in the February each year at the Carnival in Rio. The rhythm of “Quick, Quick, Slow&”, are performed by the Rio dancers as fast three-step weight changes with slight knee lift, the sections of which are led with alternate feet. The woman adept at showing of their hip movements while the men’s action is less exaggerated. Meanwhile, the head is kept perfectly still to avoid toppling the magnificent edifice it is supporting.
Today Samba are danced with sharp, staccato feel of the 1990s, these tend not to stand the test of time and fade in favor of an approach which embraces the dance’s original character. The Signature of the Samba is 2/4, the value of each count of slow = 1 beat or Quick = ½ beat.
The beat will frequently be split to provide exciting rhythmic combinations. The split beats are conventionally described as: &=1/2 beat or a=1/4 beat. When the beat is split, smaller, quicker fraction of the beat is taken from preceding beat. In the count of 1 a 2, the “a” count is taken from the preceding “1” count, so hat the “1” count is only ¾ and not the whole beat. When the music has a 4/4 time signature, the beat values describe above are doubled. The tempo is currently set at 50-52 bars per minute.
(Article Extracted from Dance Class by Paul Bottomer)
