About Bachata Sensual
Bachata is a traditional dance from Dominican Republic, and Bachata Sensual is a modern variation of Bachata from Spain. While traditional Bachata focuses on weight transfer and hip movement, Bachata Sensual builds on this with turns, ballet-inspired body movements and isolations, plus fusions with other dances.
As modern bachata music evolved to use more modern instruments and pop-music/R&B musical structure, the dance has evolved as well to implement isolated body movements which allow to interpret all instruments and hit the drops and stops in modern music. Bachata Sensual is based strictly on lead/follow principles (everything in this dance is improvised based on simple social dancing rules, initiated by the Lead), and is now one of the most popular social dances all over the world! You would be surprised how popular Bachata Sensual is, and you can find somewhere to dance it pretty much anywhere in the world, from South America to Japan!
Meet the founders of Bachata Sensual - Korke y Judith from Cadiz, Spain.
Quoting Judith: "Sensual Bachata is a love story that unfolds on the dance floor. It is a mix between dance and theater."
Korke and Judith admit that this dance was created as a fusion of Bachata steps and musicality with Judith's background in classical dance. Since then, many more dance styles have influenced the look of the dance, such as hip-hop, zouk, and Swing.
They have based their style on strict follow and lead principles and the foundational movements of Bachata Sensual have been largely tested out on the dance floor while social dancing all over the world. In order to make the style universal, a very solid system was made ensuring that almost every move is leadable and not choreography-based so that every student can learns how to dance with anyone after a class (even someone who doesn't know this style should be able to follow a good leader).
Quoting Korke: "A good leader should be able to lead the worst follow. My goal is that anyone can dance Bachata Sensual with their grandmothers."
Korke firmly believes that a good leader should be able to lead absolutely anyone with clarity and precision. Thus, it is very important for a Bachata leader to learn how natural human movement works and how to easily move a follow's using natural weight transfer, gravity and the energy of circular movement. The lead's job is to start and stop the follow's movement and the follow's main job is to follow by finishing the movement that the lead initiates. This energy makes the movement feel transcendent and magical for the follow as the body continues to move with natural energy momentum. The lead should then feel totally in control of the follow at every moment as he is educated and has knowledge of how the body can be lead in the most natural and efficient way based mostly on circular movement, inertia and natural energy.
The dance is filled with moments of passionate pauses that create visual floating pictures which take your breathe away. These are sprinkled on top of the regular basic step and beautiful turn patterns. The flow of energy in this dance can be interrupted to hit certain stops in the music with the use of body isolations. The leader isolates the follower's upper or lower body, so as to steer only one part of the follower's body to create visual stops. This is a nice addition to the rest of the dance which has a more floating and flowing vibe.
As the dance style has grown and competitions have become more popular, this dance has become more open in a show style format.