Terence Levine occupies an usual position within the UK and international salsa scene. Also known as t.t. and tangotime, he has achieved fame (some might say infamy) on certain online salsa forums due to an extensive knowledge of the history and practice of mambo and salsa dancing, first hand recollections of people and places the rest of us can only imagine, and outspoken views that have been known to cause perturbation. Yet hardly anyone in the UK has seen Terence dance, even fewer have witnessed his teaching, and until now no one has seen a photo to go with the name.
I felt called to investigate Terence Levine’s story. A phone call to his present home in Dorset resulted in my speaking to the holder of a gentle American accent (the result of almost 50 years living in the United States). I began our conversation by taking Terence back to his childhood, dancing in 1930s London.
‘As a child in those days I think parents, with ballroom being at its peak, used the dance schools as drop offs for their kids like baby sitting, and I took to it like a fish to water and that evolved from that, you did a bit of modern, a bit of tap, it was very geared to kiddies, and I got into the old time dancing, and that led to the ballroom, and that evolved into the Latin which became a part of the whole genre, because in those days there was no cha cha, there was no mambo, there was no salsa.’
Sometime around 1958 or 1959 Terence decided to leave the UK.
‘I actually moved to Canada first, primarily because I’d met somebody who’d been working in The States and told me about the Arthur Murray schools. I went, ‘What do they do?’, and he said, ‘You can call them American style,’ I said, ‘Really, is it different?’ and he said, ‘Oh yeah.’ So I thought, ‘I’ve got to check this out’, so I packed my bags and off I go to Toronto, knocked on the door of the Arthur Murray studio and they said, ‘You’ve got to train our system.’’
Terence began teaching ballroom in Canada, however he soon discovered that his knowledge of Latin dance was woefully incomplete.
‘My very first introduction to mambo was this: every studio in those days used to have student nights out where you’d go to a club and dance with your students. They took me to a Latin club and they played a mambo - I had never even SEEN one. And the student turned round to the manager after this, I’ll never forget this, the student said, ‘I don’t know about Mr Levine being a gold professional, he couldn’t even dance a basic mambo.’ I had no idea what the Hell it was. But that was the eye-opener, that was the awake call – what is this all about?’
After several months Terence moved again, this time to California. He was motivated by having family there, however California was to give him opportunities that were to set a course for the rest of his life.
‘That’s when I started to get into the Latin, the real thing. In a club called Virginia’s in LA which was the only Latin club in the city, and had the same type of influx as The Palladium in New York. They both had the same kind of vibe going on. The big bands attending, Puente and Tito Rodriguez and Machito and Cal Tjader, all the famous names would come and play there on a regular basis. And it was free. So all the teachers at 10 o’clock at night we would run downtown, also the public, charge into Virginia’s at 10 and 10.30, and dance until around 3 in the morning. And that’s how I got my introduction to what the genre was really all about.
‘And looking back then, I thought I knew but as years went by I realised how little I really knew. The styling that I’d been used to, because I was ballroom trained, people would laugh at me. And I’d say, ‘Why are you laughing?’ ‘It’s just the way you dance. It’s not what you do, it’s the way you do it.’ I said ‘I don’t know,’ so they said, ‘Take a look at all these different Puerto Rican guys,’ and I said, ‘Wow.’
Terence was advised to approach the Puerto Rican twins Doug and Don Rivera, who had both danced in West Side Story in New York.
‘They were phenomenal. So they educated me on the nuances of rhythm and how it should look. That’s where I got my really really first understanding of what this was all about, musically speaking. From that point on I watched and danced, and everywhere I went, the first thing I looked for, (and I worked in a lot of states because being very highly qualified I was in great demand for coaching etc), I looked for Latin clubs, if there were any, and immediately immersed myself into that. Learning to speak Spanish to some degree, and that became part of what I did for the next forty to fifty years. Up until coming back to the UK in 05, I was dancing salsa 6 sometimes 7 nights a week, year in year out, literally.
‘I mean I was just obsessed with it. People would say, ‘Are you nuts?’ because here I am teaching all day, and running out the clubs at night, dancing. I’d say, ‘Well, I just gotta go, I gotta get my fix.’ I wouldn’t stay late, just a couple of hours maybe, 10 to 12.
‘And it never never got boring. This is the strangest thing. For some reason every time it’s fresh. Isn’t that strange? I don’t know if it’s the musical influence, the culture, people have asked me what it is, I really can’t put that into words.
‘As someone said to me once, a Latino said, ‘We dance from the inside out. Most non-Latinos dance from the outside in, we dance from the inside out.’ I thought, ‘That’s an interesting statement,’ and then I began to understand what they meant.
‘Before I came back from The States, I consider a very great privilege and honour that in The States every year they have National Heritage Month and I was teaching out of a Puerto Rican club restaurant, in a small suburb of Atlanta, and one day I got a call and this lady said, ‘I represent for the region for National Latino Heritage Month, would you care to come and give a lecture and a demonstration at the Air Force base?’ And I thought, ‘Me? There’s like fifty Latins that are teaching in this area, white as the driven snow as I am they ask me to come and do it . . .’ I developed my style to a point that it becomes so Latino that people in clubs for many many years, to this day, still think I’m Cuban. Is that strange or what?’
I asked Terence about the success of mambo, and how it transformed into salsa.
‘If you think back to the period of the forties through to probably the late to middle fifties maybe early sixties, mambo went through a phase, and although many people claim to be responsible for its growth in reality the person who did more to awake the general public was The Arthur Murray Dance Studio. And the reason was they did a weekly dance show [on television] in The States and every week they would demonstrate different dances and they showed mambo and everybody went wild over it. And the next thing you know they’re beating the doors down to studios to learn mambo. Now they’ve got all these students learning mambo and very few places to go, so eventually of course people go, ‘Wait a minute, people want to come and dance and they’ll pay to get in, wow we can do that.’ So the clubs obviously started meeting that demand.
‘You’ve got to look at its root. When you look at what bolero was in the States in the thirties and forties, it was a dance that was Cuban, it breaks on 3, it was very sensuous, danced in close position many times, and the studios took it up. And so when mambo became a dance as we know it today, (or maybe not quite as we know it today), it reflected on the basic concept of what the steps that they taught in bolero were. And danzon being the mother of all of that, became the rhythmical application of the dance. So if you took the square box of danzon, which is a quick quick slow rhythm, and the basic concept directionally of bolero, then you have what was then called the mambo box. And from that they applied the crossover breaks, or they call them (the New Yorkers) the natural reverse turns or the forward and back spots, whatever you want to call them, all of these basic ideas were drafted from bolero through a danzon rhythm into mambo.
‘And as they needed more variety they started to turn to swing. So they adapted swing moves, from East Coast Swing, into mambo and the dance grew. Now if you look at what people call the street side of things, they found out that a lot of people were dancing solo, just getting down to the music, so they thought, ‘Let’s put some steps together which people can dance in shine position,’ and so now shines started becoming more popular and you had a choice now whether you want to dance all partnership or part shine or whatever whatever. And so the dance evolved through that kind of medium of the combination of the indigenous Latinos’ dancing and the people who’d been taught in studios who then evolved into that scene and started to adapt and modify the ballroom type of feel of mambo into the Latino genre. So that dance evolved style and step wise through the efforts mainly of the chain schools of the day.
‘If you look from the beginning of the seventies, it took a complete nosedive. The clubs didn’t exist any more, they weren’t getting the business, and of course the New York scene said, ‘Wait a minute, we’ve got all these great musicians here, let’s rewrite some of this and start to give it a different feel and a different influence.’ And when that came in then of course the word salsa was born. The dance had changed, the music had changed, it had modernised, it was going in a different direction, and so as teachers we had to learn and adapt to that.
‘My major complaint about the whole thing was - the foundational work should always be there. I don’t care if you want to do twenty-five spins, it’s not what I want. I think the essence of the dance has to always be maintained, no matter how advanced you are. Show work, that’s okay, but at a social level, we’ve got to realise that this dance is danced in clubs with a crowded floor, it was never designed to dance the style of LA style, a slot style, that’s not what it was about. But the younger generation demand lifts and the drops and the spins. Does that make it right? It does for them but it doesn’t for everybody. So what we have to do we have to accommodate all styles and all ideas, and choose from that what suits us.’
I then asked Terence about his experiences of salsa in the UK since his return in 2005.
‘I’ve danced in six different cities since I’ve been back, mainly out of curiosity, to see what they were doing. I’ve had numerous offers to come and teach people privately, from varying locations. Problem is number one I don’t have a car, that wouldn’t be a problem going there but to go all the way for one or two private hours is not financially viable.
‘So I offered on a couple of occasions just for a bit of fun, to go to London and do a free workshop on a Saturday. Well I got responses, ‘Yeah yeah yeah,’ and then when [Terence told them], ‘Well you have to find the space because I’m not there to do that,’ then I started getting objections about why they couldn’t, and I thought, ‘Well if you’re going to put objections in the way of free learning then what’s the point?’
‘I was not looking to do a monetary gain thing out of this, that’s not the objective, it was purely to maintain and to make sure that the understanding of what we’re trying to do is not lost. There’s very few of us of my age left that are teaching at this level, particularly in this genre, they’re just not around. You can go down the list of people that were the greats of that era and they’re all gone just about.
‘I was going to show them some of the material that was used by the mambo dancers of the day. It’s not all transposable to salsa, for some reason it just doesn’t seem to work well. I can’t explain why, it’s not a good fit as they say. So this is the kind of thing I’d like someone to pass it on to, that it doesn’t get completely lost.
‘What I’m finding the problem seems to be is this: the majority of teachers from my understanding, and I will stand corrected on this one if I’m wrong, do not expose their students to the various rhythms that are available in the many many different styles of music. They don’t explain or maybe don’t know, I don’t know the reasons, I just know it’s lacking because when I went to clubs and see people dance, they seem to look like robots being taught sequences, and repeating those sequences ad nauseum throughout every song. No matter what the type of music comes on they do exactly the same thing.
‘They don’t know what a cumbia break is, they don’t know what guapacha rhythm is, they don’t understand guajira, there’s so many different rhythms built within this because it’s a son driven music. And son rhythms change. All salsas are not the same. They may seem the same to the uneducated ear but when you listen to the type of rhythms that are being employed, then you must dance to those rhythms. You can’t use the same things to every song that comes on. It wouldn’t make any sense. It doesn’t to me.
‘So the problem is, enough people that have other ideas about what to do are not being given the opportunity to express those to the general public ie through congresses or whatever. I wrote to three people, I was advised, ‘You need to write to these people because they work at every congress.’ Not one of the three replied back. The reason being, if you don’t have a partner today, and they’ve not seen you dance, they judge your ability on your dancing. Never was a bigger mistake made. Dancing proves only one thing – that you know how to dance. It tells you nothing about my knowledge, it tells you nothing about my background, it tells you nothing about how I teach.
‘Everywhere you go in the world you’re going to find enormously talented people. You’ve got them here, you’ve got them everywhere. I think a lot of them don’t have the guidance they need. They make that common mistake of realising they’ve got talent and instead of getting guidance and training, they’ve relied upon completely their own intuitive senses. Not that that’s a bad thing but I think when you’re going to get out in the public arena, as we say in the profession: you need to clean up your act. Knowing how to present yourself, just a lot of things that I look at and go, ‘Why are they doing this or why didn’t they do that or why didn’t they say this or why did they say that?’
‘You’ve got to realise when you put something up on the net, there are not just students looking at this, there’s all kinds of professionals looking at it as well. No-one realises the number of comments I receive from pros, I know the average person doesn’t give a damn about that, but the point is it’s constructive stuff, they’re not putting them down per se. I think all would agree that the talent is out there, the talent to be the best there is if they want to be. And I don’t think that emulation of one particular individual is going to really develop who you are.
‘You can look at the congresses and you can pick out five names and I guarantee you, if there’s a congress coming up next year I give you five names of people who are going to be there before it’s even published. I think of the hundreds of teachers, people out there with knowledge who have never been asked, it’s oustanding. It’s like these five have the eternal secret to dance? I don’t think so.
‘I’m not the only one [in the UK] with ideas, there’s probably dozens of them around. I saw a guy in Manchester, I saw a guy dancing one night, this guy was phenomenal. He was one of the best things I’ve seen ever [in the UK], this guy he was, he was Latino, really outstanding. And I thought, ‘Here’s a guy that will probably never get asked to demonstrate his skills anywhere.’ So my point is they are out there, you’ve just gotta go look for them. And that’s the sad part, if someone doesn’t promote these people they’re going to get lost.’
So what plans do you have for the future Terence?
‘I’ve got an offer from Dubai which I’m considering, to go out and do some work, I’ve got one in Minsk that I’m negotiating right now, in Russia, I’ve had one from one of the Carribean islands, the problem with these offers is, they want you to come and stay, come and work here. I don’t want to move, at my age, to another foreign country. I’m more interested in doing a two or three day thing and coming back.
‘As far as nationally or locally here, I have no immediate plans other than to get this video done. That’s something I’m going to be working on and putting up on the Youtube, if that brings any interest or work I’ll follow that through. I’m going to include stuff on there that most people talk about but don’t really understand, particularly clave. I’m going to dance on clave rhythm to salsa.
‘If there’s any ladies out there who are interested in helping me with this video, that have got some background, please call me. I just want someone that’s got some good background that I can work with for a couple of hours and do some very basic things. I will pay their train fare down or whatever. They’ve got to be petite because I’m only 5’ 8’’.
‘I would love to get some DJ work in, because the complaints I get from congresses, constant complaints about how fast the music is. Descarga’s fine to a point but I don’t want a steady diet of it for three hours. For that reason alone I would like to get out and do some salsa monga and some dura rather than stick with this high speed stuff all night, which apparently is somewhat of a vogue which they’ve created, for whatever reason I don’t know.’
Before we finished I asked Terence to describe his style of salsa dancing.
‘I dance what I call a Puerto Rican style with a strong Cuban influence. It’s definitely not anything close to a ballroom style, remotely. I’m a ballroom teacher, but I can’t defend something that I think is wrong. It’s not wrong, that’s the wrong way to put it. I don’t want to defend something that I think has moved so far away from its indigenous roots that it’s becoming to look like towards a foxtrot, that’s what I mean.’ [I forgot to ask Terence what beat he likes to break on however I have read that he breaks on 1, 2 or 3 depending on the style and feel of the tune he is dancing to.]
Terence Levine’s favourite salsa music:
Terence refused point blank to name his 10 favourite tracks however he offered to instead name some of his favourite artists:
Tito Rodriguez
Tito Puente
Cachao
Johnny Pacheco
La Playa and La Plata Sextettes
Grupo Gale
El Gran Combo
Fruko Y Sus Tesos
Willy Chirino
Willie Crespo
Frankie Ruiz
El Canario
Terence Levine’s qualifications:
Fellow with International Dance Teachers’ Association
Fellow with United Kingdom Alliance - ballroom and Latin
Fellow with North American Dance Teachers’ Association
Former examiner for North American Dance Teachers’ Association in 5 divisions
Contact Terence:
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I would like to give my special thanks to Terence for taking the time to talk to me.
Written by DJ Yuca, contact:
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Copyright DJ Yuca 2008 Photo courtesy of Pierrette Langdown – many thanks
