When I found out about Karen Ritscher’s passing, I was in Munich, in a tiny but very charming Airbnb. That night, I did three Zumba videos in the kitchen. I’d downloaded the app some weeks earlier because of an Instagram ad, but hadn’t touched it until that night. Karen was as much a dancer as a violist, at least in her last chapter. Dancing connected me to her, even though I hadn’t seen her in years, and was across the ocean.
Yesterday, I completed an 8-hour Zumba teacher training. All fall, I’d been going to classes twice a week with my beloved teacher, Chela Zykorie, before my gym doubled my membership fee! Lately I’ve been yogaing instead, but as much as I love yoga, I don’t have the dozens of hours, or thousands of dollars, for a teacher training. I was a little suspicious of the… Zumba of it all. And yes, a small part of the time was spent on ads for itself and further trainings, and how to be a brand ambassador yada yada. But businesses gonna business. And I learned some interesting factoids. Zumba prides itself on using lots of different styles of music, especially mainstream. If you’re dancing to it at a club, they want you dancing to it there. But that’s copyright $$$ and that’s where a lot of our membership $ goes. At a time when the streamers are giving practically nothing to creators, that’s pretty cool. Also, the founder of Zumba, Beto somebody, still teaches dance in Miami, and has his own music studio so he can work with musicians on what works for dance. Our trainer played an example of the “breakdown bar” at work— where the different parts of the song are represented by different colors, since each part will have its own choreo— and I noticed that they were all the same length. When I asked her about choreographing moves when it’s a song that has, say, a very short bridge, she answered that for Zumba, all song elements have to be the same length!!!! Isn’t that nuts? So that’s a lot of what they work on with artists when they make edits.
I just realized that I was the only white person in the training. Neither here nor there, but just interesting. One of my favorite things about Zumba is how it celebrates music from all over the world. Bollywood, belly dancing, Afropop, not to mention the “four (mandatory!) rhythms” we learned yesterday: merengue, salsa, cumbia (how does the iPhone not know that word?!?!), and reggaeton. A lot of the practice I do now on is going to be on cueing. One of the tenets of Zumba is that the instructor isn’t supposed to talk, but gesture every change with enough advance warning that the class feels comfy and smooth. That explains why I was able to keep up in that mega giant outdoor class in Oaxaca, despite my very imperfect Spanish.
I’ve been listening to the *incredible* Fela Kuti podcast. 30-minute songs and he always refused to make radio edits!
