This is a video of our performance at the 2010 SF Rueda Festival:

The choreography is by Ryan Mead and Sidney Weaverling to an edited version of the 1997 live recording of "La Vida Sin Esperanza" by Issac Delgado. (The process of editing was quite involved and more than a little painful - the original is 12 minutes, and several magnificent parts had to be cut to make the piece the required length of less than five minutes).

This piece was very well received at the festival and we are very flattered by Kevin's post about it.

We strove to fit the choreography to the music as much as possible, and wanted to stay true to the lyrics at many points as well. We tried to show the first coro of "encoje y estira" (shrinking and stretching) in a number of different ways, first as a group together in the full rueda, and then in individual couples later on. We also chose to embody the "coge, tira" coro by literally catching and throwing each other. And then we went down and back up to Issac's calls of "vamo' bajando" and "vamo' subiendo."

We danced son "on 2" to the cuerpo section of the song, where Cuban musicians would dance with the same timing, and switched to dancing "on 1" during the montuno section. We wanted to hit all the important bloques (percussive breaks) with changes in our footwork and body movement. We chose to simulate the complex layering of the champola mambo section by doing an original move called "la ola," where each couple dances on a different beat (1, 3, 5, and 7 in dancers' counts) and the leaders switch time as they switch partners. And we wanted to embody the energy of the final bomba section, by changing the rhythm of our feet to match the bass slides and by performing an athletic series of partner switches across the center of the circle ("dame dos") that our dancers dubbed the "death gauntlet" due to its difficulty and lack of room for error.

To see more videos of our performances, please visit the video gallery on our website.