Ahhh Janeiro! Time for resolutions, losing weight, quitting smoking and eating well!
Well, since I don’t smoke and I’m quite thin and tend to keep healthy, I like to give myself fun resolutions. This year, I want to learn to dance samba de gafieira, also called simply gafieira or gafiera.
A lot of people, when they think of samba, they think of the samba schools they see during Carnaval in Rio, but that’s just one style of samba, samba enredo.
Samba de gafieira, sometimes confused with ballroom samba, is a Brazilian dance style that’s danced in pairs to a samba de roda, chorinho, or samba beat and like most Latin American dances, the male leads, making my life a littleee easier when it comes to learning! In traditional performances, you’ll see the men wearing white dress pants and a hat and the women wearing knee length dresses that have a lot of movement mimicking mid twentieth century urban Brazil.
Here are two videos on Samba de Gafieira, the first is a class for you to start learning some moves, and the second a performance for inspiration!
