LCC Latin music by Duchicela will be part of the 12th annual International Festival, focusing on Latin America.

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Step into lively
Latin dance moves
at Leeward fest

Loosen up and enjoy the excitement of Carnival by putting your feet and hips to work during salsa, merengue and cha-cha workshops that will be presented as part of Leeward Community College's Latin American festival tomorrow and Thursday.

You never know when such skills will come in handy, as I learned only after embarrassing myself in a very public way during a Mardi Gras parade down Nuuanu Avenue a couple of years ago.

In the spirit of the event, I joined in a troupe of dancers from the Movement Center rhythmically making their way down the street to the beat of festival drums. Behind my feathered mask and headdress, I thought, who would know?

Everything was going fine until a loud bystander yelled and pointed our way: "Hey, those two don't belong!"

Oh well, I might not have mastered the steps, but attending Brazilian/Caribbean classes for a couple of weeks did help me overcome a degree of reserve.

Suzanne Frazer, artistic director of Tango Hawaii, encourages festival-goers to loosen up and have fun with movement.

"We start with the merengue. ... It's a great party dance that people can get right away," she said. The basics of salsa and cha-cha follow because the hip and body motions for all the dances are similar. Samba is the hardest dance to learn because of the complexity of foot patterns.

"In Hawaii, people are used to seeing hip movements with hula. Hip movements are very foreign to Western society," she said. In African and Latin American cultures, moving the hips in dance is natural, she added.

"What makes Latin dance so sexy are the movements from the center of the body."

Learning one dance helps with learning others, and as with any skill, practice makes perfect. To help students along, Frazer also organizes Latin Dance Night at the Atherton YMCA in Manoa, during which the facility is transformed into a makeshift all-ages nightclub on the second Saturday of each month.

"We have kids, teenagers and older people -- all with different dance abilities," she said.

VIBRANT DANCES, accompanied by rustic instruments, martial arts demonstrations, a display of "Art and Artifacts of Peru" from the collection of J.D. Carpenter, and Latin American cuisine served up in the LCC cafeteria will be among the festival's highlights. Capoeira Hawaii will demonstrate the basics of its energetic Brazilian dance-inspired martial-arts techniques and teach some basics in the dance studio on Thursday afternoon.

Lectures and presentations during the festival will cover an array of topics, from the guitars of Mexico and Latin America to the experience of Puerto Rican laborers in Hawaii. N. Santana, president of the Brazilian Cultural Center of Hawaii, will talk about Brazil's indigenous population and how peoples' lives are changing as they are forced to become nomadic due to the breakdown of their rain-forest home.

Latin America is highly represented in the United States, said professor Pat Neils, who is the event chairwoman, "but it is neglected in the UH system. There is no one that specializes in Latin American history. We really lack knowledge and awareness."

She had the opportunity to travel to Peru and Chile to learn more about their culture, but she also learns from her students, including Brazilian youths with the dual motivations of getting an education and being close to big waves.

Themes for the cultural festival change each year.

"We covered Asian/Pacific culture a few times, and the Muslim world," Neils said. Next year, the committee plans to focus on the Philippines because Hawaii will be celebrating the centennial of Filipinos' arrival.