Building community through dance

Community connections are being made through dance in UB’s Alumni Arena.

It’s the gathering place for 20-30 people who regularly take part in a Cuban dance called rueda de casino. Similar to square dancing, rueda de casino features one person in the circle of dancers who calls out the moves for each couple in the rueda — “wheel” in Spanish — to perform. 

Every Wednesday this spring semester, UB faculty members Melanie Aceto and Andrea Pitts teach rueda de casino through their program, Community Engagement through Cuban Dance. It’s a collaboration that provides an opportunity to connect and enhance UB’s relationships with Western New York communities and UB’s own diverse students, faculty and staff.

Rueda de casino is often danced in clubs, festivals and group classes because it fosters a lively and inclusive atmosphere. The dance includes quick partner changes, claps and yells, and intricate footwork, making it energetic and fun. It originated in the 1950s in Havana as a social dance where multiple couples perform synchronized moves while switching partners, similar to how it is danced today.

“It’s a fast-paced activity with almost a game-like element to it because the caller can make calls and then immediately cancel them, adding a playful aspect,” says Pitts, associate professor in the departments of Comparative Literature and Global Gender and Sexuality Studies. "So, it’s not a high-serious, ballroom-style dance; it's engaging, communal, and even has a teamwork element.”

“But at the same time, there’s more responsibility,” adds Aceto, associate professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance. “If you mess up, you mess up the whole group. Like any team activity, you have to let go of your ego and focus on having fun. The stakes are higher, but so is the fun.”

Pitts says that getting the group together every week is an important part of forming a community.

“There’s a vulnerability in learning dance, but when you’re laughing and rotating through partners, it helps ease the anxiety,” Pitts says. “In a world where people can feel isolated, dance brings people together. It fosters joy, coordination and shared learning.”

When asked how their practice group came together, Aceto and Pitts recall its organic growth through social media, word of mouth and local outreach at Hispanic Heritage Month events and festivals in the Buffalo area.

“We put out a call on social media to local Latin dancers and reached out to colleagues who might be interested. There are several faculty members and staff from UB, for example, who come regularly,” Pitts says.

Aceto and Pitts say there’s a Latin dance community in Buffalo and throughout Western New York, including Rochester, Niagara Falls and even across the border in Ontario — places like Niagara-on-the-Lake, St. Catharines and as far as Hamilton and Toronto.

Pitts notes that a rueda de casino group in Rochester meets regularly, and some of those dancers have joined us the dance group at UB. “The beauty of this dance is that it’s transportable — you can go to another place, say, ‘We’re doing a rueda,’ and people who know it can join in,” Pitts says.

A dedicated Facebook group, Buffalo Rueda, also plays a key role in connecting dancers.

“Now, we’re even getting emails from people who find us online and want to join,” Aceto says.

Given Buffalo’s own investment in local Hispanic communities, including new bilingual radio programming, the recent construction of the Hispanic Heritage Cultural Institute and the longstanding forms of Latinx cultural production in this region, Pitts and Aceto thought the time was right to introduce this program and increase the breadth and level of the dance community, lifting it up here in Buffalo and in Western New York.

“No one in Buffalo was consistently teaching rueda, so this became an opportunity to grow the community’s knowledge of Cuban dance and music,” Pitts says.

Aceto hopes the practice group encourages more people to dance regularly. “It’s a space where everyone is equal and the more you help each other, the better it is,” she says. “The more people dance, the better they get and the more enjoyable it becomes.”