What Salsa and Bachata Dancers Notice When They Try Forró for the First Time
- Rafael Piccolotto de Lima
- May 8
- 5 min read
Updated: Jun 8
For many dancers in New York City, salsa and bachata are the gateway into partner dancing.
They create a strong foundation in rhythm, coordination, social dancing, partner interaction, and movement awareness. After some years inside these scenes, many dancers begin exploring other styles, looking not necessarily for a replacement, but for a different kind of experience.
This is often where forró enters the picture.
Over the years teaching forró in New York, I’ve seen many salsa and bachata dancers become curious about the dance. Interestingly, they often recognize certain things immediately, while other aspects feel completely unfamiliar. In many cases, those differences are exactly what makes the experience so interesting and keeps people exploring further.
For salsa and bachata dancers in NYC, forró often appears as a natural next step for people who already enjoy partner dancing but want something more grounded, improvisational and community-oriented.
Salsa dancers often recognize the movement vocabulary quickly
One of the most common things salsa dancers notice is that parts of the movement vocabulary feel strangely familiar.
Turns, changes of direction, coordination between partners, and certain movement structures can feel surprisingly intuitive, especially for dancers coming from salsa cubana, which tends to have a more circular organization closer to forró.
Years ago, I taught a special introductory forró workshop in New York specifically for a salsa community. One of the most interesting parts of that experience was noticing how naturally many dancers absorbed turning structures and movement patterns. In some moments, I barely needed to explain the mechanics because their bodies already understood similar ideas through salsa.
At the same time, another layer of the dance felt much more challenging to understand. The biggest difficulty was usually not the turns or the steps themselves, but the embrace and the way connection operates inside forró.
During that same workshop, I ended up spending much more time working on embrace, contact, body organization, and connection exercises than teaching movement patterns themselves.
Ironically, in many regular beginner classes, the opposite often happens. Complete beginners with no salsa background frequently struggle much more with turns and movement organization than with the embrace itself. The salsa dancers already understood much of the movement vocabulary. What they needed was to reorganize how connection itself worked.
Many dancers realize that the biggest challenge in forró is not learning new movements, but learning a different way of relating physically to another person.
Bachata dancers often recognize the proximity
Bachata dancers usually react differently.
While salsa dancers often connect first through turns and movement structures, bachata dancers frequently recognize the physical closeness and continuity of the dance more immediately.
Bachata already tends to work with proximity, body connection, and a more intimate interaction between partners. In that sense, the transition toward forró can feel emotionally familiar from the beginning.
At the same time, the quality of the connection often feels different. Bachata frequently emphasizes sensuality more explicitly, while forró often feels more grounded in comfort, groove, receptiveness, flow, and continuous interaction. The dances create different emotional atmospheres, even when both share physical proximity.
Interestingly, there are also some movement parallels. Traditional lateral movement patterns present in bachata can sometimes feel similar to one of the older lateral movement foundations found in more traditional forms of forró. At the same time, the more modern front-and-back organization commonly seen in contemporary forró often feels familiar to salsa dancers.
These similarities do not make the dances the same, but they often create bridges that make the first experience feel surprisingly accessible.
The dance often feels more organic than expected
Recently, while discussing this article with a few dancers from salsa and other Latin dance communities, I asked what stood out to them most when they first encountered forró.
Their answers were remarkably consistent with comments I have heard for years.
One dancer described forró as feeling more fluid and elastic than salsa. Certain movements felt familiar, but the overall character of the dance felt different. The rhythm itself remained steady, yet the movement seemed to breathe differently. There was a recurring sensation of expansion and compression, as though the dance were constantly stretching and gathering itself before moving again.
I immediately recognized what she was describing. That quality is not necessarily present in every historical approach to forró, but it became particularly influential in many contemporary social forró communities and in the generations shaped by the forró universitário movement. Once you notice it, it becomes difficult not to see it.
Another dancer described forró as surprisingly free and less standardized. Rather than feeling organized around fixed patterns, it felt as though the dance could constantly reshape itself according to the music, the partner, and the moment.
That observation reminded me of a broader question I have been thinking about recently: what actually makes someone feel like a forró dancer? In many cases, it has less to do with the repertoire of movements and more to do with how dancers relate to connection, movement, and interaction itself.
Those comments reminded me of something I have heard many times over the years. People often tell me that they do not fully understand what is happening yet, but that the dance somehow feels natural.
Even when dancers cannot fully explain the mechanics, many describe forró as feeling unexpectedly organic once they stop trying to control everything intellectually.
Part of that sensation comes from the fact that the dance often asks for less anticipation and more responsiveness. Instead of relying heavily on memorized sequences, dancers gradually begin organizing movement through timing, groove, connection, and real-time interaction.
For some people, this initially creates a sense of instability because many of the references they previously relied on become less fixed. Over time, however, that same quality often becomes one of the things they enjoy most. The dance starts feeling less like the execution of patterns and more like an ongoing conversation.
For many salsa and bachata dancers, that shift is one of the most distinctive aspects of the experience. The challenge is no longer simply learning another set of movements, but developing a different relationship with listening, responsiveness, musicality, and connection.
This broader relational skill is explored more deeply here:
Why many dancers keep exploring forró
What often begins as curiosity gradually becomes something deeper.
Some dancers become fascinated by the musicality. Others by the improvisational aspect, the groove, the closeness, the live music culture, or the social atmosphere around the dance.
For many people in New York City, forró becomes not only another dance style, but another way of experiencing partner dancing itself.
What attracts many dancers to forró is not only the movement vocabulary itself, but the combination of groove, improvisation, connection, and musical interaction.
If you are curious about exploring forró further, these articles are good starting points:
Sometimes the best way to understand the dance is simply to experience it in practice.
Forró is one of many partner dances that thrive in New York City. If you’d like a broader look at the city’s social dance ecosystem and how forró fits within it, explore this guide:
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rafael Piccolotto de Lima is the Founder and Educational Director of Forró New York, as well as a Latin Grammy-nominated composer, arranger, and music director.
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