S Sorrensen
Uki. Friday, 8.15pm
It’s funny watching people dance. It’s especially funny watching people do Latin dancing. It’s doubly especially funny watching men do Latin dancing. Well, some men anyway.
On the verandah of the cafe, people face big speakers pumping out some big Latin grooves. A man with a microphone is teaching the crowd how to move, Latino style. It’s a hip thing.
With his back to the people, he demonstrates (step, step, hip), and the locals imitate him (step, step, hip). Or try to. He’s a good dancer. It’s certainly not funny watching him dance. It’s gratifying. His hip dips and snaps back like an elastic band (step, step, hip). It’s sexy.
He has neat hair and beautiful shoes. People who love to dance the paso doble or salsa or tango or bachata do not wear sneakers. They wear leather shoes so shiny they wink at you with each step.
Of course, I’m not on the verandah learning these hot moves. I’m too insecure to expose myself to possible ridicule. I don’t want someone like me to laugh at my tango attempts, so I’m hanging outside with a drunk, a hack of smokers, a coterie of blue-faced teenagers texting, and a little girl with angel wings crying into her mother’s colourful dancing skirt.
The drunk offers me a smoke. I politely refuse. A pretty woman brings me a cider, which I accept.
The cafe is pumping to a mambo (or bomba or tumba or rumba – I can’t tell) groove. The learners are in rows doing step, step, hip in unison. It’s like line dancing with soul. And without the jeans and serious belt buckles. But with full skirts and high heels.
It’s funny watching some of the blokes. Without Latino blood running through your body, that body just doesn’t get the whole hip-swivelling, bum-thrusting, shoulder-rotating thing. It resists.
Bodies brought up on the two-step shuffle of four-on-the-floor Chisel rock, or the straight-legged bounce of The New Christs’ punk slam, just aren’t trained to gyrate and rotate. Some moves here are more spasm than samba. Funny.
One big bloke, his polo shirt so stretched over a paunch the shirt’s stripes are no longer parallel, seems about to dislocate his hip. His ‘step, step, hip’ isn’t a sensual slither; it’s more a prop forward’s shoulder charge. Thongs don’t help, I guess. He’s having fun though, and laughs at his dancing, as do I and the women beside him. Those women are dancing well, their smiles expressing the joy of accomplishment, the elation of dance.
Women have a rapport with their body that men lack. (Yes. Generalisation. I know.) Sprouting children in a body must make you very aware of it. Being so connected to her body, a woman more easily expresses sensual subtleties through it. Women have an affinity with graceful movement. Men fight; women dance. Many of the women dancers here have picked up the steps quickly and are already luxuriating in the sybartic groovin’.
A waitress carries two plates of food. She bends, twists and twirls her way through the bopping throng to an older seated couple. They accept the food and applaud her choreography.
A little boy bolts past my legs, squealing in delight as a bigger boy chases him. Coming upon the little angel crying into her mum’s skirt, he stops abruptly, a squeal and a cloud of dust hanging around him. He makes a face at the angel. She giggles. Mum smiles and looks to the dance floor.
I like Uki. At the feet of the mountain, under a milky wash of stars, village life goes on.
People don’t need as much as what we’re told we need. We just need each other. (Even blokes that can’t dance.)
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
