Salsa Night — filled with dances, lights and food — is coming back Tuesday, March 10 at 6 p.m. to continue it’s a long-standing tradition to celebrate Hispanic culture.

Ballroom and Latin Dance Club (BLDC) at Oakland University is hosting its second Salsa Night event in the 2019-2020 school year. The event is going to feature a dance lesson where participants can learn the basics of three popular Latin dances: Salsa, Bachata and Merengue.

According to dancefacts.net, Salsa is an amalgamation of popular Cuban dances in ballrooms and nightclubs of Havana at the end of the 1950s. Primarily developed by Puerto Ricans in New York in the early 1970s, Salsa has various distinct styles.

Vice President Ethan Demarest runs the Special Events Committee which helps organize and execute the club’s events. He is also responsible for the communication between the club members and the executive board.

“This Salsa Night will be different because this time, it is a collaborative effort between the Ballroom and Latin Dance Club, the Spanish Club, Sigma Delta Pi and HALO,” Demarest said. “Because this is a collaboration, we have a higher budget to execute the event.”

With the budget, collaboration is not only offering OU students the opportunity to learn and familiarize dances of different cultures, but it is also providing a gourmet taco bar for them to try Hispanic food.

“[While] the main goal is to have fun and learn how to ballroom dance, our club is both competitive and social, depending on what individual club members seek,” Demarest said. “It’s always nice to do well in competitions, but having fun is more important.”

The BLDC is a “unique and growing community of dancers” — according to its website — that involves social dancing, lessons and competition. Introducing a variety of ballroom and Latin dances, the club provides its members a broad range of opportunities to compete with institutions across the nation and attend social parties around the community.

“My favorite part of Ballroom is meeting new people,” Isabella Mahuad, member of the BLDC, said. “Everyone is friendly and overall, just super nice. They’re a really great group of people, and I’ve learned lots of different styles of dance.”

She also said she looks forward to learning new styles of dance they don’t usually get a chance to do. Being Hispanic, Mahuad believes in the importance of being exposed to new cultures.

“I’m really looking forward to the Salsa Night,” Mahuad said. “I think it’s a really important opportunity to teach people about parts of Hispanic culture they might not be exposed to otherwise.”

Other than Salsa Night, the BLDC hosts a variety of events and participates in events both around the campus and the community. It also provides an opportunity for students to become new members anytime throughout the year.

To learn more information about the Salsa night or upcoming social events hosted by BLDC, visit the Facebook page of BLDC or email [email protected].