"You Can't Stop Dancing"

By JAY COCKS

Sweet deliverance! Finally a dance anyone can do -- a fast dance, a hot dance -- without looking like a candidate for a physical-rehabilitation class. A little flame and no shame. Slick stepping and sexy navigating, with no bruised knees. And no characters on the floor making jokes about the rhythmic capabilities of most native North Americans. "It's a very simple dance, not complicated," says Gloria Senor, who, with her husband, runs a dance band in Miami. "It's a two-step." It's the merengue. It's bliss.

Mireya Navarro, 29, a California journalist, reports that her relationship with an "Anglo from Berkeley" used to undergo social duress and some physical stress when the couple hit the dance floor. Then the merengue craze blew in from back East. "I tell him, 'All you have to do is march and move your hips,' " Navarro says. "If there's one dance that Anglos can get into, merengue is it." In New York City, merengue is footing aside other variations of Latin dance music and is busting out of the Spanish clubs into slicker venues. Mayor Edward Koch showed up at a merengue concert earlier this month to try a couple of decorous hip twirls. His verdict: "This is the one dance that you can do from the moment you're born."

Merengue technique involves no free-form violence, like slam dancing, and no shin-splinting fanciness, as in the mambo. It is less taxing than the tango, which caught on anew with the Broadway success of Tango Argentino, a show that spawned a fast-stepping tour and any number of gift certificates for dancing lessons. "Merengue's not a real complicated step pattern," says Lynne Frazier of the Arthur Murray Dance Studio in Burlingame, Calif. "You're not fighting to keep up with your feet."

Above the waist, merengue action has the approximate agility and combustibility of Mister Rogers doing a Maypole dance. Partners move sideways, taking a long step and hauling the other foot behind. The real fire is down below. Partners can press hips close enough to grind grain, dance a few steps, drift away from each other, then, as the music quickens, come together again. Says Oscar Herrera, 34, a Salvadoran immigrant who directs a San Francisco social-service agency: "The merengue grabs you so much that even if you get tired and soaked in sweat, you can't stop dancing."

Merengue has been part of the Latin music scene in the States at least since the '50s, when Xavier Cugat dished out some slicked-up, watered-down rhythms that had made their way north from the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Legend has it that the merengue was inspired by a Dominican general who trailed a disabled leg behind him as he navigated a ballroom. Another myth says the dance originated with slaves brought from Africa to work the fields. The slaves, in chains, would move off the ships by lifting one leg and dragging the other.

Dominican Republic Dictator Rafael Trujillo could kick up his boots like a pro. During a 1951 peace meeting on the Haitian border, El Jefe grabbed the daughter of one of his officers and, as a ceremonial band bore down on a merengue beat, danced away the next hour. His countrymen could also call the tune to advantage, however. After Trujillo's 1961 assassination, Dominicans danced for months to The Death of the Goat, an irreverent merengue written to celebrate the general's violent removal.

Merengue madness is not shared throughout the Caribbean. Just as there are shadings in style -- Haitian merengue, for example, has a heavier African inflection -- there are differences among people whose musical tastes can be as vehement as their politics. "The trouble with Dominicans is they don't know how to dance," grumps a Puerto Rican music-business entrepreneur in New York City. But the numbers are against him.

"Like the tango, the merengue never really left," says Cesar Ascarrunz, owner of San Francisco's Latin Palace. "It's just coming into its own again." Last winter Promoter Jose Tejeda staged a merengue extravaganza at New York's Roseland, and, he says, "the fire department had to come and block the doors because 5,000 people showed up." Merengue's ascendancy has been helped by a slackening of interest in the more energetic variations of salsa, which were tough on untutored feet and sartorially deficient.

"The rock establishment disdained this music that had such corny (harmonic) changes and featured entire bands in matching polyester, bell- bottom leisure suits," wrote Critic Enrique Fernandez in the Village Voice. But newly rediscovered merengue stars like Fernandito Villalona not only could sing on the sound track of Miami Vice but have the wardrobe for a guest shot as well. "Dominican bands look sharp," Fernandez points out. "Merengueros are image conscious. They've learned the lesson of MTV."

The sound underneath the look may remind the uninitiated of the sound-track music that usually accompanies movie scenes of airplanes landing at palm-lined airports: easy rhythm, heavy percussion, peppy horns. But Discos CBS, a division of CBS Records International, has begun signing up merengue bands, and there are indications the sound is getting slicker. Bands led by Bonny Cepeda and Wilfrido Vargas are experimenting with synthesizers as a way to bring the music to a wider audience. "The great thing about Americans is that if you show them how to do a dance, they'll get up and do it," says Milly Quezada, one of the lead singers in Los Vecinos. "But a lot of them think merengue is too loud and too fast. Once we soften the brass a little, add synthesizers and make the music more American, we'll get them." All right, America: hips together.

With reporting by Cristina Garcia/San Francisco and Edmund Newton/New York