MamboYa Dance Company is celebrating its third birthday. It’s a group not focused on performing FOR you, but performing WITH you. Owners Miguel Malagon and Aminat Escoto-Lawal are professional dancers who host events that start with a lesson in, say, salsa or cha-cha, and move into everyone dancing. It’s called a “social dance.”
Malagon and Escoto-Lawal are both military veterans who discovered dance – and community – while serving overseas.
They both say it became a passion and a calling to bring these elements together in Orlando.
“My first duty station was in Germany, and I had no idea about salsa,” explained Escoto-Lawal, who served as a nurse and an officer in the Army. “I may have heard it in passing, but I happened to be in an olive oil store in Germany, and I heard the music, but the language was in my mom's language, Yoruba. She's Nigerian.”
She asked the shopkeeper what kind of music it was, and he said salsa. Escoto-Lawal remembers wondering, “’How do you dance to that?’ So someone showed me how to dance, and that was it!”
Malagon, too, was first exposed to different kinds of dance overseas, in places like Japan and across Europe and Latin America. But he says his love of salsa dancing solidified when he went to visit his dance-loving father in the Dominican Republic, and his dad dragged him to a salsa “congress,” a festival that generally lasts several days.
“My jaw dropped, seeing, first of all, my old man dancing like that,” Malagon laughed, “and then just seeing hundreds of people on the dance floor having the time of their life. And so that was a big catalyst for me, personally.”
Malagon said that when he and his friend Escoto-Lawal joined forces in Central Florida, the partnership brought Orlando something new. “We just don't have anything like we've experienced outside of Orlando, right?” he mused. “Like in Europe and Asia, Latin America, those venues, the music, the vibe, was just absolutely incredible… And we're like, okay, well, let's not complain. Let's do something about it.”
Escoto-Lawal described what MamboYa’s social dances are like. “We have our socials every single Sunday,” she said. “And before each social, before the social dancing, from 5pm to 6pm we have a salsa class, bachata class, or a cha-cha-cha class. Each Sunday we have a different artist that will teach, and then we also have a different DJ that will play from 6pm to 10pm.”
“We do sometimes have performances,” she continued. “This weekend, we have Latin Passion [dance company]. They have two teams that will be performing – a ladies’ team and then a kids’ team.”
Escoto-Lawal said building community and offering joyous, familial vibes is part of the company’s aim. She wants to pay forward what she experienced when first learning to salsa dance back in Europe in 2009.
“Stepping into the salsa scene, I knew nothing of it,” she said. “And it was like a family – I go in and everybody was so happy to teach me. And that is one of the things we wanted to bring to Orlando.”
