Merengue Side By Side

The Side By Side is one of the first open figures a beginner learns in merengue, the briskly marching couple dance that is the national dance of the Dominican Republic and, by scholarly account, the foremost marker of Dominican identity both on the island and across its diaspora.^[1] Merengue moves to a quick two-beat march: dancers step on every beat in a continuous, hip-led motion with none of the break step that punctuates salsa, and the Side By Side simply unfolds that marching basic out of closed hold so the partners can travel shoulder to shoulder before drawing back together. The form belongs to a deep Ibero-African lineage — it draws on African and Iberian roots, grew in prominence under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, and spread internationally through the large Dominican immigrant community in New York City.^[2] Its homeland is the Dominican Republic, the Caribbean country in the Greater Antilles that occupies the eastern five-eighths of Hispaniola, the island it shares with Haiti.^[3]

Dancing the figure

Keeping an inside-hand connection, the leader rotates roughly a quarter turn to stand beside the follower, both now facing the same direction; the follower mirrors the footwork on the opposite foot and turns a matching quarter, so the two reorientations sum to a half-turn shift from facing each other to standing shoulder to shoulder. Neither partner stops marching — the even, hip-driven step runs through the opening, the travel, and the return, when the leader rotates back to re-collect the closed frame. Because the basic never breaks stride, the figure makes a natural first lesson in changing direction without disturbing merengue's relentless pulse.

A studio label more than a folk figure

More a studio-syllabus heading than a regionally codified, named step, the Side By Side reflects how merengue has been packaged for instruction abroad. The dance reached U.S. West-Coast studios decades ago — documented, for example, in Beverly Hills on a touring circuit of Arthur Murray studios that taught it as part of a Latin social-dance curriculum alongside salsa and other partner styles^[4] — and today it is danced socially around the world, programmed on Latin nights beside salsa, bachata, and kindred dances.^[5] On the island and across its diaspora, however, dancers commonly improvise such openings on the spot with no fixed name, a reminder that the tidy English label is a teaching convenience rather than Dominican vernacular.