In 2008, I was starting out as a photographer, and I was trying to get out to shoot as many summer events as possible. I went to “El Dia de La Familia,” a popular norteño and banda music festival in Military Park. There, I came upon “Destrampados” and a couple of other quebradita clubs showing their talent out in the crowd, maybe 50 feet from the stage.
It was a dance I’d never seen or heard of, so the whole acrobatic and dangerous nature of it totally blew me away. The dancers were executing a whole variety of moves and tricks that looked totally insane — the dance is like polka on steroids with acrobatics thrown in.
I kept in touch with the Destrampados members because they were friendly and down to earth, and they ended up inviting me to photograph their rehearsals and a quinceañera.
It was an absolute thrill. Shooting something so energetic up close always gives me a secondhand adrenaline rush.
Youtube and Facebook were still quite new, and apps like Instagram and TikTok didn’t even exist. There wasn’t instant access and exposure to every dance and music style in the world at our fingertips, so you could still be blindsided and amazed by something while just being out and about.
Dancer Nataly Batana invited me to give it a shot and tried to teach me once or twice. I could do the basic step and some turns, but other than that I was hopeless. It’s a demanding dance that requires a lot of dedication to be done well.
I started Spanish class in 3rd grade and studied it as my major at IU, along with Portuguese. I think half of the dancers spoke English and had lived in Indy for a while, but with the members who didn’t speak much, I’d talk in Spanish. I suppose they appreciated that I was making an effort to get to know them in their language.
Some scenes just come and go. Things go out of style or fizzle like in other arts scenes. There were four competing quebradita clubs here. Supposedly several of the dancers ended up having children and could no longer dance (parenthood is very time-consuming after all) and some moved to other cities.
I don’t know how long it was going on here before I covered it, but the clubs disappeared within a few years. I’ve always hoped it would have a glorious resurgence here.
From my limited outsider perspective it seemed like there was a very strong sense of community in the scene. Other than trophies, I don’t remember what the prizes were for the club battles, but I don’t think it was very much money, if any at all. It seemed very much about the passion and enjoyment of the dance, about having fun and being creative with friends, and not about money or egos, at least here in Indy.
Though they weren’t all professional dancers, two brothers in Destrampados, Silviano and Majín, were particularly strong and skilled at the dance. And one young woman, Diana, was especially small and lightweight, so she was the easiest for them to throw and whip around in the air and through the legs. They pulled the wildest moves and acrobatic tricks with her.
She was like a ragdoll helicopter being whirled around on their backs and at the end of her routine in their choreographed team performances she would walk away pretty exhausted but somehow not dizzy, and just laugh it off. You can see them performing it in the video (above) that I captured at Vulcan nightclub.
Once at El Dia de La Familia, the second year I captured it, this girl in red (above) got dropped by her big buff partner who threw her way up in the air. For a couple of seconds it was pretty scary, but she popped back up just fine, slapped him jokingly, and they and their club laughed.
I would imagine that among the four clubs that were active and competing in Indy at the time there had to be some sparks flying and romances among the dancers.
They definitely opened my eyes to how much is going on in this city that the general public has no idea about. There is truly a deep wealth of culture(s) here in Indy and incredible events happening all the time, especially for a rather humble, relatively mid-sized city.
You can try, but there’s no way to even keep up with it all. But if you ever hear someone complain that there’s nothing going on here, it’s because they’re simply not making enough of an effort to find things.
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