Havana, January 27 (PL-RHC)-- The International Festival Guillermo Barreto in Memoriam, known in Cuba as the Drum Feast, returns in 2015 with its percussion and Casino-style dance.

Giraldo Piloto, president of the organizing committee, said the event will be held from March 3rd to the 8th with its traditional percussion contest, as well as several concerts and jam sessions.

“The commitment with dancers is inevitable,” remarked the director of the Klimax group. He said that choreographer Santiago Alonso is preparing a show that will combine dance and percussion.

As in previous years, an international contest was summoned in five different modalities: timbals, bongoes, battery, congas and bata drums. There will be no academic requirements for participants to apply.

A Casino competition was also organized, in which dancers who won the classifying round will participate in February. This contest started last year to rescue a dancing modality which identifies Cuban dancers in the salsa world context, the Casino, due to its gradual disappearance in the media.

“In recent times, young people dance less casino music, they barely know its basic steps and we want to reverse that situation, because Casino is still important and is being forgotten,” said Piloto.

Casino is the traditional Cuban way of dancing salsa and owes its name to the appearance of this style back in the 1950s in dancing halls of the Casino Deportivo Club in Havana.