Frankie Martinez

Frankie Martinez is a dancer, choreographer, educator and method founder who expanded the artistic and pedagogical possibilities of New York mambo through his Abakuá Afro-Latin Dance Company and the Afro Latin Funk training system. Born in Queens on September 25, 1975, Martinez grew up in a Puerto Rican family where his father's collection of Latin music and concert visits shaped his early relationship to orchestration and sound. He trained in Shotokan karate from childhood, an experience he credits with developing the discipline and body control that would later define his approach to dance.

Martinez became serious about mambo after encountering trained dancers at a Florida nightclub and began formal study at Dance Club International on Metropolitan Avenue in Queens. He learned by watching dancers in New York clubs and started dancing mambo in 1996, teaching by 1997. Eddie Torres became an important mentor; Martinez studied with Torres and joined the Eddie Torres Dancers, making early appearances at Roseland Ballroom, Madison Square Garden, the New York World Salsa Congress, and performances connected with Tito Puente and José Alberto "El Canario."

In 2000, Martinez founded the Abakuá Afro-Latin Dance Company, moving mambo beyond nightclub and congress showcases into concert-dance structures while maintaining close engagement with social-dance vocabulary, Latin music and Afro-Caribbean movement. The company's official estimates place it in more than 50 cities and 20 countries, with performances at Madison Square Garden, Lincoln Center, Aaron Davis Hall, Jacob's Pillow and SummerStage.

The Afro Latin Funk method emerged as a formal training system, established in 2002. Rather than treating Afro-Latin forms as incomplete, Martinez structured a curriculum that separates interconnected practices: Afro-Caribbean body movement and isolations, mambo openwork and partnerwork, turns and spins, gestures and armwork, cha-cha-cha, boogaloo and pachanga. The method aims to give dancers the kind of technical, rhythmic and interpretive education expected of musicians while preserving the cultural identity of these source practices.

The 2005 documentary *Frankie's Mambo: El Ritmo Diablo*, directed by Gavin and Helene Macaulay, brought Martinez and the developing Abakuá company to public television audiences through screenings on PBS affiliates including WNET in New York and WGBH in Boston. By 2009, Abakuá had entered a clearly documented concert phase with summer appearances at Lincoln Center Out of Doors and performances at BMCC Tribeca Performing Arts Center. In November 2009, the company premiered Martinez's *The Life & Death of Suzy Q* alongside *Raices* and *Children of a Groove*. Throughout the following years, the company continued to develop performance-training projects and student showcase opportunities, documented in part through an official YouTube channel.

Martinez's contribution extends beyond a catalog of choreographic works. His ongoing teaching practice in New York—offering classes in Salsa On2 fundamentals, mambo partnerwork, Afro Latin Funk openwork and Afro-Caribbean body movement—represents an evolving way to train dancers to listen to rhythm, organize the body across multiple layers, and improvise within culturally rooted movement vocabularies.