When Eddie Torres met his future wife, Maria, more than 20 years ago, he was a mambo dance contest champion and she was a children’s gymnastics instructor who knew little about Latin dance. But Maria was in love and she learned fast, mirroring Eddie’s every move. Before long, she was so good that Eddie got up the confidence to ask for a job with his hero, the great bandleader Tito Puente. In 1980, the couple made their debut at the New York Coliseum, marking the beginning of an association with the musician that lasted until his death in 2000. This Friday, the Torreses return to the spot — now the Time Warner Center — to strut their stuff again with members of the Puente band as part of the floor show for an event called “Palladium Memories.”

Set in the elegant surroundings of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Allen Room, the affair attempts to re-create the Palladium Ballroom, the legendary nightclub once located a few blocks farther down Broadway. Until it closed in 1966, the Palladium was the home of the mambo, the place where the great bands like Puente’s played, and the spot where the greatest dancers came to dance.

Born in 1950, Mr. Torres came into the world too late to be a Palladium dancer. But by the time he was a danceobsessed teenager (there was a girl; she passed him over for a guy who could dance), original Palladium dancers were still around as models, and he soaked up all he could.

He also started following his own generation’s interest in partnering. The Palladium dancers, close to the African roots of Afro-Cuban music and dance, had preferred to dance apart — in couples, playing off each other, but seldom touching. Mr. Torres wanted to change this, and his great ambition became to devise increasingly intricate ways of wrapping up and spinning his partner.

The style he developed incorporated jazz, flamenco, African, a little Broadway, a little Vegas. The original Palladium style had been equally eclectic, the product of Cuban dancers, ballroom dancers, and swing dancers all mixing on the same floor, rubbing off on one another. Mr. Torres’ radical departure, though, was his teaching method. What he had learned informally — watching, imitating — he would try to teach in formal classes. To do this, as he was told by a ballroom instructor with whom he often danced, he would need a syllabus with named steps and he would need to break down the timing into counts.

Yet if the Torreses classes are structured, as was evident in a recent class, they certainly aren’t stiff, and their combination of clarity and passion make them among the most popular in New York. Ms. Torres takes the beginners and sets them at ease before she builds them up for Mr. Torres’s tutelage. Classes are generally divided between drills in “shines” (fancy footwork, performed apart from your partner) and a partnering sequence. Practicing the latter, each man gives it a try with one woman, then moves on to the next, cycling through the room. “First names only!” Ms. Torres says, and that’s not the only etiquette she imparts.”Gentlemen, if the lady starts to fall, what do you do? You catch her. Ladies, if the gentleman starts to fall, what do you do? You get out of his way … and then you make it up to him later.” She jokes, of course, but the seductive core of the dance becomes explicit in all references to her husband — a word she savors by drawing out its sibilance: “my hussssband.”

Mr. Torres’s classes are down to business, the shines and partnering patterns exponentially more complicated. The winding and unwinding of an advanced turn sequence can look like a Mobius strip: One arm, two arms, behind the back, over the head — the frequent reversals of direction creating an infinite loop.

But style is paramount in mambo, and style is what the Torreses have when they dance together. After that first appearance in 1980, the two danced with Puente’s band for seven years as one of the only professional dance teams in the era of the Hustle. By 1987, the tide shifted, classes filled up, and Mr. Torres was able to start a dance company. Ten years later, the Latin dance scene was vibrant again, reorganized around “congresses” — workshop and performance gatherings around the world — and Mr. Torres had more work than he could handle.

At such congresses, Mr. Torres can observe the innovations of the younger generations — mixing in reggae and hiphop, concentrating on aerial maneuvers — and he worries about where the dance is headed. Which is, of course, how the Palladium regulars, like Freddie Rios, who will also perform at “Palladium Memories,” felt about Mr. Torres’s innovations back in the 1970s and ’80s. But for now, what Mr. Torres mostly sees at an event like “Palladium Memories” is a dance floor packed with his students and students of his students, spinning and twisting, doing the dance his way.

November 3 (Broadway at 60th Street, 212-721-6500).