It was an awesome evening – our most organized by far! We opened the doors at 6:30pm and by 7pm when the lessons began we were already starting to fill up the huge venue. Sara and Farnoosh taught the intermediate lesson on stage and Tracie and Mark taught the beginner lesson upstairs.

At 8pm DJ Efren started spinning his very high energy salsa tunes and the lights went down. By this time we had about 400 people in attendance dancing up a storm. Upstairs in the dancer’s lounge the 18 competitors were getting their makeup done professionally by Alice from Mary Kay Cosmetics who volunteered her time to spice up the competitors. A huge thank you to her and her colleague – they were amazing and did a great job!

At 9pm sharp George(eous) our host began the competition. Funny as always (and making fun of me as usual 😉 George thanked our sponsors, the judges and introduced our 18 competitors who warmed up on stage for 2 minutes. Then each competitor was introduced with their bio and performed a freestyle performance for 2 minutes. Here are the names of the competitors in no particular order:

1. Winnie Fung and Manuel Alvarez
2. Mridu Das and Elton Martins
3. Michelle Sui and Bobby Cabral
4. Karen Di Monte and John Radtke
5. Julia Brodyansky and Vincent Cheng
6. Marta Slowik and Alex Florescu
7. Stephanie Cansino and Nick Sagias
8. Eva Wen and Derek Wisniewski
9. Maysa Tani and Dan Tahirkheli

The energy of the crowd was excellent and the judges had the very difficult job of rating each couple. Once all competitors performed Sara and I ran upstairs to tally up the scores and get the names of the 5 couples with the highest scores. At the same time, the adorable kids from Latin Groove Productions performed on stage. Thanks to Oscar for bringing his group to perform – the crowd loved the group!

Finally it was time for the results. Once again, in no particular order, here are the 5 finalist couples who will be competing for the TDS Champion Title:

1. Winnie Fung and Manuel Alvarez
2. Mridu Das and Elton Martins
3. Karen Di Monte and John Radtke
4. Marta Slowik and Alex Florescu
5. Maysa Tani and Dan Tahirkheli

Everyone received an awesome gift bag with prizes like a year’s VIP pass to Six Degrees, TDS t-shirt, El Rancho VIP 4 month pass, passes to Lula Lounge, Plaza Flamingo, Baila Society classes and more. Thank you to the sponsors for the great prizes!

Overall an amazing evening. I can’t wait to experience the final round on Sunday May 31st at 7pm at Six Degrees. Hope to see you all there!

The post The Preliminary Round of the Competition! appeared first on Toronto Dance Salsa.

The evening began with lessons as usual. Velina and Mark taught a beginner lesson and Evan and myself taught the intermediate turn pattern. The classes were packed and hopefully everyone could hear us over the noise. Regardless of the usual sound issues, everyone seemed to do really well with the combinations and hopefully the turn pattern stuck with everyone throughout the evening so that it became muscle memory.

At 11:15pm our TDS Helper Team were introduced for their performance. For those who don’t know, about once a year we hold a special class just for helpers that teaches them how to become performers. This includes learning a professional choreography by our awesome choreographer Caryl (go Caryl!), fitting for costumes, and makeup assistance from professional makeup artist Shirley Yung (thanks Shirley!). The team, after months of practicing, has now performed at least twice and has been invited to several other functions to show their stuff.

Here is a list of the performers:

Barry Ip
George Reichert
James Anes
Sandra Villella
Tracey Hsieh
Winnie Fung
Manuel Alvarez
Marta Slowik
Ozzy Gul
Phoebe Yu-Kowalski

Needless to say the group looked amazing. They were polished, energetic and I was super proud of their hard work and dedication. Congratulations to them as well as David and Mildred who are part of the group but could not be in attendance on Friday.

Hopefully everyone had a great time at Plaza. Our next two outings are as follows:

1) Friday Feb 6th at Lula Lounge
2) Saturday Feb 21st at Peridot Lounge

See you all there!

The post Last Friday at Plaza Flamingo! appeared first on Toronto Dance Salsa.