Also try to practice your basics, listen to salsa and watch some DVDs, video clips or youtube performances just to get your mind back into the swing of things. If you can, visit a salsa practice or club at least once. Go through the syllabus we sent you last semester and try to visual how to lead or follow each move.

We also have our Monday night practice sessions beginning Monday Feb 4th at 9pm at the Adelaide Club. It is $4 to drop in or $25 for the entire 9 weeks. Come out and practice.

Hopefully if do a couple of these things you can feel a little more confident about starting classes back up. Good luck with your first class and looking forward to seeing everyone at the outings!

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The first one was of the 2005 San Francisco Salsa Champions. I hadn’t seen this video before but I thought it was very interesting. The salsa music was very fast and if you dance salsa, you know how hard it is to keep up with all those spins to the music. I thought they were very talented and the woman’s spinning skills were outstanding. I didn’t love the repetition of the spins though – it was too much of the same spinning move and at many points the choreography and turnpatterns completely stopped which is not visually as pleasing to watch as the second video that I saw by Danny Zepeda and his group from San Francisco, I believe. You can’t see the routine well as it is filmed so far away but the routine is really great. They have the same fast salsa and almost as many spins but done in a way that blends with the rest of the turnpatterns which makes it more interesting to watch (for me at least).

I also noticed that the first clip of the SF 1995 Champions showed a bit of an error half way through. They did a great job of getting back on track but it made me think of a choreographer’s job of balancing moves that are safe and will not cause room for errors vs moves that are much more difficult and will really wow the crowd if they can be pulled off. What is better? Do you play it safe with your choreography and although it my not be as much of a wow it will be smooth and error free or do you go for it and hope for the best, taking a gamble.

I guess it depends on the confidence you feel at rehearsals trying out a risky choreography and your ability to continue the choreography if an error occurs. It also depends on experience. When you first start performing keep it simple and clean. After some experience start to stretch yourself and the choreography to keep the challenge and energy in your routine.

Would love to see the videos that you guys are watching…send them my way!!

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What is interesting is the stages of salsa. I was once at the completely addicted, couldn’t function without dancing 7 days a week, can’t think about anything else but salsa, stage. That stage can’t possibly last forever. First of all, I was sick all the time. I couldn’t understand why such a young, healthy girl who exercises all the time by dancing 30 hours a week would be sick all the time. I am quite sure I underestimated the value of sleep 🙂 Averaging 3-4hrs per night for the first year of dancing had me struggling with pneumonia, bronchitis, and every imaginable cold. And still I would dance every night!

Now if I had You Tube back then, I may have stayed home a little more surfing the video clips looking for great salsa dancing and instructional clips. I was so hungry for salsa info back then and if there was less than a tenth as much videos, blogs, websites and information online back then as there is now, I would be in salsa online heaven!

I know many of my students are religious You Tube viewers. On the show “The View” last week the young host talked about having You Tube dates with her husband where they sat together on a Friday night and surfed through videos, sharing the best ones with each other.

It is interesting to see this movement recently. I am pleased that my students have so much more info available to them and hopefully we can have even more salsa info online soon!

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