Thursday, October 23, 2014

Zouk dancer's challenge: Learning salsa!

A while back I decided to take on a new dance challenge: I signed up for salsa classes for this autumn season.

In other words: Salseros, beware! :D

So starting early August I've been learning cross-body salsa with a simple intention of becoming a fluent social salsera. I committed myself to this project for four months -  it will be exciting to see how much I improve during that time and how I'll feel about salsa then!

So where did I start off in August? I'm not a complete beginner in salsa or social dancing in general, as you might know. Which is a double-edged sword: I have both the luxury and the complications of not starting from scratch. While most of my knowledge in social dancing I derive from Brazilian zouk, during the past couple years I have also ventured on the salsa floors around the world a couple times. Remember when I was salsa dancing in Mexico, Bolivia, New ZealandAustralia, JapanEstonia..? Basically I've just used the little I know of the on 1 basic step and count myself to death with 123 567 while I dance. Every time I've danced salsa I've discovered something new... and realised yet again I have no idea what I should do. But now I'm learning to dance salsa, for real.

Below I talk about the challenges and rewards of learning salsa during my first two months of training!

Is this how I will look like dancing salsa... way way in the future?