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How to dance salsa: My story (or “How to get blood from a stone”)

You may have already figured this out but that’s not me in the pic!

I am an Irishman and I dance salsa!

You could interpret this in a couple of ways:
You could think “hmmm, those two things don’t sound like they should go together”, as I used to, before I started and maybe even a little during the beginning of my salsa journey.
Or you could think “Sounds like an new member’s introduction at a Salsaholics Anonymos meeting” as I sometimes feel these days.

In any case, the fact is that a little over three years ago I didn’t dance at all (besides an occasional, embarrassed Irishman-shuffle when it couldn’t be avoided) and now I can’t imagine my life without dance. How things change!

What I hope to accomplish with this post is to show you how I, a mild mannered, arrhythmical, introvert “defied the odds” and became a salsa dancing machine, a salsero! I hope that this may encourage those of you starting out in salsa (or any dance for that matter) and make the whole process even more enjoyable and a whole lot faster.

(Note: the following guide speaks mostly about lineal salsa i.e. LA or New York style and from a mans (known as the lead) perspective but can be applied to any style of salsa, indeed most styles of pair dance and of course to women (known as the followers).

So, let’s rock and roll.

Step 1: Find a dance class

You can watch as many videos on YouTube as you want but without someone to correct your mistakes and form, progress will be slow. At the very least find someone who can dance and get them to go through the basics with you until you’re comfortable with the rhythm and can find the beat yourself (which comes with plenty of time and practice listening to salsa).

In my case, this is the reason I was so slow at improving during my first year of salsa. The most regular salsa classes in my area in Japan, which were run by the famous (at least in the Miyazaki salsa world) Yano mama & papa, were every two weeks on a Sunday and because of my weekend surfing habit I initially only made it there once every two months. Yeah, that’s right, every 60 or so days.

I did however find another class, for ballroom dancing in fact, which included an hour of salsa once a week. I would usually hop in for the salsa and duck out when it came time for things like the foxtrot and the Charleston, much to the disdain of the instructor.

She was an older Japanese lady who all the students respected without question but as the weeks went by I realized that her teaching methods weren’t the best. What I mean is that her explanations of moves and combinations were a little ambiguous and relied a lot on her doing the move for the students to see and expecting them to imitate it without much referral to the timing of moves within the context of the salsa beat (I’ll write more about this in the future).

So I learned a few new moves that I could “kind of” do although often it would be hit and miss. The important thing was that I was practicing and listening to salsa music and improving my basic step, which brings me to…

Step 2: Master the basic steps

I can’t stress the importance of mastering the basic step in salsa. Until you can do this without thinking, that is, until it becomes as natural as walking, doing additional hand movements and patterns is going to be very difficult indeed.

When I hear salsa music these days my body automatically starts swaying to the rhythm (thankfully I live in Colombia where it’s a little more acceptable to “get your dance on” when waiting in line at the supermarket, where they’re always playing salsa. When I lived in Japan there was one store I visited occasionally which was always playing salsa music in the background for some reason. I couldn’t help breaking into a little salsa shuffle whenever I was there, despite the protests of my girlfriend at the time).

You should aim to become as comfortable with salsa as you can, make it automatic. The best way to do this is plenty of repetitive practice. Yano papa, who was manager of a bank, told me he used to practice his salsa basic step under his desk while sitting in his office and that was how he “automated” his footwork. You shouldn’t have to do that yourself but you should find as many opportunities as you can during the week to practice so you no longer need to think about what your feet are doing when you dance.

Step 3: Find a dance partner

You should try and find someone to practice with during the week to help consolidate any new moves or steps that you’ve “learned”. Learning a new move and doing it relatively well at the end of a one hour dance class means absolutely nothing if you forget it by the end of the week (I forgot the vast majority of moves I learned when I first started salsa for this reason). Having a dance partner allows you to practice those moves again and again at your own pace to make sure you remember them.

I’ve been very lucky over the past few years to have been blessed with many amazing dance partners (and friends). From Yano mama and Chihoko, the original members of my salsa group in Japan, to all my beautiful partners in Dublin and here in Cali, I’ve always actively sought out someone to practice and improve with.

I also think having multiple partners is a fantastic idea (minds out of the gutter people, you all know what I’m talking about!). Practicing with different people teaches you how to adapt and react to different dancing styles ( and everyone develops their own style and idiosyncrasies) which is something you need to be able to do in the real world, especially when you dance with someone for the first time.

Try and find a partner that’s a little (or a lot better) than you too. Just like in martial arts where sparring with someone above your level leads to quick improvement, the same can be said for dancing. A good partner (and plenty of practice) will help you to “up” your salsa level in no time and will help you make some amazing friends along the way.

Step 4: Record to remember

Record new salsa moves (with a video camera) and keep them all together so you can review them after your class and practice them again. This will also help you remember moves that you may not have tried on the dance floor in a while and thus have temporarily “forgotten”.

You may of course be one of those savants that can remember something forever after seeing it only once, in which case, good for you! However, if you’re anything like me you have a mind like a spaghetti strainer and have a lot of trouble keeping track of new salsa moves.

I solved this problem by outsourcing the task of memory retention to my computer hard-drive. Whenever I learn a new move I record a video of it (mobile phone cameras mean I don’t have to carry a separate camera around with me) and load it onto my computer (remember to try and get whoever is doing the move to do it relatively slowly and if possible calling out the step-counts as they’re doing it).

I also download salsa videos from sites like YouTube using keepvid and keep all my dance related videos together in a file on my computer. This means that whenever I’m practicing with my partners I can just open this file, watch a video and practice any move that I want to (and I don’t have to worry about forgetting it).

Step 5: Dance

“You learn the moves in class, you learn to dance on the floor!”

This step is by far the most important step of all. You can spend hours practicing the same move over and over again with your partner but that all means nothing if you can’t lead someone new to do it out on the dance floor.

The only way to really perfect a combination is to try it over and over again with new partners, constantly tweaking and refining your form, learning what works and what doesn’t, getting better every time.

Unfortunately, this happens to be the the step that most salsa newbies find the most emotionally traumatic. I’ll admit, at the beginning it’s not easy asking someone new out for a dance. Your mind is full of “what ifs”; what if I forget my basic step? what if I lose my place in the music? what if they get bored with my lack of combinations? what if I try a turn and accidentally hit them in the head with my elbow sending them into a 5 year coma after which they wake up unable to handle all the changes that have happened and seek me out for cold blooded revenge?

My attitude to this is “it happens”. All of those “what ifs” have happened to me at one time or another (except that last one, it was actually more like a 5 minute coma…no revenge…yet).

This is where you’ve got to bite the bullet, confront your fears and take the bull by the horns. It’s time to man-up and dance!

Easier said than done right? I’ll be honest, I had a lot of trouble getting over this fear when I started. I was afraid that I would be repeating the same moves over and over again and the person I was dancing with would get bored and never want to dance with me again. The first time I went to a real salsa party (Salson in Fukuoka) I was very green in salsa terms. I went with my girlfriend and apart from her I only managed to work up the courage to ask one other person out to dance (after 3 hours and near the end of the night). Obviously I felt pretty stupid for being such a chicken.

However, after that, I came up with the ultimate method for getting over this fear, a method that I am happily going to share with you as I know it will get your beginner salsa progress off to a flying start.

Here it is: all you need to do is wait for a song to start, wait a further 2-3 minutes and then invite someone out to dance for the last minute! That’s it. You’ll have about one minute of pure, unadulterated dance time. If you don’t know many moves, you won’t have to worry about boring someone for a full 4 minute (approx.) song and if you feel that you suck, all will be over in about 60 seconds. You’ll have gained valuable dance experience and (hopefully) your ego will still me intact

That’s it! For a beginner, if you follow the steps here you’ll improve quickly and will be a salsaholic in no time. Of course this is only the beginning, the first baby steps on the road to salsa super-stardom (which I’m slowly trying to follow myself) and there are many more aspects to salsa that you’ll become familiar with yourself and which I hope to introduce to you in upcoming posts.

I hope you’ve found this post helpful or at least it has taken down a few of the barriers that might have been preventing you from giving dancing a try.

If you have any tips of your own or any questions that you think I might be able to answer, right them in the comments below and I’ll try and reply as soon as possible.

Keep dancing.

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Tags: Dance, Goals, Salsa

Comments 5 Comments
Categories Dance, Salsa

How I ended up in Colombia (or “Thank you, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!”)

14 May

First off, don’t worry, the title will make sense eventually. I promise.

I moved to Colombia in September, 2011 arriving first in Bogota and then, after 3 days of rain and cold far too similar to Irish weather for my liking, taking the 12 hour bus through the Andes to Cali, the world capital of Salsa. My Mecca.

That off course neither explains why I went there nor the title of this post. For that we need to go back, way back to my chubby childhood. To a period lost in the annals of mediocrity. Back to the nineteen nineties!

I like many easily influenced kids at the time used to spend my evenings after school sat in front of the telly watching cartoons until the children’s programming ended and that waste of air-time known as “the news” started. One day, a new cartoon began that was to captivate me every subsequent Friday afternoon and affect me profoundly (albeit unknowingly, initially) for the rest of my life. That show was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

The show had everything; crime fighting, turtles, comedy, sci-fi and most importantly, martial arts. I was hooked. I managed to get my parents to buy me turtle video games and even a turtle costume complete with super-breakable plastic swords that I used with my younger brother who had a pair of super-breakable (although super-painful) plastic nunchuks. I didn’t manage to get them to buy me the pet turtles I wanted which in retrospect is probably a good thing, considering I would probably have tried to mutate them with something in an attempt to have my own mutant play friends (I loved science too which meant it was a genuine possibility).

However, I did manage to get them to send me to the local Shotokan Karate club so I too could be a crime fighter (I would have to try and work on the mutation stuff later). I imagine that many martial arts clubs at the time saw a jump in enrollment when the Turtles first aired, with so many kids wanting to emulate their heroes. A jump that was probably as short-lived as it was sudden.It was the first sport I ever really gave a go at and I did it for a couple of years, getting my purple belt after which I just stopped going, as children are wont to do.

The next stage of my journey with karate began in my 4th year of secondary school (1999-2000). I went through a lot of changes that year. I had decided that I no longer wanted to be the chubby kid who regularly got bullied by the other kids so I started to eat healthily, bought a cheap set of barbells and dumbbells and returned with a new passion to Karate. I practiced diligently and became relatively decent, winning a few trophies in competitions, getting my brown belt and gaining a new found confidence in myself that I never had before.

It was during secondary school that I started reading books about karate and other martial arts and this obviously led me to learning about the history and culture of Japan. I began to understand the origins of many of the things I did in my karate training and most importantly I learned and really came to appreciate the Japanese concept of “dou” (written in Japanese kanji as 道) which means road or way and is used as a suffix to signify the “the way of…” in numerous Japanese art forms such as sadou (茶道) “the way of tea” for the study of the Japanese tea ceremony or shodou (書道) “the way of writing” for Japanese calligraphy and of course in martial arts like karate-dou (空手道) “the way of the empty hand”.

I liked the fact that in Japan there was traditionally a correct process, a way, to do things and this left me with a strong desire to go there and experience it for myself. So strong in fact that I even asked the school guidance counselor about it and she let me know about a teaching programme called JET that paid university graduates to go to Japan and immerse themselves in Japanese cultures (this also happened to be the only time that the guidance counselor provided me with anything useful in my six years at that school). I was 16 years old and completely sold on the idea. Once I graduated from university, in 5 years, I was going to Japan.

When my final year of secondary school came around I decided to focus on my studies (as I was I good boy and deep-down, a total nerd) so I put Karate on hold. I did well in my final exams and got into the university I wanted, University College Cork, studying biological sciences (the sci-fi aspect of the Turtles leaving its mark in yet another way I believe. I also learned that mutation in real life was nowhere near as cool as it had been portrayed in the Turtles).

In college, I took the opportunity to try out the various clubs that were available; boxing, scuba-diving, gymnastics, break dancing and I even went to a couple of salsa classes thanks to their clever advertising campaign pointing out the shockingly large ratio of women to men (in my 2 classes I neither learned to dance nor met any girls, imagine that!). I did however become a pretty dedicated member of the kickboxing club and to a lesser extent, due to scheduling conflicts, of the karate club. I remained a brown belt throughout college, as I never took the opportunity to try and advance further while I was there (i.e. like many college students, I was just too lazy).

During my 4 years at college I had almost forgotten about going to Japan although the idea must have kept hold somewhere in the back of my mind. Luckily, at the careers exposition of my final year I stumbled across the JET information booth, remembered my teenage dream, applied and was eventually accepted (it was not quite as easy as I’ve made it sound and MAY have involved lots of scrambling for deadlines and a little bit of crying. MAY!)

So in late July of 2006 I was shipped out to Japan and to my final destination of Miyazaki prefecture (which I had never heard of in my life) where I would spend 4 of the best years of my life.

At this stage you’re probably wondering “What does any of this have to do with salsa or living in Colombia?”. It’s coming, bear with me.

In Japan, I did so many new things; learning Japanese, Japanese archery, calligraphy, surfing, organizing Irish cooking classes and phenomenal St. Patrick’s Day parties that I almost completely forgot about Karate until my final year there when I found a great club with some great people, started training again and finally got my black belt, almost 15 years after I started karate for the first time (never let it be said that I don’t get the job done… eventually).

While in Japan, one of my best friends, Nahoko, a very international girl who was very socially active invited me to a salsa party that she was hosting at a local bar. I went, a little reluctantly, with my girlfriend at the time. There was an introductory lesson given by two people who were to become very important in my life; Yano-papa and Yano-mama (as they like to call themselves).

Here’s the thing, I had always wanted to learn to dance as I always watched jealously whenever I saw a couple dancing on TV, moving in perfect unison and harmony with the music and pretty much just looking much cooler than I ever could with two-step, back and forth, Irishman sway. My girlfriend at the time had danced ballet when she was younger and so had no problem picking up the rhythm instantly during the lesson and I have to be honest, watching her dancing in front of me, smiling and gently swaying her hips with to the music was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen (I, however, was a little less than coordinated).

We had a blast at the party, and “danced” (as well as an Irishman with no rhythm can) until the party ended. I made a pledge to myself that night that I was going to get better at salsa, dance well with my girlfriend and impress the hell out of her.

Now, as you can imagine, finding regular salsa classes in a rural prefecture in Japan is not the easiest of tasks but I managed to do a few classes, kept secret from my girlfriend, where I picked up a couple of new “moves” and some “dodgy” rhythm. Over the next year and a half, thanks to new found motivation and few journeys abroad for “training”, I improved a lot (how and why I’ll explain in some other posts) eventually organizing and teaching at a monthly salsa class and party in my city to try and promote salsa to the masses. I can proudly say that that party is still going strong in Miyazaki city thanks to the help of my Japanese salsa friends.

In my final year in Japan, after breaking up with my girlfriend, I began to look for new challenges (filling the void that develops after a breakup is something I’m sure many of you are aware of). I was pretty happy with how I had progressed with Japanese so I wanted to try a new language and Spanish was the obvious choice thanks to my desire to actually understand the lyrics of all the salsa songs I regularly listened to. I gave it a shot (without much dedication) and began to think about what I might do after I left Japan, where I would go etc. and all the signs (Salsa, Spanish and a desire to experience a culture completely different from Japan’s) pointed to South America.

Around the same time I met a very beautiful Colombian woman, living in the neighbouring prefecture, who I mentioned my idea to. She told me straight away that I had to go to her hometown, Cali, the world capital of salsa, to truly live the “cultura de la rumba”. After asking my reliable and knowledgeable friend, Wikipedia, all about Cali, my mind was made up. I was moving to Cali, to learn Spanish and real salsa (I also learned that Cali is apparently home to some of the most beautiful women in the world and that didn’t hurt either).

I finished my contract in Japan and moved back to Ireland where I worked for a year after managing to get a great job at the Japanese Embassy that I thought would look nice on my CV and would help me smoothly readjust to western culture. It did.

I was more than happy to discover, when I moved back, that there was a very healthy salsa scene in Dublin and I became a regular at the various events and parties around the city and was very lucky to befriend some amazing salseros and salseras, both from Ireland and abroad. I learned and improved my salsa a lot that year and really came to appreciate Dublin (as it was my first time living there). However, my mind had been made up and I made all the arrangements to travel to Colombia as soon as my one-year contract at the embassy finished.
And so, after a little holiday back to Japan to visit my friends and get my fill of sushi I returned back to the family farm for a couple of weeks to get my affairs in order and say goodbye to my family and friends once again.

After a week’s layover in New York, relishing the chance to reconnect with some old friends, enjoying good food and dancing salsa I arrived in Bogota and then made my way here, to Cali where I’ve been ever since, bailando, rumbeando y gozando all that this very special city has to offer.

There’s a great deal more to tell you about but I guess that’s what a blog is for. I can’t wait to write the next post. Stay tuned.

Tags: Colombia, Japan, Karate, Martial Arts, Salsa

Comments 7 Comments
Categories Colombia, Dance, Japan, Salsa, Travel

Who am I?

7 May

I’m an Irishman, with a beard!

I live in Cali, Colombia, the world capital of Salsa.

I dance.

Basically I am living my life the way I want to live it right now and I am very happy the way it’s working out.

Everything that has happened to me in my life has brought me to where I am right now and I am enjoying being taken along for the ride (while making sure I’m staying on the right track). I’ve lived around the world, met many incredible people, seen some unforgettable sights and taken up some really fun hobbies.

So, on the advice of some friends and out of feeling the necessity to share some of my insights and experiences with the world (which apparently is waiting for me) I’ve started this blog.

I hope to talk about everything that interests me, everything that makes me tick so I’ll be covering a lot of topics. From food to world travel, language learning to skill acquisition, nutrition to exercise science and maybe even how to make a good cup of tea (because I am, after all is said and done, an Irishman).

Oh yeah, and I’ll probably mention something about dancing too.