Return of Patricio - Simple Rueda - Peter & Cinzia

July 4, 2005

Very small crowd for both the class and club. Heinz had his first taste of Rueda and apparently enjoyed it. Routines tried were:

Dame
Enchufe
Enchufe doble
Croquetta
Evelyn
Sacala
Sientala
Pimienta
Vacilala

All the routines have been described in my first Rueda entry (except for Pimienta, which was done on the second week) and were used previous (some unrecorded) Peter & Cinzia classes (usually not changing partners with enchufe or enchufe doble).

I tried using Rueda for partner dancing again to see if this works well with followers who are used to Cuban style. It worked fabulously with some but not others. It's possible that ones with whom this didn't work (aside from obvious beginners) are just not very good or that this would work only with people somewhat familiar with Rueda. Right now, I'm leaning towards the former guess because some followers whom I expected to know only Cuban style did very well following my LA style lead.

Patricio returned from wherever he was. I never took a class with him, but apparently he is the first salsa teacher in Cambridge and has been teaching since around 1994 (or 1995). Apparently the salsa scene in Cambridge started in 1994 in some restaurant near Parkers Piece on Hills Road in 1994, and Patricio arrived as a teacher several months afterwards. Apparently, everyone danced on-2 in the beginning. Ballroom crowd was blamed for moving it to on-1; even self-dubbed Godfather of UK Salsa Nelson Batista (who moved to England in 1988 and is currently teaching at Greens on Sundays) has been forced to move to on-1 supposedly because of the ballroom crowd.

I had an amusing conversation with Peter afterward the class. I think he looked at this blog again recently and came across few confusing/misleading items. He asked about reverse cross body lead, which was mentioned very (and a little too) casually on July 1 entry (which I expanded more today). Peter also thought that I had a fallout with him based on my May 19 entry (now expanded to clarify the situation) whereas I merely meant to convey difficulty of the routine/lesson that day. There are only a handful of people (I can count them with my two hands with fingers to spare) who is aware of this blog, and I hadn't really expected anyone to be interested in it. I think maybe I should be more careful about what I write, but that could become too time consuming. An alternative is to avoid writing anything but description of routines, but I'll just write whatever I want to for now.