Carnival at the Soul Tree

August 22, 2005

Last Friday at Club Salsa, Nanek was handing out fliers promoting a new club/new event called Carnival at Soul Tree, which promised salsa and meregue on the Penthouse dance floor. A quick search on their website indicated there were four dance floors and at least two DJ booths, so I figured that the chances were pretty good that there will be plenty of salsa and merengue for at least one of the dance floor. After all, the idea here seemed to be to offer multiple choices of music for people to dance to. I walked in around 10 PM with a voucher for one pound entry (normal price is two pounds between 9:30 and 10:30 PM, four pounds between 10:30 PM and 11 PM (or perhaps 11:30 PM - their website was unclear about this), and five pounds thereafter to 2 AM). A peek at Salsa in Cambridge website indicated that Vishal was the DJ for one of the dance floor (main floor that is, not salsa/merengue), which led me to wonder who was going to be the main DJ for the salsa/merengue floor; I was right.

Now this is not the first time Vishal tried to go head-to-head against Po Na Na. Few months ago, Club Salsa had some instructors teach beginner's class on Mondays followed by a club. This lasted about a month or two before it was abandoned. A similar venture was tried with Ashrafi and Charlie offering beginner's salsa lessons on Tuesday; this lasted a little longer. I don't know how other people thought about these classes, but I was not interested in either of these classes because I knew the ceiling for learning Salsa was "low" as all classes were apparently geared toward beginners and improvers. No offense meant but Ashrafi is essentially Mauricio with less grace, style, command and charisma. Vishal also tried to get Helen and Rhona to move their Rueda classes to Mondays and set up a club afterwards as well; this apparently didn't work out. My big question now was, "How will this new venture work out?"

First how many salsa dancers did this event attract today? There were five leaders I recognized including two guys sharing DJ duties, few girls who didn't seem to be dancing on time and whom I didn't recall noticing before and one woman I recall seeing in couple of classes (by far the best follower tonight although that's not really saying much). The most amusing moment was after my last dance with this woman from class, a Brazilian guy came over "to congratulate me for being able to dance beautifully" - interesting choice of words but I guess English may not be his first language - also this last dance was to a song that was not-quite-salsa, which made staying in time tricky for my partner (and me to some degree as well) and I was running out of routines because it was my fourth dance (of which, only two were danced to a proper salsa song) with her. There were many young people who were not salsa dancers but were there just for the kicks (or as an alternative to the electronic music being played downstairs). For now, this event is bring your own partner (BYOP) type of event if you want to dance early and often.

How was the music? I thought the sound system was better than at Po Na Na although it became a little too loud at the end. A latecomer speculated that the DJ turned up the music in desperation to get people to stay and dance but that this backfired. I think that the salsa people would have left fairly early with this being a weekday and all. Even the Club Salsa Wednesday, which has become enormously popular, thins out quite a bit after midnight. As the night went on, DJ was playing more and more non-salsa and non-merengue. I'm not sure if this was a good idea considering that this was an alternative dance floor. Perhaps for non-salsa dancers, this floor would work better as a place to watch other people dance or talk to other people, in which case keeping the volume somewhat lower and staying with real Latin dance music (keeping things "exotic") may be the way to go. This of course assumes that real dancers start coming to this thing. I don't know if this will work in a sustainable manner or even once. In any case, it'll be interesting to see how this latest Vishal enterprise works out.