The end of innocence

September 30, 2005

1,2,3,5,6,7 cross body lead
1,2,3,5,6,7 lead follower to a pivot clockwise turn on 5,6,7 and switch to R-R
1,2,3 overtake follower on the right side like Enchufe and use L hand on follower’s R shoulder to stop further turn by follower
5,6,7 hook turn (optional: lower body during hook turn with bent knees)
1,2,3,5,6,7 (version 1) standard Copa with L-L connection being made on 1 or 2 and with R hand on follower’s waist on 3/4 (dead end)
(version 2) end Copa while stopping follower after a single turn with R hand on follower’s stomach
1,2,3 walk around on the right side keeping follower stationary and getting into what is essentially an open position (probably ending to left of follower?)
5,6,7 lead follower to a counterclockwise half turn (not completely sure) with L-L high and R hand ending on her R shoulder
1,2,3 walk backwards together in same position (L-L high and R hand on her R shoulder) with follower in counterclockwise manner (180 degrees is fine - could try for 360 but I found it a little difficult)
5,6,7 lead follower forward and into a 1 1/2 clockwise traveling turn to get back to open position

I predicted that version 2 was going to be difficult to pull off. I managed it couple of times with some of the participants in the class afterwards. However, I failed to do it with Serap who sat out because of uneven number of students.

I had some extra time early in the evening so I decided to come early to see how Johnny & Serap taught beginners (and improvers/intermediates). I'm sorry to say that the beginner class was a bit of a mess. There were six people altogether being taught by Serap, four women and two men. Both men apparently came with their own partner. One pair was complete novices; they managed to begin to learn basic "mambo" step and side-to-side for the entire class. Another pair was doing three basic steps plus cross body lead. Two women were being taught cross body, cross body with 1 1/2 counterclockwise turn, cross body with 1 1/2 clockwise turn and Setenta. No one was staying in time to the music although my recollection is that no one (aside from Mauricio) tried to teach this to absolute beginners in Cambridge in anything more than perfunctory manner (although Sean mentioned that his timing might have been different - not quite on-1 that is). After about 10 minutes of watching, I couldn't take it anymore and jumped in to help first with the two women. Later on, I moved on to the absolute beginners. I think this had to be one of the worst examples, but I could see why I felt I didn't learn anything from Johnny & Serap's class last year; there simply is too much gap to bridge from beginner class to improver/intermediate class to advanced class. I meant to discuss this with Johnny & Serap later, but I forgot.

Dancing during the club hours was pretty good in the beginning but became less inspiring rather quickly. Instead of dancing, I talked with few different people about my blog and possible problems with it. My initial intent was to simply document routines taught in classes I attended and later share them with small number of people (before this week, 2 set of teachers and 3 students). After a while, it also served as something of a "Salsa diary" for me taking on more and more Salsa-related things. For example, I recorded things I learned about Salsa aside from simple (or complex) routines - after all, Salsa is not simply about moves-moves-moves and even moves can be either well-led or poorly led in a way that a simple notes (or even some of my more detailed notes) cannot convey. I recorded some milestones (having dances that were marked improvement over others) also. Some social things including people's real names (in part for me to help remember them, at least in the beginning) and other nonsense also started accumulating. Then, I started to simply enjoy the writing process as well and I sometimes emulated newszine format - albeit with an audience of handful of people. Or at least that was what I thought after spending a short amount of time during which I examined the level of traffic this blog was getting with help of a web counter program. Of course, things did not stay the same - with no effort on my part to increase traffic, I found a steady increase in traffic. This terrified and excited me at the same time. Terrified because I was afraid someone may find some of the contents objectionable and excited because - well, who doesn't like some attention now and then? I talked with some of the people I told about the blog to get some feedback and started making some changes. Meanwhile, the traffic keeps increasing - I even start finding evidence that some people are sending links to my blog via e-mail! On Thursday, Helen asks me about the blog and talks about putting a link to it on her Cambridge Rueda website. Anyhow, the people I talked to this evening were very helpful in starting the process of guiding me out of this quandary. So the first thing I'm doing is to remove all real names from this blog except for those of teachers and DJs in their public role in the Cambridge Salsa scene. I made one exception (Sean) for now because he assured me that he had absolutely no problem with the blog and trying to remove all reference to him would mean I would be delayed in removing others. I also will stop using anyone's real names in future entries among other things. More changes should be forthcoming pending inputs from other people.