Eve of eve of UK Congress

September 21, 2005

With this being the last club evening before UK salsa congress organized by Salsa-UK, I was quite curious to see how this evening would turn out. I arrived a little later than usual – perhaps 5 or 10 minutes after the lessons were completed. It was one of the least crowded evenings I have seen on Wednesdays for quite some time. I suppose I’ll find out who is NOT going to the Congress Friday evening after the lessons. I also wonder if it would be poor night for SOS this weekend.

My original impression was that early part of the evening was rather uneven (although when I thought about it more, it really wasn’t that bad). The most problematic dance was with Argentinean Mariella (soon-to-be-instructor at my workplace); I felt really drained after two consecutive dances with her. This really reflects my shortcomings rather than her dancing abilities because I had it in my head that Mariella would want to look sensational performing difficult turns, etc., which I'm in short supply of and thus giving me something of a "performance anxiety". In addition, I was more flustered than usual whenever there was a miscommunication, which led to even more mental stress. A third dance with her later in the evening was also similar and I found it mentally and physically draining. Later dances with other people with a lot of space were unusually good, and I had fun traveling and using a lot of rotating cross body leads with large steps.

I got to see Cristian dance a lot more than usual tonight – with four or five different partners at least. Finally, this was an opportunity for me to evaluate how well he dances. His lead seemed smooth enough, his repertoire seemed fine also – probably not as extensive or flashy as Johnny and maybe slightly less moves-moves-moves compared to Johnny. I still think Ivan and Sergio both have cooler style. However the thing that struck me the most was that I was pretty sure that he wasn’t dancing on-1. I’m not much of an expert on on-2 (which I think breaks on-6 – or L foot forward for men during basic occurs on beat 6), but I don’t think he was dancing on-2 either. Also I don’t think he was dancing on-5 either. Hmmm. Of course, I am not completely positive than I can spot beat 1 consistently – I like to think so but it’s not impossible that I’m wrong. On the other hand, I was able to spot several other good dancers consistently dancing on-1 (at least as I count beat 1). I wasn’t able to declare one other leader with complex routines as dancing on-1 also but I am less sure about this. It should be interesting to see evaluate more dancers Friday.

Incidentally, this coming Friday will mark my one year anniversary for salsa – 364 days since my first salsa lesson with Johnny and Serap. Okay, one year has 365 days but it’s close enough.

Parts of the floor are still in pretty bad condition and should be considered hazardous (especially upper floor on the back). I'm probably going to associate that flooding incident with Hurricane Katrina for a long time.

I got into a conversation about insurance issue for Mariella, the Salsa instructor from Argentina. Apparently a quote they got from one company was for 300 pounds sterling for 3 months (?), which they thought was quite steep. It would seem to me that teaching salsa with insurance could become a money-losing proposition if the instructor were to teach only once a week. I have no idea whether each instructor would need to get a separate insurance. Do dance clubs like Club Salsa or dance societies like CDC insure all of their instructors as a group (or give subsidy to instructors?) How does it work with free lessons Club Salsa was offering a while ago?