Curry and Salsa do not mix well

December 23, 2005

I think I had too much curry tonight before Salsa dancing. When Tony was in Cambridge for the Bachata workshop, he repeatedly made comment about being able to feel the curry in his stomach throughout the evening. I also consumed curry that evening (in fact twice as much as Tony and Claudia), but it didn't affect me much presumably because the quantity was not large. I felt the curry in my stomach more on the Club Salsa Christmas party earlier this month. Dancing on full stomach is good but it might be better to stuff myself with less complex fare.

Having larger number of male dancers compared to female dancers has to be a unique phenomenon for Cambridgeshire. Tonight was especially bad; there were approximately 20 men and 6-8 women at around 10:30 PM. More people arrived thereafter, but I don't think there was a time when the number of women outnumbered men.

There were at least 4 or 5 songs in which two men were seen dancing humorously together - they did it pretty well. Same-sex Salsa dance is so common in Cambridge that I no longer am surprised when I see one, but it seemed there were more of male-male dancing tonight presumably because of lack of followers. I have only a very limited experience playing the part of the follower - the only occasion being at SOS the other day with Serap leading. Knowing the part of follower no doubt can help to learn how to lead. By the way, I think it might be interesting to have a gender reversal Salsa dance competition. I have observed more than half of male Salsa instructors in Cambridge play the part of follower one time or another, and the other half also probably could do it reasonably well.

I tried do practice some on-2 footwork with mixed results. I think it will take a lot of effort to become proficient on-2. At this point, I still don't understand how dancing on-2 would change the way Salsa is danced dramatically as some people claim.

Practicing to lead follower forward on 5 on cross body lead with turns (see yesterday's post) was not particularly productive because there were very few followers tonight who has learned to follow cross body lead style. Despite the recent explosion of CBL craze in Cambridge, many still are doing Cuban - I think 1/3 of followers tonight were comfortable with CBL, 1/3 were still exclusively Cuban, and 1/3 either did not dance or were incapable of dancing in time to the music. Thus there were very few dances tonight at high level done with good control (then again some people seemed to like what I thought were wildly-out-of-control dances).

I did get some Bachata practice, which was nice. I think some others who attended the workshop were also doing well with it. An encore workshop may work out okay or so I keep telling myself.