Scala – like Club Salsa but bigger and slightly better

April 16, 2006

Weird night. Incoherent night. Tiring night. These are some of many descriptions I could think of when I think of my Scala outing. There were enjoyable moments too but overall it was a flat and underwhelming night for me in general.

Where to start? Perhaps with a phone call from Sergio shortly after noon, as I was driving to my workplace with Lenny Kravitz on at high volume, to let me know that he decided to come along? Or perhaps getting home to eat dinner and trying to find time to work with Frankie Martinez body movement DVD before picking up Sergio? By the way, there was not enough time to get started with Frankie. Or perhaps I should start with getting lost less than a minute after picking up Sergio? Instead of taking Chesterton Road from High Street to eventually enter M11 from exit 13, I ended up going towards Milton Road, then taking a minor road to turn around, taking a wrong turn on Milton Road and ending up on Arbury Road and finally on some parking lot (or car park as they call it here) before backtracking my way all the way back to High Street via Union Lane. After this initial farce (I probably lost about 5 minutes here), drive to Scala was flawless and I managed to find a space to park right in front of Kings Cross station less than 100 minutes after I left home for a less than 2 minutes walk to Scala.

Maybe 2 seconds after I entered Scala, I spotted two, then three, then four, then five people from Cambridge Salsa scene. Within 5 minutes, the number grew to dozen and eventually to a little over 25 people – I counted 28 people (14 men, 14 women) including me. It was as if I never left Cambridge. According to Joe Davids, this was the best ever attended Scala night on Easter (meaning probably over 1200 people) and Club Salsa regulars contributed over 2% of the total.

Scala. Big yet small. I think there were four rooms; I only managed to find three - the place was something of a maze. The first room I spotted was a Cuban alcove about the size of lower floor at Club Salsa. Three sides of this alcove were surrounded by walls, which made the space look even more constricted than it perhaps was. The fourth side led to a social area / bar / coat check, which took up more than 5 times the area of the Cuban alcove thus dwarfing the alcove. The second room I saw the Main Salsa room (Salsa Max). This room had three areas for dancing – the main floor (about the size of main floor at Clarendon Grill in Arlington/DC), the elevated stage behind the main speakers (slightly smaller than the main floor – when combined with the main floor, the dance space becomes comparable in size to the main downstairs floor at the Rocket), and the corridor behind the DJ booth. There were a lot of corridors, stairs, etc., and many places to watch the dancers were somewhat inaccessible from the dance floor thus finding a new dance partner who wasn’t already on the dance floor was a bit tricky for me. In terms of layout for easy access to dance floor, this room was the worst I have ever seen for a Salsa venue. My initial reaction was something like “They are going to have 1000+ Salsa dancers in this place? This is not going to be fun. I wouldn’t want more than 300-400 people at most.” Cambridge Guildhall main hall has more space than all of Salsa Max room danceable area combined. The third room for Lambada looked pretty nice at a quick glance – pretty spacious with dance floor being accessible to dancers.

Music was generally good and sometimes adventurous. I particularly enjoyed the fact that several songs I either played at Club Salsa or was planning on playing at Club Salsa in some future based solely on my opinion were played tonight by professional DJs. It was also nice to see that some songs I would have considered essentially unplayable at Club Salsa were played tonight as well – it might give me more courage to push boundaries even further if chance presents itself.

There were three showcases. I progressively stood or sat closer to the stage for each successive shows. I think I enjoyed the Lee & Shelley one the most – even though I think I saw this routine three times now.

On Londonsalsa.co.uk forum, one person wrote that there would be over 1000 black belt Salsa dancers at Scala tonight. I don’t know what her opinion of black belt Salsa dancer would be. If I were to place least experienced dancers from Cambridge tonight as the lowest cut-off point for black belt, I would have to say that the number would be well below 1000; I thought a very large number of people were watching other people dance 90+% of the time. My guess is that the median Salsa dancer tonight from Cambridge would place in top quartile of people who were at Scala, and everyone would have been considered average (approximately 50% percentile) at worst. I think one third to half of my dances tonight were with Cambridge people; I would never have predicted it.

Back to space. There wasn’t very much. Vast majority of Cambridge people were dancing on the elevated stage area behind the speakers, which for a short time had more space compared to the main floor. At times, dances were more of a traffic management than anything else. Sergio mentioned observing tempers flaring over with some people using their partners as a battering ram on people who were intruding on their space, etc. I felt like I had to be quite restrained and dance compactly – some of my partners seemed perfectly okay about this while others were probably bored. It seemed like whenever I tried to stretch things and venture beyond a comfort zone, some disaster struck. I never got around to dancing with full energy – which may or may not be a good thing.

I only recognized couple of dozen regulars from SOS, and relatively few random people I asked for a dance were very good. On the whole, about half of 10 or so dances I enjoyed and had absolutely no complaints about were with strangers. Many of the better dancers were better largely because of some underlying context (e.g. better than usual dances with familiar dance partners, dancing with people I haven’t seen in a while – both in Cambridge and in London). None of the dances when taking dancing alone as sole criteria reached spellbinding level though, and I felt pretty flat most of the time.

Unique. I find this adjective somewhat troubling whenever my dance partner to describe my dance style. I must have heard this about three times in last 5 months or so and my best explanation is that my partner simply does not have much experience. It would make sense if this word is used in a pejorative manner, but the tone used has seemed complimentary. Still, it had a negative effect on me tonight – probably because I was already feeling fairly negative. I think I was able to get myself up for one more dance after this comment. I suppose I’m not good at reading people – for example, there are people who I think may not like me very much for some unknown reason but I am very unsure about this assessment. I feel very awkward interacting with them and I would micro-analyze every small gestures and generally be oversensitive – not fun especially since I don’t have a nice gentle subtle ways in me to correct any problems. When translated into dancing, there are people who I can dance with more or less competently but I have poor idea of what she wants from the dance as well as what I want out of the dance. Awkward.

Highlight of the evening. I ran into someone I was hoping to run into tonight – it took long enough – it was 3:20 AM by the time I spotted her – I’ll call her Diane (not her real name); she apparently arrived around 1 AM. It took a long look as well as a returning look of recognition from her as I approached her because she had changed her appearance quite a bit. It’s gratifying to know that she likes dancing with me – supposedly because I enjoy and have fun dancing and have a lot of energy (somewhat surprising because I was feeling very tired by the time I had my dances with her and my shines were sloppy as hell - by the way, a big part of our first dance was an inside joke). I guess I just need to work on everything else. It’s interesting to note that two other people who made a comment like this to me in the past are Serap and Sally. I was already planning on working based upon more dance advice from Sergio, but this provides even more impetus.

Sergio thinks I should work harder on my basics, and I agree with him. My understanding is that he’s looking at my feet mostly. When I started out, my feet were my strong points and my hands were rubbish. Now, it’s the other way around and my feet feel heavy. I don’t know how easy it will be – hopefully the cure will take many weeks of training to take a dramatic effect as opposed to many months or even years. It’s nice to know that people think I’m worth working with – whatever it is that they see.

Drive back was odd – I’m so not used to driving out of London when it’s not dark. Even though I was never lost, I felt lost two or three times and had difficulty figuring out if I was indeed on the correct road. Also driving long distance at 4:30 AM to 6 AM in any condition is not something I am used to. Aside from basics of dancing (and idea of some tutoring), main topic of conversation was music.

I was hoping that Scala would help to gauge my progress over last couple of months but this did not work as well as I hoped. I’m not sure if I am any better and more fun to dance with for other people. I think I have more opinions about abilities of my partners – generally more critical although I no longer know if my judgment is any better; I have changed my opinion so often about my various dance partners in the past so that I no longer know if someone I like dancing with now would be someone I would still enjoy dancing with as much in two or three months time. In case it means anything, as I get more critical of others, I am getting even more critical of myself; I am guessing and hoping that I am dancing better than I was 2, 4 or 6 months ago in an absolute sense, but it usually doesn’t “feel” that way except on occasional superb nights.

I’m feeling pretty nervous about Tuesday night. I meant to speak to Cambridge people about it once again while I was at Scala. I ended up talking about it only with one person and that was because this person decided to drop out with a perfectly understandable reason. A funny or odd thing is that while I became worried, I felt even friendlier and freer with this person when given this news. Whether it turns out a success or disaster, I wonder if I have any more energy left to organize any more events like this.

I also wonder if it’s safer now to start referring to some less public people by name – provided that they are okay with it. This blog sometimes has too much self-analysis, which is time-consuming and is by default self-absorbed. I would imagine many people wouldn’t mind as long as nothing bad is written about them.