High and low

May 18, 2007

Another last minute decision on dinner - pretty standard now. It came down to just me and Cyrille with no firm decision on the restaurant - not even after I picked up Cyrille and started driving towards the town center. Just before reaching the Catholic Church, we settled on curry - Mill Road - Golden Curry - a decent, cheap and convenient option. In the western hemisphere, England must have the best and cheapest selection of Indian restaurants. Conversation topic rarely strayed from Salsa - Bournemouth, Hamburg and Benidorm, etc. Dancing to the music was another big topic.

As for dancing afterwards, I felt like I was never very good to begin with and seemed to just get worse as evening progressed. It's still difficult to believe that things go from pretty good to disappointingly poor so quickly even though it happens all the time.

Music was okay for the first hour or so before turning into a predictable lowest common denominator mass crowd pleasers just in time for Mimi's arrival before moving onto a mostly similar sounding energetic happy Colombian material. I don't know about others, but I would have liked more slow songs - it might have enabled me to dance more.

Even when the song should have been okay in some other circumstances (e.g. I could imagine having nice dances to Nina Y Senora (classic) or Alabanciosa (decent) or Dame Cinco (okay depending on the mood and partner)), things did not come together. It was rather frustrating and discouraging and made me wonder if I'm regressing rather than progressing.

The end of the evening dragged a bit. Mimi would have liked to leave earlier rather than later in part because of her aching feet. Cyrille on the other hand was unstoppable - perhaps those shots of tequila on top of copious amount of beer had an effect. We ended up staying until closing time. Vishal tried to talk me and Mimi into entering Sunday's dance competition - a bit awkward.

I have a mixed feeling about entering dance competitions. Under right circumstances, it could be used for comprehensive self-evaluation and feedback and consequently could lead to significant improvements. This would be possible only with shared commitment and philosophy among all involved. However, this could be done without using a dance competition as the main impetus. In many ways I like remaining a pure social dancer - staying away from performing or teaching. It might be fun still.

I also have a silly idea that it's good for the community to have quality dancers not involved in teaching, performing or competing. It would be unfortunate to get back into a situation where anyone feel like they should consider start teaching after several months of experience (Disclosure: I had such delusional thoughts as early as 6-9 months after starting Salsa after taking a look at some of the people who were teaching Salsa at the time). One of the things I like to think the existence of San Miguel Gang seemingly in combination with a pretty good set of established teaching teams in Cambridge has done is to help squash any notion of starting new Salsa classes by people with dubious abilities.

I recall one of my first long conversations with Cyrille. It was after one of classes with Sally. I think we got together because of Mimi. At one point, Cyrille half-jokingly said that three of us should start a Salsa school together somewhere, and we stayed on this topic for a few minutes. And then Sergio showed up, and I introduced Cyrille to Sergio and said that Sergio is one of the best leads in Cambridge. Shortly thereafter Ivan showed up, and I did the same again saying that Ivan is another one of the best leads in Cambridge. Neither Sergio nor Ivan was involved in teaching Salsa at that time (at least not to the general public). I don't think this Salsa school will start anytime soon.