What an ending!

June 22, 2007

No Salsa until around 12:30. Dinner at Shiraz lasted til 11:30 - good food and nice perks but not a place to go for a quick meal. There was a lot of Salsa music played there too - circa Club Salsa or Po Na Na couple of years ago. The Fountain Inn was very smoky, and the music was not as good to my ears as the previous week - jazz and latin sound replaced with synthesizers and quasi-funk/techno with touch of hip hop maybe. The general aura of the place was less inviting so returning to familiar environs of Club Salsa was a relief even though it should have felt passé given this would have been my fourth time out here in five days, which is a lot.

The first half hour or so was merely okay. A bit crowded. Some like Pauline, Andrea seemingly had been there for a while and left around 1 or so. The guest teacher from the other Friday - I think his name was something like Domenic (many people, whom I have talked with, like his style or more specifically musicality of his dancing) - was there along with Johnny, Serap and Kate. The team contingent comprising of Agnes, Stephanie, Haihan and Zoon arrived minutes after I did. Steve and Natalia were there too.

It looked as if it was going to be an okay night but nothing special. This felt especially true when Vishal moved onto Reggaeton promotion for tomorrow and people started leaving. And then voila! Vishal started playing a really great set of music and there was decent amount of space on the dance floor all of sudden. I danced to songs like La Salsa Nunca Se Acaba (Susie Hansen), Arinanara, Caravan (latter two by Eddie Torres Mambo Kings Orchestra), and all of the sudden it was the end of the evening. Time just flew by - it was amazing. We were all talking about how great the end of the evening was - we in this case meaning people like Haihan, Agnes, Stephanie and Domenic. Johnny and Serap were there to the end too - I think I danced to Caravan with Serap and to Arinanara with Agnes.

One of the girls I danced with asked me about what one might do to get better. I think it's a tricky question to answer - aside from saying something like "You should work on getting your fundamentals right and then just practice a lot" there's no answer that fits everyone. Also almost everyone dislikes getting criticisms - even if they say they want an honest evaluation (forget about giving unsolicited advice if you don't want to make enemies - even a seemingly harmless comment could come back to haunt you). For absolute beginners, taking any drop-in classes in Club Salsa would seem to be a decent way to start, and private lessons probably will mean faster progress although it might be less cost-efficient for beginners. But how would one go about advising someone who has long enjoyed dancing at beginner, improver or even intermediate level and is thinking about ways to improve? Do they really need to know (or need to be reminded) that getting to next level requires putting in a lot of effort for a long time (for most typically many hours of instructions over months and years), and most people will lack desire, willpower, time, resources, money, etc. I think it's trickier for someone who long ago reached a comfort point and had not felt the need to improve for a very long time. A not-so-uncommon reaction to a difficult task is to quit - so telling them the truth means risking saying goodbye. Also it is not as if the reward for getting better is without negatives - being better than most people means there will be less number of people who would be able to dance with you at a comparable level. I probably could teach people to a pretty decent level if I tried (and there are some others in Cambridge who could do better job than me), but I doubt very much could be done unless the student is extremely motivated. To get to higher level, people eventually would have to reach out to instructors in other places like London or in other countries - there probably is no instructor that knows everything.

The evening ended with people outside the club chatting and still high from the nice end of the social dancing. I was mostly talking with Agnes, Stephanie and Haihan (all three of them will be flying to their home country on Saturday - we'll keep in touch one way or another) before we also started talking to another group of four people who were standing and talking next to us.

Oh, I almost forgot - it was a theme-party at Club Salsa tonight - beach party.