Anne And Anichi At Club Salsa

July 4, 2008

So I did get there shortly after 7:30. When was the last time I was at CS at such an early time on a Friday? I should think it was the last time I took first hour class with Johnny and Serap years ago. I should be able to check it out by looking at old entries. [The answer is probably May 2005.]

These days Joe probably doesn’t arrive by 7:30. I’m guessing that the class start time is more like 7:45 than 7:30 – or I think this must have been what Vish told Steve, Natalia and Gabrielle. Steve apparently had been exploring the St Albans scene recently by the way. In any case, Joe was very late tonight, which prompted Danie to do an impromptu isolation warm-up rather than a typical shine class.

Joe, Danie and Vish and ran the first hour of classes while Anne and Anichi went out to grab a bite to eat. I decided to sit out during the first class because the uppermost class had 4-6 surplus men while the improver class was exactly even in numbers and the beginner class was more or less balanced as well. I suppose I helped out a tiny bit by being there early playing the gopher – nothing more than a minor luxury for Vish, Joe and company, but I didn’t think it showed much except that I have little life outside work and Salsa. Incidentally I was in a middle of a short discussion about preferring having one instructor in charge as opposed to having two and was made to think about how difficult it is to maintain a delicate balance act people like Super Mario and Susana Montero pull off with both coming off looking as great instructors while teaching together.

Anne and Anichi took over the Intermediate/Advanced class for the second hour. I briefly played around with the idea of taking part in the class. Then I saw the proposed routine (actually the first of two or three options) and decided that I wasn’t interested. It was a “Matrix” move, which is essentially a dressed-up version of another move I know except this one would require a lot of space and would need to be a choreography at least in the initial stages. Plus the gender gap (i.e. too many leaders) still existed. Also Joe asked me to help with the music while he went out to grab food for himself. I was already doing the same during the first hour. I jumped in at the chance to keep me occupied since I really didn’t have anything better to do now.

Anichi had brought their own CDs and asked Joe to use one of their tracks. I believe he said either track 5 or 6 – he wasn’t completely sure. Joe set the track 5 at –16% and seemed to think that it was still very fast. He left an alternate track from his collection (this one set at –14%) and suggested that I make play it by ear. Incidentally, one of Joe’s practice songs (a Tabaco Y Ron song) was played initially at –16%, and Vish signalled to me mid-way through that it was too fast so I had slowed it down to –20%. I’m not a big fan of slowing songs and avoid it as much as possible. Since there was plenty of time before the practice music would be needed, I decided to examine the speed of the songs provided by Anichi and Joe. By using songs from my collection with known BPM as reference, I determined that the track 5 at –16% was still in the 170s BPM range – this is about the same speed as La-La-La (Direct Latin Influence) and faster than La Llave (Grupo Latin Vibe). For whatever its worth, I estimate Joe’s practice songs would tend to be at 150-160 BPM range. So I could go to maximum –24% and still be at 160s BPM range. I think that would be problematic. I toyed with the idea of playing one of my own songs with speed unchanged before checking out other songs from Anichi’s CD. Track 6 was much slower without any speed adjustment – possibly around 160 BPM (Vish’s mixer indicated 154 RPM or so). Track 7 was even slower – around 143 RPM. Cool. Anichi probably wanted track 6 or 7, rather than 5 or 6. I decided it would be useful to start with track 6 for the first song and save the slower track 7 for the last song. When it came time to play the first song, I started track 6 unaltered and slowed it down to –4% when I heard Anichi make a comment that the song is fast as the class struggled with the routine. Vish commented that I picked a most difficult song, and I replied that it was guest instructor’s CD. Joe returned while the first practice song was playing but left me where I was at the DJ booth. He also left me with an amusing vignette about whom he wants to make sure he pleases for business purpose (hint: see my life comment earlier). I hope I successfully buried it with all of the long and boring details in this paragraph.

The other thing I was playing with during the classes was the air conditioning. What a delicate balance between keeping temperature reasonable without disturbing the instructors! The temperature went up as high as 27C, which prompted me to turn the AC on. The extractor, which makes loud noise and is often kept off during the classes, was on during much of first hour of classes. I turned it off about half-way through the first class. The main floor AC was turned on early. The side floor AC was turned on half-way through the first class. Joe asked me to turn off the AC towards the end of the first hour of classes. Vish turned the extractor back on during the break. Ditto for the main floor AC. Early on during the second hour, Anichi asked me to turn off the AC. Okay. I decided to leave the extractor on, which might have helped to cause Anichi to struggle with his voice by the end of the class. Joe turned the AC back on right after picking up his food next door. Probably the optimal setting is to have AC on and the extractor off during the classes to help keep the temperature down and keep the floor from becoming very sticky, but if cool air bothers people… Enough minutiae. Enough torture?

Shelley apparently fell ill, which meant that Joe would have to give ride back for Anne and Anichi. Maybe this was one reason why Joe was late arriving tonight; my impression was that Shelley was originally planning on coming together with Anne and Anichi in a separate car. I more or less expected Joe to leave by midnight. Surprisingly he stayed until nearly 1 AM. I don’t think this was planned – I recall Joe talking about leaving at midnight.

Interesting night social-wise. Many people who had been away came back. This included a fairly large Cuban group, who had been away for a month or so. Wednesday was represented by Cristian and Sandra – I only learned very recently that Sandra started teaching on Wednesdays. Thurday was represented by Sally, Lindsey and Nicola. Haihan made a rare Friday appearance. Zhenzhi was back after about three months, and Euvian was back after about four months. Euvian mentioned that she met up briefly with Mimmi on a stopver. Mohammed and other nice regular Cuban leads from Fridays were actually present and active for a change on one of these performance Fridays; I think they are a real nice presence and keeps more people dancing. Louise also made a rare appearance although by the time I got around to asking her for dance, she seemed done. Anette was back after being gone for maybe two years, and she was in a really good form considering the long break – very nice to see.

Vish took over as the DJ when Joe was finally done near 1 AM. After a few of his songs, I decided that it would not do much for me to DJ tonight. I thought it would be more useful instead to punctuate Vish’s set with two songs from my collection. Unfortunately I had difficulty locating one of the songs (refined remix of Bilongo by Charanga De La 4 – I had put the CD in a wrong page) so I settled for just only one – Mambo For Vibes by Hilton Ruiz (featuring Tito Puente). It was preceded by Anacaona and was followed by Chin Chon Chow. Since there's neither new song nor real DJing involved, I'll refrain from categorizing this post under DJ.

I tried to dance with many different people balancing immediate gratification with what I think might be good to keep the dancing atmosphere good for the long term – both for the night and possibly for longer. At first I was worried about straining my back (there was a scary moment) but my feet were hurting more by the end. I had one dance with Anne in a very tight space - tighter space than most of my dances all night in fact. I had more Bachata dances than usual and finished the evening with a long Merengue medley (and one of the nicest Merengue dance ever). The party ended around 2:45 AM.