Unending Epilogue 4

July 2009

How many times did I go out Salsa dancing this month? One disadvantage or benefit to not having a daily diary is that it is more difficult to keep track. I am sure I went out at least 4 times. I might have gone out as many as 7 times.

The last time I went out was the last Monday of July to Clarendon Grill. It’s easy to remember that one since it was only two days ago. Arguably the big event of the month was the SOS anniversary party on the third Saturday, which I also attended. I definitely went to the DC Dance Collective Saturday socials both times this month (second and fourth Saturdays). I don’t think I went out on July 4th,but I probably compensated by going to Clarendon Grill the Monday afterwards. So that probably makes it 5 nights out – my best guess. I think I’m done for July. Wow – that’s not a lot considering I do not feel burnt out.

I think it’s possible that I danced exclusively On2 on four of those five nights. Again wow. I actually made an active effort to try dancing On1 a few times this Monday, but there is little point to try to dance On1 elsewhere. This is so unexpected but not necessarily surprising in retrospect. There are very few people here who can step in time reliably and yet is rather poor in On2 timing. Big parties or at least the big parties I attend attract plenty of On2 dancers. The DC Dance Collective Saturday social tries to be DC’s version of Jimmy Anton social in NYC (the Mecca of On2 dancing) – in fact they probably picked their dates (second and fourth Saturdays) to be as far apart from Jimmy Anton social dates (first, third and occasional fifth Sundays) most of the time.

On a different note, I had talked to Tanya about having me play some songs at her social for a short segment. Now why would I want to do that? I’m not interested in getting DJ gigs. For the most part, I think I prefer to be dancing rather than playing. I’m far from certain that I would do a better job than people who are established here. In fact after having talked to Tanya, Jimmy, Stu and Tommy about their musical preferences, I actually find the prospect of a flop quite real – it might be really easy to displease many people with “wrong” song choices. Certainly pleasing everyone all the time is out of question since even these four alone have different tastes; some loves certain songs while others despise those same songs. At least one of the big reason why I asked to DJ was to try playing kind of songs that seem to get played here. However, I may not have a very good sense of which songs are being played a lot while which songs are nearly unheard of (I was told Hector Lavoe gets played to death by some DJs!). It doesn't help that I don’t go to many of the "typical" venues. In fact, I have heard only a handful of songs get played more than once in this area since April; the song selections seem pretty deep. Thus the amount of general Salsa music knowledge here may be considerably greater than I am used to – difficult to gauge.

Moving from audio to video, I discovered a clip of me dancing at the DC Salsa Congress. It was not a kind of video where one couple is the center of focus, but it was enough to cause some cringing and give myself some harsh evaluations. The shortest summary I could think of? I still suck. I think it shows that I really haven’t done any critical evaluation of how I look while dancing taking advantage of videotaping myself. Of course I don’t know if I have the energy and time to go to such efforts and I also don’t know if such measure would be beneficial in all ways. I say this because I could see a scenario where video analysis may help lead to removing certain excesses and perhaps bad habits, it may also lead to inhibitions and stagnation. Ultimately I imagine benefits would outweigh harms since knowing is ultimately better than not knowing. It’s something I should do eventually if I want to keep on dancing for a long time.

One of the things I cringed about was seeing how often I was failing to dance along to how the music was progressing. At least at two different passages, I was asking why the heck am I doing what I am doing at that point in the song? A few caveats. I don’t know the song so I suppose I could easily be caught off guard here and there. I never danced with the person I was dancing with before also – although that’s not much of an excuse and my recollection is that she was a pretty good follower by the Congress standard (and most people I danced with there were pretty darn good by my European Congress experience). One of the things I saw (although I suppose I was somewhat aware of this even before) is that even though I think I’m trying my best to dance according to the music I seem to be doing a pretty poor job of it – lucky if I’m doing okay maybe half or even one third of the song even with really good partners (arguably being generous with myself).

Another thing I did after finding this clip was to look at other social dancing clip from the same event. In most cases it was difficult for me to see that people dancing were making an effort to dance according to the music. A small minority was making an effort to accentuate the breaks in the song. It was less clear that most people who were trying to accentuate the breaks were paying attention to other parts of the song (although no doubt better than the general populace and occasionally I saw things that made me think what some people were doing were pretty darn good - miles better than what I was doing). So I guess the good news (or the bad news) is that most people were not succeeding most of the times either (or I can tell myself that I may be doing it poorly but doing it poorly could be considered better than not trying or not being aware?). I also would not be surprised if I come back to this a half year from now and say I had no idea what I was talking about; I write about these things but I certainly cannot be considered an expert or an authority of any sort in dancing (or music or pretty much everything).

There is one big question I have. Now the old-time musicians have said things like they can watch the way old-time dancers moved and be able to tell which music they were playing. Would they be able to do such thing in a Salsa congress event nowadays? I ask because I feel that I would be completely clueless about how to go about figuring out the song from the dancers from all the seemingly random moves different people go about performing at all parts of the song.