So how can you improve your styling and body movement?

Styling and Body Movement

Most if not all body, movement comes from the ability to isolate, the better you can isolate the better your body movement will be. This will require taking classes, learning the basics and practicing. Practice everywhere, in your car while driving to work, while watching TV, at your office desk (If you can put up with the weird looks you will get from your colleagues). I’m even doing mine while writing this article. There is no excuse just build it into your daily routine.

Once you have learned to isolate you can start combining movements together, the following list should give you some ideas on how to achieve this:

• Try mixing two or three of the isolation exercises together.
• Stand in front of a mirror and see what movement looks good on you, then expand on it.
• Video yourself dancing and work on improving things you don’t like.
• Play music and dance to it, incorporating as many of the isolations you can.
• Take Body Movement workshops in congresses or with you local instructors.
• Watch Youtube videos, see what some of the best dancers are doing and try and incorporate the movement you like and expand on it.
• If you are taking shine classes, watch your instructor when they are doing the shines to music, they often add body movement to improve the look of the shine, try and duplicate it.

One of the most important things is varying the speed of your movement; sometimes moving fast and sometimes moving slowly and exaggerating the movement. The best dancers do this brilliantly. Doing too much of one or the other can make you look a little one dimensional. This is also something we will expand in greater detail in the Musicality article as the subjects are closely interrelated.

I have listed some of my favorite dancers who have exceptional body movement when they dance. They also have outstanding musicality which is a fundamental part of incorporating body movement with the music. Search for them on Youtube and watch them social dancing to see how they move and interpret the music.

Guys – Frankie Martinez, Juan Matos, Franklin Diaz, Neeraj Maskara, Maykel Fonts.

Gals – Magna Gopal, Amneris Martinez, Griselle Ponce, Vanda Gameiro, Burju Perez.

So how can you improve your leading and following? As this will vary depending on your level, I have broken it into two parts.

Beginners

At this stage, you have the advantage of being able to learn properly at the very beginning before you develop any bad habits. Don’t rush through the basics, listen to what is being said by the instructor and don’t be afraid to ask questions. Make sure you leave the class understanding what you have been taught and practice as much as you can prior to the next class. In your first few classes focus on your footsteps, then body positions and finally the lead. Most instructors should break down each part in turn, and you can always ask if you are unsure of any point.

I realize that repeating the basics over and over again at the beginning can get tedious, but having a strong foundation will expand your potential and allow you to progress through the higher levels at a faster pace. In our experience, the students that spend their time working on, and perfecting the basics steps and techniques, tend to become our most promising pupils.

The motivation for most instructors is seeing their students improve, so if you can demonstrate that you have the desire to learn, your instructor will probably be more motivated to give you a little more attention and will be more than willing to answer any questions you have before or after the classes.

Intermediate/Advanced

If you are a student that has been learning salsa for any length of time, your first focus is your basics; you will probably need a private class with your instructor to find your weaknesses. If you are on a budget, you should encourage your instructor to give feedback during group classes or directly afterwards, then go and practice the weaknesses he/she has highlighted. Depending on the length of time you have been dancing, you have probably engrained your bad habits deep inside your brain and it will take hard work and dedication to remove them.

The basics you will need to focus on include the foot positions, body position, hand signals and tension. Foot positions affect your body position and your body position effects your lead, and tension affects everything, so you will need to start from the feet and work upwards. Once you have mastered the basics, you can then incorporate them into all the turn patterns you have in your repertoire.

A lot of the information you will require to get to an advanced level is beyond the scope of this article and can only be learnt by taking classes, much of it will need to be tailored to the individual. This article is to try and educate dancers on how they need to dissipate the information they receive during tuition, to help them go into classes with the right attitude and to leave the classes with the right information to practice.

Look out for the second article on Styling and Body Movement which will be posted next week.

Firstly, I believe that most dancers early in their development are not able to distinguish the characteristics of an advanced dancer, and often not until they have travelled on that path and reached the destination are they able to answer it. I also believe it is impossible for anyone to judge their own level; all we have is the comparison of the present and where we were in the past.

I will break the dance into 4 key areas, all of which need to be mastered, before anyone can be considered an advanced dancer, and the best, are exceptionally good at all of them.

Leading and Following – Salsa being a partner dance, this is the foundation and the first part you need to master.

Styling and Body movement – Many people would break these two up into separate categories, but for me they are one and the same, styling is an extension of the body movement, and generally if you don’t have good body movement, your styling will just look out of place, so it is not advisable to learn one without the other.

Spinning – The body turning one or more revolutions, with the weight balanced on one foot. In our style spinning is prevalent at the higher levels.

Musicality – This would include anything from staying on beat at a beginner’s level to hitting all the accents of the music at an advanced level.

A very small percentage of students actually focus on perfecting the basics when they start learning, most are intent on learning in the shortest amount of time possible, so when someone suddenly has the epiphany to take their dancing to greater heights, it normally requires going back and studying the basics again. This is incredibly daunting for the majority which is why very few dancers actually succeed and reach their goals.

Another mistake most students make, is spending all their time learning one aspect of the dance as was the case with me. I spent all my time learning how to lead and increasing my repertoire of turn patterns, which meant that girls liked dancing with me but I never looked that good dancing.

Now don’t get me wrong, leading and following is probably the most important aspect along with staying on beat, as this will get partners lining up to dance with you, but just remember as a male lead I prefer dancing with a girl who follows really well but looks terrible over a girl that follows nothing but looks amazing! Alex will say the same thing about the guys! So in essence learn how to lead and follow first but don’t forget the other aspects and incorporate them into your practice sessions.

So now the question most of you are probably asking. ‘How do you go about improving these key areas?’

As there is a lot of information to include which will make this blog post far too long, I am in the process of writing a separate article on each of the four key areas, I will publish them over the next four weeks.

All the key areas I will discuss will take time to perfect. If you have the desire to become an advanced dancer, the one thing you have to invest in is time. If your instructor is really good you can improve at a much faster rate, but you have to listen to what they are saying, take their advice and practice it. Like anything in life, to get good at something takes dedication and a whole lot of practice.

Be careful who you listen to and don’t let negative criticism get you down, use it as a motivation to push you to reach your potential. Never listen to anyone who says you can’t get there, because if you are that dedicated, you will get much further than anyone else thinks you can. As nice as it is everyone saying how amazing you are, don’t let it get to your head as until the best dancers are singing your praises, you are probably not there yet.

Look out for the first article on Leading and following which will be posted this week.

Leading & Following
Styling & Body Movement

This was my first attempt in choreographing and performing in a music video so for me it was a very interesting experience. What made matters so much harder was that as Alex was out of the country at the time, I had to put the choreography together on my own.

As we were solely dancing to the none lyrical parts, I had one minute of choreography to prepare, with only three two-hour sessions to teach it to our dancers and prepare them for the shoot.

To give you an idea on how we normally put a piece of choreography together, I will start by explaining our usual method. We initially start by spending weeks listening to the music, over and over again, before we even start working on it. During that process, we are trying to listen to everything contained within that track, the phrasing, instrumentation, the subtle accents, hits and breaks. This also aids us to visualize the show before putting movement to the music. Often, we need to edit the music, so during this process, we will cut sections out and by the time we are ready to choreograph, we have a cut we like and already have ideas on the form that the piece will take.

Then comes the hard part; we begin by looping a section of the song, around 10 seconds or so, and playing it repeatedly, trying to fit movement in sync with the music. We dance that part over and over again; until we are 100% sure that it represents the music accurately. We then move on to the next 10 seconds or so and keep repeating until we reach the end of the song. Even though this sounds easy, there are often several parts, especially the breaks, that we can spend a lot of time perfecting, making sure it depicts the music exactly how we visualized it.

Video technology plays an important part at this stage, enabling us to see the results as we go along, often reviewing footage a day or so later, so we can get a fresh take on things. As we gain more experience, we are finding that we have to change less and less, but in the early days, we would see the footage, decide we hated it and would have to completely rework those sections.

Preperation

As I had been given the music Friday, one week before we were going to shoot, I had to compress the weeks of listening into 24 hours, and as the music wasn’t salsa, I had to find a way of making our style fit. Saturday was the team’s first practice and beforehand I needed to prepare as much of the choreography as I could, so as not to waste time. I picked out a footwork section in the first half, which I could prepare on my own, while the partnerwork was far more challenging, having to mentality piece it together in my head, which was totally new to me.

Fifteen minutes with one of the girls, before Saturdays practice, and a few adjustments later, I had the first half of the piece finished, then set about teaching it to the team. One of the advantages of having worked with the dancers for a couple of years is that they are starting to pick up our choreography in a short space of time.

Sunday went pretty much like Saturday, although I did meet with one of the girls to finish the choreography that afternoon, as the last thing I needed was to waste practice time that evening. So after two practices, I had managed to finish the choreography and teach it to the dancers.

In the past, we have always spent weeks if not months perfecting our choreographies so this is where the challenge started; and with most of the dancers working throughout the week, we only had an hour on Wednesday evening with half of them and two hours on Friday, the day of the shoot.

The Day of the Shoot

This was going to be a long day, especially knowing that some of the team members didn’t know the choreography well enough, so an early start was in order to bring the weakest members up to speed before meeting the rest of the team for the last rehearsal. This being our first music video, we didn’t really know what to expect, so the immediate priority was to get the choreography as clean as possible in the small amount of time we had.

With all the final touches completed and armed with enough Red Bull to keep us energized, we arrived at the studio ready to film. Our first challenge was to go through the arduous task of waiting for the girls to finish their hair and makeup, before finally being ready to start.

Our parts were in sections, so we could record each segment separately, which put less pressure on us having to remember the entire choreography in one go. The filming required us to repeat each section over and over again, while they captured us from wide and close up positions. It was exhausting and incredibly hard to maintain the energy, especially as we needed to look happy throughout to fit the theme.

All in all it was a lot of fun and even though there was immense amount of pressure during the week to get this prepared in such a short period of time, it turned out really well on the day, and all of us had a lot of fun filming it. It is incredible to think how much work goes into producing a clip which ultimately ends up being less than three minutes long. Now comes the worst part, waiting to see the finished product!!!!

Here it is the finished video, most of the dancing is towards the end.

This is not intended to offend anyone, it is simply a light-hearted look at some of the emails and phone calls we receive on a daily basis, asking about information readily available on our website. I guess I should be worried that some of the people who have sent these emails might come across this, but then again, if they didn’t find all the information in the first place, chances are, they won’t find this blog! ;)

Firstly, I know if an email was sent through our website, as it states so in the subject line; so it stands to reason that whoever sent the email, would have already browsed through it… or so one would have thought!

Going back to this email I received, it sounds innocent enough, but when you think that our contact numbers are written right above the form that this email was sent through, and at the bottom of every page, it makes you wonder!

So here is a list of my ten favourite questions that were sent through the website form, or asked over the phone, when I know they have looked through the website (in no particular order):

1. Do you teach Hip Hop? I think if we did, we would advertise that fact! I have also been asked for Tango and other dance forms, but this one was the most diverse.

2. I have looked though your website but the group class times don’t suit me, do you do group classes at other times? Again, I think if we did, it would say so on  the website.

3. Do you teach in Sharjah? Well, does it say so on the website?

4. Can you give me details on the classes? (with no other information on the email). I know I probably shouldn’t do this but after about a thousand of these emails, I now just reply with the link to where the information is situated on the site.

5. Do you teach Real Salsa? I am not even going to try and answer this one.

6. My girlfriend is coming to Dubai next week, can you teach me to dance salsa by then? Worse part is, after speaking to him further, he only wanted a couple of classes! And no, this is not possible… before anybody else asks!

7. I have not managed to find any information about salsa classes on your website! It helps if you click on the tab which reads “Classes”.

8. Are your group classes offered with other people or as one on one? … The answer is in your question  (the scary thing is, we’ve been asked this more than once).

9. How long is each class? 8pm – 9pm… I guess it is a tough subtraction to make.

10. And the cherry on top of the cake: I visited your website and got no information! We were very surprised we even received this email… Well, at least they found our email address!

All of these emails we received since we last updated our website, and we have not changed any of the content as a result of these (although if we get many more, we may have to reconsider).

I hope this blog post doesn’t stop us receiving future emails through our website, as we might need new material for part 2! :p

Looking back at the first few performances I gave, they went well, no major mistakes and I re-watch them fondly. Then I went through this period, where I performed shows that were put together in a very short space of time, sometimes over a few days. I hadn’t spent the time perfecting them so the performances always ended badly, some of them so bad I can’t even bring myself to watch them on video, even today.

The show we performed in 2007 at the Indian Salsa Festival was one of these terrible shows to begin with; we put the choreography together in 5 days and only spent 2 days practicing it, so it should have come as no surprise that our first performance of it was terrible. By the time we arrived in India, we had spent a lot of time perfecting and practicing the choreography but that wasn’t enough to take the negativity from the back of my mind.

Until this day I don’t know how I got through that first international performance. I don’t think I have ever been as nervous on stage as I was that night, but we performed it well, got a good response and it has certainly become one of my biggest learning experiences.

It took me a long time to get rid of the negativity from all those previous bad performances. I have had to work hard to do it, by ensuring we always have adequate time to put a show together and perfect it till the choreography flows naturally.  This has given me so much more confidence, even debuting a new show internationally doesn’t scare me anymore. I can finally say I actually enjoy being on stage!

This article is not going to go in depth with the music, because I am not a musician, I don’t understand all the nuances in the music, how and why the music is put together, and quite frankly, I don’t care; in my opinion it is not important (although some of you will disagree). This article is how I relate to the music as a dancer and to do that I am going to talk about my journey through salsa.

Twelve years ago, I saw salsa for the first time in my life and all I saw was the dance, I don’t remember what song was playing or even the genre, I just saw people dancing and knew then that’s what I wanted to do. It took another four years for me to hear salsa again and that was about six months after I arrived in Dubai.

Throughout those early months and even years, I don’t remember much about the music, and I couldn’t hear the differences between the various rhythms, although the one thing I do recollect is that I didn’t like any of it, but I loved the dance, so as long as the DJ played something that resembled salsa, I was happy.

Slowly over the years, I started to appreciate it so much more, I was finding songs that I really liked and traveling to Salsa Congresses/Festivals really opened my mind to some of the music that was out there. This was the first time I really started enjoying the music, admittedly it helped that they were actually playing salsa and not the mixture of Latin rhythms that I was used to, but it did give me a newfound love for the music, which has only got stronger over time.

Two years ago, we decided to introduce a salsa night with the intention to play music that we really appreciated and to educate our students on some of the great Mambo and Latin Jazz tracks that have been produced over the years.

We have taken a lot of criticism and have had very little support from many people by playing this type of music, with the exception of the few educated salseros that have traveled and understand the style of music we prefer. Most request us to play commercial Latin, Romantica, and even Salsation which is incredibly monotonous to dance to. As for me, it is all about the tempo changes and the breaks, which most beginners and intermediates struggle with at first, although, helps to improve their dancing over time.

Two years on and we have so many people that love the music that we play and would go to our night over some of the others; we still get people complaining and some refuse to even attend the night, but quite frankly we are not going to change for them. There are many places that play other types of Salsa here in Dubai, so let us have one night where we can really enjoy the music that motivates us to dance.

So if you want to dance to our kind of music that may be a little different to your usual tastes, try our salsa night, and you never know after a few weeks or even months you might just start to like it, and if you don’t, there are plenty of other salsa nights for you – except of course if you are one of our students, you are contractually required to be at Zinc every Saturday night!!!! :-p