Blog~

April 26, 2012

Blog~

April 23, 2012

Is Salsa Dancing easy? Social dancing? or performance? Let’s talk about social dancing! From my experience, it’s easy but not so easy. Can it be both? Learning the movements takes you far and it depends on your goal of what you want to do. At the beginning, the follower has it easier because they don’t have many options. It is less productive for a follower to dance with a beginner because they are not challenged. However, I don’t recommend you rejecting anyone because it’s not niceL I am just talking about the technical stuff. If you dance with a beginner, focus on your own technique. Followers don’t need to learn the patterns, so they are able to focus more on the styling, feet position, posture, and rhythm. But they need to memorize the basic techniques in order to be a good follower. Many of them quote: “I don’t think I need to go to class, I just follow!” Well yes, you do follow but do you know what you’re following? And more importantly, you don’t even know how it happened! Remember, in order to break the rules, you must know the rules.

In the Night Club, the followers ended up adjusting for the leaders! Beginner and intermediate dancers love to dance with advance followers. Why, because it feels good? No. Because they fake is for us! LOL J Yes. Every time we offer a poor lead, the followers would finish the move themselves. Paying attention to the signals is different than anticipating them. When a follower learns more technical moves, they are giving the leader a greater benefit. On the other hand, when intermediate leaders dance with beginners, the followers tends to not read the signal easy so they end up following what they really feel. Now leaders need to be better at sending clear signals. Good leaders send only one clear signal, no more. I understand that it’s harder to lead than to follow, but in a social dance like Salsa, there is a need to create and dance at the tempo of the music.

Dances like Ballroom, or salsa shows, are more choreographed. You learn many moves for performing and competition. Social dance is just another animal, performing it is very wonderful but for different purposes.

In my opinion, leaders improve by dancing with beginners because that’s when they really learn how to lead. If you can make someone dance, you are already a step ahead! If you like to dance with the best ones and think that some followers are bad because they’re beginners, well guess what? You are probably not leading well. That’s a reality check for me. If I can lead a beginner right, then I’m leading well. In fact, I love to dance with beginners because I can always improve on something. If I dance with an advanced follower, of course it feels better, but I’m not building my skills, certainly my ego is being lifted J

For the followers it’s the other way around! When they dance with beginner leaders, they don’t get challenged. Dancing with experienced dancers improves your technique dramatically.

Learning salsa is hard because it is a pattern-based dance. Why do people want to start dancing Salsa? Most people say they love the music and want to learn how to move to it. I don’t know anyone who’s ever tried to learn salsa just for the moves. The first step is to find the beat: 1,2,3…5,6,7… OK? You got it! Now we can move on. I don’t think people spend enough time understanding the music. You don’t need to have a Music degree to understand salsa music, but you do need to pay attention to what is happening with the music, not just the rhythm.  Most beginners dance off beat. Why, because they are beginners? NO! It’s because they don’t listen to the music as often as they should. It’s human nature to want to learn the advanced things first before mastering the basics. I know we want to be cool, but it’s we won’t go far that way. We memorize patterns and then our dance becomes just a pile of patterns. If we are dancing to Oscar de Leon, Celia Cruz, El Gran Combo, and The Latin Brothers; we are still looking the same way. For 2 reasons: the beat for us is 1,2,3-5,6,7 and the moves and patterns we memorize never change. As an instructor, I am responsible to teach beginners the meaning of the music and the salsa basics! Right turn, cross body lead, inside turn, spot turn, etc. At the end, all these simple moves will combine to make complicated patterns. Taking short cuts is not a good way to become a great dancer.

At first, leading is harder then following, but later on it changes. When the leader has a better understanding of the basics, he will lead better and faster and the follower would need to react quicker. Followers space between leads are now really thin.

I found this really funny! Beginner and Intermediate dancers want to learn the hard, cool stuff.  But advanced dancers and instructors usually like to work on the basics.  If you want to be a good social dancer, you need to master your basic steps. Everything in salsa comes from your basics. We have 10 concepts (basics) in salsa and each of those have different variations, for instance: Cross Body Lead is the basic, CBL with a left turn is a variation. CBL with a right turn is another variation. Then we have 10 to 12 styling tools like the hammerlock, the hand toss, and the windmills. If we do 2 to 3 variations for each basic, we create 10X2 of move that are coming just from the basics. Add the styling tool on top, then mix the basics into two basic variations, and you can keep going for as long as you want. When you learn 3 counts of 8s, you will be doing the same moves over and over again because it takes repetition and time to memorize it all.

For Leaders, mastering the basics allows them to create more moves rather than repeating the same sequence.  Followers usually improve on their technique, the response to the lead, and their reaction to it.

I love social dancing because it is challenging and you never know what to expect. If you are beginning to dance, I recommend you to take it easy and try avoiding making the same mistakes we all make. J

If you are serious about learning salsa, don’t be afraid of the basics. Master the fundamentals and you will not regret it!

Until next episode,

Ricardo Tellez Giron

April 10, 2012

Salsa Blog-

What a weekend! Salsa y mas Salsa. The SF Salsa Festival was a success! It was organized by John Narvaez and Liz Rojas; the Salsamania Dancers festival was also a full house! I’m really amazed by the way John and Liz organized this event. From the ballroom, workshops, DJs, instructors, vendors, the salsa bands, and everything else was so synchronized. They’ve been doing it for three years. I cannot imagine the work they put into preparing for such a big event with so much entertainment! You guys rock~!!

Pre Congress party Thursday night:

Club Cocomo:

I had to practice with RicaSalsa before the festival. As usual, four Salsamaniacs were at the door to welcome me. As soon as I walked in, I saw that Liz Rojas looked so relaxed and happy. For having an event of this magnitude, I thought she’d be feeling stressed or nervous like most people do, but she didn’t. I saw the DJ Booth and DJ Honk spinning awesome salsa music. Waiting for their set were DJ Chino and DJ Amarok From Toronto! The Salsa Band for the night was Danilo y su Orquestra Universal. I know Danilo from way back. His band vibrated with energy through the walls of Cocomo. We are so lucky to have so many great musicians in the Bay Area. Remember that without the band, we cannot dance Salsa! Supporting live music is very important.

The performances begin with Salsa Sin Limite, Salsamania Family. It is always nice to see new performers because they always come with such much energy. Another Bay Area icon, Ava Apple, performed alone with Adriana Correa “Mambo Elite”, and also with Lindsay Wylie, a great Mambo piece “Ven a mi Casa,” the english version “Come on my house!” which was great.

Is Adriana Correa back? I hope so, because I love watching her

dance. She is someone I loved to watch in the late 90s. Welcome back Adriana~

The Latin Bombshells is another group directed by Silke Miller. Silke is a ballroom dancer who mixes Salsa with other Latin techniques. Ricardo Sanchez Team Salsa Cruz did an amazing job too! Some of the dancers had to learn a routine in less than a week. Way to go guys! The team Sangre Latina was directed by our friend, Jose SantaMaria. It was great! For the closing of the show, there was a couple from Guatemala, Alex Aquino and Majo Borrayo. Buen trabajo muchachos! Coming out of Guatemala, this new couple has made an impact in the competition and will compete at the Albert Torres World Latin Dance Cup on December 12^th to 15th in Miami, Florida.

Westin Hotel:

Friday night- To be honest, I didn’t know what to expect. Last year, I was out of town and I missed it. I promised John and Liz I would never miss the festival again! So, I was there for a tech rehearsal at 5:30 p.m., ready to run our RicaSalsa Piece to one of my favorite songs, “Sin poderte hablar” by Willie Colon. We had a good Tech practice. I went back home to rest and prepare for the performance.

The Night began with the competition! Amateurs, pro-am, team division, on1 on2, …I would love to mention all the performances but it will take too long. As a competitor, everybody is a winner. Competing pushes you to your limits, but you will get better and stronger no matter what while you prepare for competition.

Show time:

Since I was assigned photographer, I had many things on my plate, plus, RicaSalsa had to open the show. Opening is a hard think to do. The energy is still mellow and people don’t know what to expect. I think we had a good run and people liked it.

We were lucky enough to have MR Albert Torres in the house. Albert is the most important Salsa promoter of Latin music around the world. Having Albert in the festival makes you feel like you’re at a red carpet event. Fourteen Teams performed and they all did a great job showcasing their different styles of interpreting the music.

As a Mexican, I feel so proud of my “paisanos” for coming to this festival to represent my lovely country, Mexico. Ernesto and Maritza, David and Paulina, Jonathan and Eli; you guys did an amazing job! David Zepeda and Paulina Posadas are the 2011 WLDC Champions on 2 Division; Ernesto Lopez and Maritza Gonzales are the 2011 WLDS Champions on Cha Cha Division; and Jonathan Ibarra and Eli for the Guadarrama 2011 WDLC 3rd place on1 division. We also had the 2011 WLDC Cabaret Division Champions from Venezuela, Grizzly Hidriago, and from Cuba, Alien Ramirez “Noche de Campeones” Night of Champions.

After the performances Karl Perazzo’s “Orquesta Avance” jam the house. Avance is one of the biggest reasons I dance salsa. I remember seeing them at Kimball’s Carnival, back in the 90s, and the image of those guys still lingers in my mind. This was the pre Karl Perazzo’s 50th Birthday party. Congrats on your success Karl, you are an inspiration for the whole Latin community.

Saturday’s the big Gala. At rehearsal, you can feel the energy building up. It feels like something big is about the happen. My dance partner Tianne and I were going to rehearse our lyrical piece “Someone like you” by Adele. After the tech rehearsal, something unexpected happened. Albert Torres asked me if we could talk for a minute and he quoted: “Ricardo, I was walking to my room and then I heard the song playing, my instinct told me it was you guys. I ran back to the ballroom and watched you guys. Let me tell you, It was amazing” He invited us to perform on his Gala night on May 14^th, at the annual Salsa Congress in Los Angeles. Sunday night is going to be a special legendary night. I was so happy Albert enjoyed our piece. He said he loved our uniqueness. Thanks Albert, we wont let you down! And we will work hard to make it better.

It is 8 p.m. Doors open and the room begins to fill. Energy is in the air. Grizzly Dance Company open the set with amazing energy and presence. They were perfect to open the show.  Even though I was focusing on taking the pictures, in the back of my mind I was thinking about the performance with Tianne. We were number 10 out of 14 groups. Finally, after the 7^th act, I went back stage and got ready for the show, physically and mentally. We had a really great introduction by Albert Torres and there we went! I felt good and felt that the performance was a standing ovation from the beginning to the end. I was happy and relieved. Now, back to the camera!

While I was getting ready to perform, I missed the Ballroom  performance danced by Max and Tatiana, but many told me they did really good. JC and Tellina’s Afinkao also performed with their Afro-Cuban movement and feminine style. Montuno did a really nice and energetic piece (El Poderoso) meaning the powerful one; Ava’s Latin Symbolic did a Hustle routine; Ricardo Sanchez performed with PB&G; and Couture Dance Alliance performed a jazzy mambo song. Then it was Salsamania’s turn to showcase their new routine. I loved the way john and Liz played with their space, ins and outs, formations, etc. You guys did a fine job mixing all these elements together. I really liked friday nights’ Salsamania’s Nueva dimension show, there were lots of things happening. Good show!

The internationals came on stage and amazed the audience with their energy. There is so much to say about this Festival but I wish I had more time!

The night ended with a 19-piece band, Bay Area’s Unique Pacific Mambo Orquestra! PMO rocked the house! They are becoming one of bay area’s favorite band, since they are so unique style in their styles of mambo, salsa, and cha cha cha. PMO takes you back to the palladium era’s golden age. Yes, they are in San Francisco. Watch our world Pacific Mambo Orquestra here!

This was overall a great event by organized by John, Liz, Salsamaniacs, and Angie, who did an amazing job as the MC.

OMG! I have not typed this much since school, hahaha, but that’s the point of blogging and sharing experiences!

Until next week,

Ricardo Tellez Giron