Week 5 - March 26th 2008

Things are getting serious now!

We started this lesson off with learning to 'hear the music'.
The clave (pronounced claa-vey) forms the foundation of salsa - if you listen for it, you'll find it has a distinctive beat. Not all salsa music will have the clave, but there will be an instrument in the background tapping out the clave beat. We improvised using some things we found in the kitchen....a cheese grater and a couple of sticks of Blackpool rock (because of course, everyone has those lying around!). I'm not sure we could form a salsa band quite yet, but its still early days....

And as promised, we showed you a variation on the cross body lead from last week - a cross body lead with a half nelson (where leaders dont let go of the followers hands during the cross body).

Week 4 - March 19th 2008

We're onto the core move in salsa (I believe, anyway!) - the CROSS-BODY LEAD.

If you watch salsa dancers, you will start to recognise the cross-body lead in a variety of guises. The cross-body (short name!) is essentially a change of place, so remember to keep it going in a straight line. Don't forget our improvised straight line - those pieces of string which just wouldn't stay in place!

Leads - remember to open out on step 3 to let your follower step through.

This figure has lots of interesting and cool variations....we'll show you one next week...stay tuned.

Week 3 - March 12th 2008

In week 3 of our salsa taster classes, we learned the left turn.

We're building up the steps into a small routine that you can dance anywhere they play salsa!

Week 2 - March 5th 2008

This week was the second of our free salsa taster sessions. We covered the following steps:

- the basic
- followers right turn
- leaders right turn

Week 1

We were really excited about all of you coming to our very first salsa taster class! We owe thanks to everyone at Queerspace who helped us to advertise this event.

Queerspace is celebrating its 10th anniversary, and our salsa taster class was one of their featured events. Please do check out the Queerspace website for details of their forthcoming events so that you don't miss out on any of them (http://www.queerspace.org.uk/). There were between 30 and 40 of your who came out to dance with us at Mynt in Belfast (many thanks to Mynt for putting on the snacks and giving us a dance space). We really hope that you enjoyed the evening and look forward to seeing you at future dance classes.

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