You know, if it hadn't been for playing in the band, I don't think I'd still be dancing salsa regularly today.
No, really.
Starting up what is now known as "4 de Diciembre" is, in perfect hindsight, maybe the most serendipitous move of my relationship with salsa, and at the right time. Many of the crucial things were in place; I'd been teaching for many years and after having understood the skill of combination building, dance vocabulary had already taken second place to skills of movement and execution.
What I didn't realise at that time was that although my physical abilities were well matched with the intellectual, I still had a blind spot in that I lacked, for want of a better word, emotional rapport. That's not to mean that I didn't connect to the music - far from it. During those years, I enjoyed my dancing and it showed. But my quest which started out to identify the time-keeping components of salsa, led to appreciating the different salsa types, recognising the embedded cultural elements, and realising why salsa makes people want to dance. That's thanks mainly to being in 4 de Diciembre.
Most of all, it's made me feel.
And it's the foremost criterion I now look for in a person I ask for a dance - she has to feel something for salsa. Asking various regulars of the salsa scene here how salsa makes them feel, I get a mixed response from blank looks of puzzlement, to "happy". Not exactly articulate, I had hoped for something a little more insightful from the more experienced. So in my best "Sex in the City" moment, I ask, "Do we think enough about how we feel? Or what we should feel if at all?"
Yeo Loo Yen
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