The Salsa & Merengue Website (Part 1): The Big Clean

The Salsa & Merengue website has for a long time been an uncomplainingly unattended brainchild. As salsa horizons stretched, dotted with the hugely entertaining events and pithy crisis-points, this wondrous resource (words from you, the users) saw less and less of me.

High on the list of things to do was the archiving of the Spanish sections.

It was a decision weighed with reluctance, but there were increasingly fewer and fewer resources to be mobilised for human translation, and it was beginning to show. The divergence between the modern English sections and the fractured Spanish ones painted the loss of coherence as obvious. And bearing in mind what new material there is to go up, the lack of their Spanish language counterparts would push the website's identity into the realms of the unravelled.

Another minor niggle was the information section about the activities of the University of Sheffield Union of Student's Salsa Society. I'd kept that publicity avenue available to them because of our long history together, but since their move almost solely to Facebook, responses to email queries directed to them via this route had become sporadic. It was starting to hurt public perception of the site.

But the straw which stirred prompt action assumed the form of an email by a kindly concerned visitor, a Mr. Silvestre, last week:

[Quote]

"Your trainings are fantastic. They are helping me a lot for salsa. I started with Merengue also and noticed that the codec you used (ligos-Indeo) for compressing these videos are different and are not supported by Vista or Windows 7. No video viewer is able to display them (VLC, Gom, WMP, etc)

"I found a solution by reincoding in a different xvid codec and now I am able to watch them. Other people may be disapointed by not viewing your videos and may not find a solution.

Here's a link where they explain the problem: http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/GettingReadyforWindows7/thread/b9789ce2-394d-4499-850e-04d67650e4e2"

[Unquote]

Okay. That's a problem on a different scale altogether.

I replied expressing my profound thanks, and then set about a solution. My first inclination was to recode and re-upload - not a small task. What I found galling was that there was no guarantee against the same thing happening again, some time down the line.

Then my colleague, Paul, suggested YouTube. And it all made sense!

They'd bear the burden of band-width and future-proofing; I'd be able to integrate video inline with the text on the webpage; and there was a small opportunity to direct new-sector traffic to the website. The only downsides were a compromise on intellectual property use as per YouTube's terms and conditions (which is only a theoretical compromise, since people were free to download and use it before); and the poorer control of the playhead slider.

And that's what's been happening in-between blog posts: uploading, and spring-cleaning of files and HTML.

It's done, and I'm very much happier with the presentation of the dance lessons now that the videos are embedded on the page. The proof of the pudding, as always, will be in the responses I receive from developing dancers like Mr. Silvestre.

Loo Yen Yeo

Salsa Ear-Training Series Completed

It's done.

I was not sure this day would arrive... the day when I finished the Salsa Ear-Training series that I started three and a half years ago. But with uploading of the timbale rhythms tutorial, it's happened.

I was in a meeting with a colleague, Adrian, about the delivery of material on a new MBA programme a few days ago and we were talking about blogs, about how useful they were to the people who wrote them. More so perhaps than to those who read them (sorry, no offence intended). As I finished the file upload I took stock of just how much of a learning experience this has been. Similar to blogging, the writing of each lesson has brought its own rewards but the intensity of effort has been orders of magnitude higher: in design, planning, validation, and critical self-reflection.

And did it work out to plan?

Timbale shell strategy
©Copyright 2008 Loo Yen Yeo. All Rights Reserved.

I'd say so. The structure and progression must have been robust from the beginning, because no changes proved necessary over the fourty-plus months it took to complete. I would have liked to say that it worked out better than expected but I can't, because it was so highly specified in the first place (and you should be the judge of that) that exceeding the targets was never likely.

The design route of the learning section did assume unexpected changes of emphasis, to reflect the changes in the salsa scenes themselves - locally, nationally, internationally, and even transnationally. The original path, in my naïveté, was to have increasing levels based on dance vocabulary. However as more instructors came on the scene, plenty of vocabulary resources became available and there didn't seem much sense in reinventing the wheel. As a maturing instructor, I moved to skills-based learning - an adjustment which works better with the prevailing vocabulary-based environment. Salsa Level Two then became about helping people learn how to use rhythm, level three about using their bodies, and level four about bringing the body and rhythm together.

I don't think this process will ever end, the writing of lessons I mean. Nor would I want it to. But it's nice to have closure, albeit in a relativistic sense.

looyenyeo

Context Matters

Finally, I've finished delivering the three tutorials on son phrasing:

Son Phrasing (Part 1): Son and Mambo
Son Phrasing (Part 2): Starting Son, and Clave
Son Phrasing (Part 3): Son Montuno

And another on the zarabanda action:
Zarabanda: A Context for Rhythmic Anticipation

Add those to the two ear-training lessons I'd done just before them, and it makes a marathon six tutorials written in a very short span of time. And my brain feels like it's run every inch of those 26 miles.

Regular visitors to the Rhythm Sense section in which the four tutorials are housed might recall that there were initially three unactivated menu items: Rhythmic Agreement and Participation; Commencing on Two Dance Cycles; and Rhythmic Anticipation. That was how I foresaw the tutorials taking shape; I knew the technical skills that I wanted to convey, but didn't have a strong sense of how to deliver them in a manner that wasn't dry. Had I done it that way, I think only really hard-core dancers would have stuck with it.

Zarabanda rhythm (torso) over Afro 6/8 pulse (lower body)
©Copyright 2008 Loo Yen Yeo. All Rights Reserved.

In the end, it took me a break from writing and dancing salsa (necessitated by the recording project) to decide on how. I'd always promised myself to work on my son dancing more, and so I did; and it coincided with two other events: leading the development of a batch of trainee salsa instructors, and finishing David F.García's book on Arsenio Rodríguez.

It became clear that the son was the ideal genre for the context of the former two skills; the zarabanda described by Ned Sublette for Rhythmic Anticipation; and the son montuno as the bridge between them. I'm happy with the way they've turned out. But naturally the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and since I can't unlearn and relearn the son just to validate it, I might have to wait until I have the chance to teach son again.

Sometimes I do wonder if it's material that anyone ever reads. At the very least it's a solitary enterprise - myself learning through the authoring process, and publishing it for Netizens to stumble upon. Oh, and it's also a good source of teaching support - I can refer my workshop attendees to it as required; they seem to like that a lot. I think it reassures them that they don't have to remember everything that I say during the class.

And, there is more context yet to come: more ear-training tutorials which layer up into a modern son rhythm section. The tracks are ready, the mind is... ?

Yeo Loo Yen

In a Teaching State of Mind

Well that's another salsa tutorial done, which means I can post this much belated blog entry.

It's been pretty hard getting back into the teaching mindset; more specifically writing for a web-delivered tutorial because of its unique constraints and demands. I've just done two in a row: on lateral chest isolation and on circular movement of the torso which completes the upper-body level programme. Roll on to the hips next.

I'm only just feeling as if I'm into the swing of things again. And since efficiency is a big thing with me, I'll stick with the lesson writing for a good while to save having to shift mental gears. I've always maintained that I get as much out of doing this as those who use them, although there seems always to be a point in the process where I question that; usually when I'm struggling to articulate a tough concept.

So all in all, things are going well, and I'm looking forward to completing the body movement series over the next few months. I've nearly convinced myself that the 'Using Rhythm' tutorials deserve their own section, but there has to be more content to warrant that (and you know what that means).

Loo Yen Yeo