During your first few weeks of Salsa lessons, you were taught the Cross Body Lead.
At least I hope you were (unless you were learning Cuban of course…)
You were probably taught a specific pattern of steps for this move, and repeated it over and over.
1,2,3,5,6,7…
No deviation from that rhythm pattern.
But if you look around a Salsa dance floor and watch the guys dancing, you’ll notice that there are some very different things going on.
Yes, some guys will be stepping their cross body footwork exactly the way you were taught.
Other guys will shuffle, spin and slide their way through the footwork.
Others will do all manner of funky stuff you couldn’t possibly copy if you tried.
Still others will appear to do not very much at all.
Why is this?
Well, the move doesn’t depend on the lead’s footwork at all. When a guy reaches a certain level of skill, he can deliver enough information to the lady about what he wants her to do without having to step through the move himself.
As long as her lead is clear and well timed, he can do whatever he likes with his feet and nothing will go wrong.
So how do you get from just stepping to doing all that funky, fun stuff?
The short answer is that it’s a process.
It’s not going to happen overnight.
When you get more comfortable with the structure of the dance, when your “map” of how the lady’s moves work and link together, leading the basic turn patterns will become less of a conscious process,
At this point you will able to start de-coupling the lead delivery from your own footwork.
For this to be possible, there’s another pre-requisite:
You first need to be able to dance on different rhythms – the core beats, the off beats, and the half beats in between, whilst keeping the follower on her Salsa rhythm.
There are only so many ways a human can move around a dance floor – all locomotion starts with a weight shift or transfer, and from there the options we have are to step, spin, slide, hop, or jump.
We can embellish those base locomotive steps with further rhythmical embellishments: taps, flicks, kicks, rondez etc.
The trouble is that when you have a lady on the end of your arm, trying to integrate all of this is multi-tasking to the extreme.
It’s highly demanding on your cognitive processes, will disrupt your timing and flow to begin with.
It’s very likely that when you have tried to do “new stuff” in the past, that it all went horribly wrong for a while.
You may even have decided that it wasn’t worth the effort and ditched your attempts.
So I’ve created a process which layers all these new skills piece by piece on top of what you know already.
My approach to teaching this is slightly unconventional in terms of traditional Salsa teaching.
However, it is rooted in the science of how your brain actually learns new movement, and the delivery is designed to keep you in the cognitive part of your brain – the pre-frontal cortex – so you don’t experience those brain freeze or meltdown moments and go blank.
This is what I teach on my Logical Leading Workshop – how to get past that annoying “improver” label without your social dancing falling apart, so you will be able to think and dance outside the box like those guys you’ve seen on the floor.
You’ll refine your leading skills and learn how to move around and manage the dance space better.
Connection will be enhanced – you’ll start to appreciate the followers experience and understand what she wants in a dance…the key to being sought after and described as a “good lead”.
Six hours to dramatically upgrade your dancing and leading skills.
To feel your confidence grow as you start to actually see yourself as dancer.
So shake off the shackles of “just stepping”, and join the ranks of “really dancing”.
Click here to find out how: http://salsaintoxica.com/logical-leading-workshop