Purpose Of The Course

I created this course to help novice social, recreational Salsa dancers expand their repertoire so they can enjoy more fun and variety within their dances.

It will help you move away from relying on memorised routines and become more spontaneous on the dance floor so you can connect to the music more and maintain better connection with your partner.

It will deepen your understanding of the structure of Cross Body Salsa so you can improvise more within the framework, and feel that smooth seamless flow that makes it all look effortless.

Who Is The Course For?

This course is designed for leads who would like to expand their moves vocabulary, but are finding that the long routines taught in class aren’t really helping.

It is for followers who want more than the “just follow” instructions often given by teachers who spend the bulk of class time instructing the leaders without breaking down the followers technique, footwork and styling options.

Let’s Look At What Doesn’t Work

Routines, however fun, stylish and creative they may be, are essentially throwaway. This is because most are simply too long or complicated for leads to remember either in chunks or in their entirety.

Many combos look and feel very similar – there may be one thing that’s different – a hand change here, an extra turn there, the direction of a turn, or a difference in positioning of the lead.

Our brains are wired to look for similarities and make connections – this is our primary learning mechanism, but when every weekly routine is presented as a stand-alone choregraphy, it’s not easy to join the dots in your head.

This is why learning everything as a pre-choreographed sequence is not that effective. You need to know how to link moves and create varied sequences on the dance floor FOR YOURSELF.

If you think about how many classes you have done in your Salsa journey to date, and compare that with the amount of material you actually use in a typical social dance, most likely there will be a huge difference.

My own experience has taught me that smaller chunks of learning with plenty of repetition is much more effective to embed excellent technique.

Context is also really important as this will help you understand WHAT you are learning and when to use certain moves and techniques as opposed to others.

If You Are A Follower

You may be thinking “well this doesn’t apply to me – I’m not in charge of the moves”.

On one level that may be true, however you ARE responsible for how you respond to any lead given.

You also have more freedom than you think to add style and body movement.

There is power in knowledge, and in order to follow well this is what you need to know for every move that is led:

1. Correct footwork and precise timing

2. How to reciprocate and maintain the connection through multiple turns

3. How to generate your own energy and momentum and stay on balance

4. When, where and how you can style without interrupting the lead

These are the details which will take you to the next level and connot be learned by social dancing alone, or “just following”.

How This Course Works

Every lesson sticks to a specific format – one that I use in both group and private lessons, and which has been highly successful in accelerating the progression of my students:

Warm Up

My warm ups are a little different but are guaranteed to get your brain and body calm, receptive, and in the zone for dancing and learning.

Too often people rush into Salsa class feeling stressed and then wonder why everything feels hard. It’s simply because your nervous system needs specific conditions to bring the learning centres of your brain online, and my warm ups create those conditions, as well as mobilising all your muscles and joints so you feel more supple.

Solo Work

If you can’t dance alone, you can’t dance at all.

Your individual movement skills are at the core of what you do as a dance partner, and how you look on the dance floor…

And let’s be honest.

Everyone wants to look good.

Luckily, Shines are a fun way to improve all your dance technique – balance, footwork, speed, spinning, styling are all covered in this section, as well as equipping you for that part in the song where you break from your partner – to SHINE!

Partnerwork

This is where I’ll teach leaders my exact method for building a social dance to the music in real time without having to remember huge chunks of choreography.

And I’ll teach followers how to understand what’s being led and respond correctly to any combination with elegance and style, even if you’ve never done it in a lesson before.

The main challenge is to change your thinking. The whole Salsa industry is built on teaching choreography when what you really need is improvisation and musicality skill.

Your brain simply doesn’t have enough bandwidth to remember sequences and recall them on the dance floor.

Yes you do need a moves vocabulary.

But what is lacking for most improver and intermediate dancers is a way to organise the moves in their head.

And to 

For Leads

I firmly believe that a lot of the pressure and anxiety felt by leads in the early stages of their Salsa journey stems from two things:

1. Trying to learn long sequences of moves and then beating yourself up when you don’t do it exactly as it was in class. 
2. Not having the confidence to improvise in your social dances because you haven’t been taught how to use the structure of the dance to create your own stuff.

Imagine what it would feel like if you could switch your brain off and go with the flow of the music, knowing that all the moves you needed were there, and you could create something different every time you danced!

You don’t need anywhere near as much material as you might expect.

You just need to know how to use what you already know to full effect and get more mileage from it.

That’s what this course is about.

The fun begins when you free yourself from trying to be a “perfect copier” and learn how to be a creator…

A creator of fun and unique shared moments with every follower you dance with which will keep them coming back for more.

Course Pre-Requisites

If you are thinking about taking this course, you may have done my previous courses in the series:

Sofa to Salsa Beginner 

Freeze to Freestyle Upper Beginner courses

Salsa Skills & Drills Improver Technique

If that’s the case you will already have the necessary footwork and foundation techniques required to embark on this one.

Shines are an integral part of Salsa, therefore you will need to know all the most common and classic footwork elements.

All my students are well drilled in these, so if your current classes do not teach regular solo footwork skills, there is probably some work you will need to do to catch up, even if your partnerwork is up to speed.

At this level we will be combining steps to create fast-moving, asymmetrical combinations with some syncopated rhythms and changes of direction/orientation.

If you are unfamiliar with the base steps and simple symmetrical combinations of them, you will definitely struggle.

This will not prevent you from joining the course but you will need to commit to getting your footwork up to the standard required. This can be disussed in a Taster Lesson where I can give you a plan to follow.