UKSALSA CHAT | ON2 CHAT | SUZYQ CHAT 
Subject: routines
From: les (Les)
Date: Saturday 1st March 2003, 5:04 pm

 BEGIN QUOTE 
I have been going to classes about twice a week for the last eight months. I go to different classes and teachers so that I can get gain an all round experience of the different styles of salsa. What I have found without exception is that all the teachers teach salsa in a routine framework so that you could get four distinct moves or figures rolled into a routine. I have to say I'm getting fed up with learning salsa this way. Learning a routine in a class even with complicated moves is not a measure of how good a dancer you are but how good you are at copying the intructor and remembering. It is a challenge for observation and memory that is all, not dancing skill.

Sooo why teach salsa this way, is there not any other way? I have a salsa video tape which demonstrates each move seperately which makes it very easy to follow. Surely this method could be taught live in a class. The format could go as follows. The instructor demos the move. Then goes through it slowly until the class has got it. Then it is practiced with music even if it just four bars long. The students are then told to freestyle it in ther own time with music without any calling. Here the students might want to begin with a basic mambo. Okay so that is the first move learned. The second move is taught in the same way. How the students put them together is up to them. So there we have two moves learned which might take up to eight bars. I think eight bars of salsa is quite enough for one evening. Maybe four bars is enough even if the class only takes half an hour, at least that is one move the students can take home with them that they have got throughly fixed in their body/mind system.

At a salsa party if you are dancing spontaneously in the moment you do not dance class taught routines. That is dancing in the head which will curtail your natural expression.

 END QUOTE 

i tend to agree with what you are saying
 i come from a sport back ground where good coaches always talk about core skills the stuff that makes everything else work
 shame you are not in the London area , there is a work shop called the move machine run by salsarapido, it lays the class out like circuit training with four instructors forming workstations you spend 10 minutes with each instructor then move on rotating round the class time permiting you complete 2 circuits learn 8 short routines:very simular to Robert Charlamagne video approach and with different instructors lots of contrast,

 i'v always thought advanced dancers would benifit more from technique classes ,take a move then learn every variation of that move forward backwards what can it lead to ? where can it go ?how's it led? really know just that move inside out, would be nice on those occasions when you are dancing with a woman who's smiles makes your brain misfire and blank, to have something short and sweet to pull out give yu time to recover. maybe if instuctors took the 'shorts' approach to teaching they would run out of material ?
 

  i think you would be suprised how many dancers in london do actually dance in memorised class routines,and i sopposed it is better than having a class with not enough to occupy your mind,
 recently did a lambada class based on man turn woman turn man turn , that was the routine.
 

   
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