1) Start Thinking of Yourself as a Dancer
Salsa is not just a social activity that involves your body. It’s actually a complete DANCE.
Therefore, Salsa has a lot in common with other dances (such as Ballet and Breakdance).
What do you know about dancers in general?
You’ve probably heard that dancing requires a lot of discipline and practice.
Maybe you think of words like elegance, posture and control of your body.
The above is true even of PARTNER dances such as Salsa.
Sure, we don’t have to jump like Ballet dancers do. Or spin on our heads like breakdancers.
But if you want to become a better Salsa dancer, you do have to
- have the discipline to stick with your lessons and focus when you’re in class.
- practice by taking a lot of workshop ours and ideally repeat your steps at home
- work on your elegance by looking at the mirror and self-correcting your movement
- become more aware of your posture and how it influences your appearance
- perhaps do other body-control practices outside of salsa dancing
Almost everything that applies to professional dancing also applies to becoming a better Salsa dancer.
So you’re not really just a person who joins a Salsa class every now and then.
Start thinking of yourself as a real dancer instead!
2) Stop Believing That You Need “Latin Blood” to Dance
Many dance students think that Latinos or Cubans are born with a talent for dance.
But nobody is blessed with the ability to dance based on their nationality. (You won’t believe the number of Cubans at clubs who asked me to dance with their girlfriends because they couldn’t!)
The truth is, some cultures simply encourage dance more than others. Some cultures are more centered around music than others.
A child growing up in Cuba will be exposed to music all the time. They will see people dancing at social gatherings more often. Their parents will encourage them to dance and reward them with praise.
The equation is this: a lot of children from latin countries have simply spend more TIME dancing than you have.
To become a better Salsa dancer, try to create an environment that mirrors that of a latin child:
- play Salsa music all the time (some of by more motivated students can listen to hours every day)
- join a community where you get positive reinforcement for dancing (like our social dances)
- start watching dance videos all the time to train your eye
- catch up with the “dancing hours“ you’ve missed as a kid and take more classes & repeat more hours at home
- kill the belief that you have to dance correctly BEFORE you allow your body to express what the music makes you feel
What do you remember about dancing when you were a child? Did you dance at all? Did your family encourage it.
3) Find a Salsa Practice Partner
For many people, joining a class once a week is not enough practice time to improve rapidly.
If you’re one of these people, look for a practice partner.
When I started learning Salsa, I’ve spend hours practicing with different friends from class.
We simply repeated the most recent figures we learned.
The reason this approach is so helpful is that is solves several challenges at once:
- it increases the amount of dancing TIME you spend practicing (=the more time the better)
- it removes the pressure that some people experience in class
- you have time to help each other understand and explain what’s important in the figure
- you start to become more relaxed with messing up & learn to laugh about it
4) Use Spaced Repetition
Spaced repetition is a concept from research on Learning. It says that one of the best ways to memorize is to repeat what you want to learn—with pauses in between.
The point is to challenge your brain to recall your Salsa movement in regular intervalls.
If you join one of my beginner classes, I will take care of the repetition.
However, on higher levels, we won’t repeat the choreographies in class.
In this case, it might be useful to repeat them yourself, ideally with gradually longer spaces between the repetition.
Here is a recipe for becoming a better Salsa dancer through spaced repetition
- Visualize new steps from class the same night just before you’re about to sleep. You don’t have to dance, just try to see everything you’ve learned in front of your inner eye
- When you wake up in the morning, try to go through the steps by yourself. Even if you don’t have a dance partner with you, try to move the arms “as if.”
- Throughout the week, have a look at the video from class you took of the figure every now and then
- During the weekend, schedule a session with your dance partner to repeat
- When you go to social dancing that weekend, try to recall the steps of that last figure before and make sure you remember to repeat the steps just a few times during the evening.
If you repeated your steps in the above manner for a week and briefly repeat it every week for 3 weeks after that, the steps will probably stay in your memory forever
5) Record Yourself on Video
In order to improve your movement, you’ll have to see your movement!
Most people have no idea how they look when they dance.
You may really be satisfied with what you see in the mirror during class, but the video often tells a different story
Ask a friend to videotape you when you’re out social dancing so that you can analyze later one.
BONUS TIP: films yourself next to your teacher (in choreography or social dancing). That way, you can compare your own movement to a model.
6) Pick Your Teachers Wisely
In the first years of your dancing, pick a Salsa teacher who teaches well. In the the later years, pick a teacher who dances well.
Ideally, you will find a teacher who does both (but it’s actually rather uncommon.)
7) Ask (Yourself and your Teacher) Good Questions
Is movement A the same as movement B?
Where is the difference between movement A and movement B?
What muscles should I activate here?
Where is my weight during this step?
Which direction am I going?
What is the feeling for this movement?
What signal should I be feeling from the leader here?
How can I practice this movement if I have troubles with it? What easier versions are there?
Where in my body am I too tense? Where am I too soft?
How is my posture right now?
Where should I look?
Where am I (are we in space)? What is the geometrical pattern?