What Is The Dance to me?


If you are the hard-core salseros/salseras, you know that nobody outside of this salsa world could understand why you are so crazy about Salsa.

I actually sometimes have been asked why I am such addicted to salsa. I always try to explain, but I don’t think they can understand. They nod as if they could understand though, Naah, I don’t think so. I am tired of this. And, I now avoid talking about salsa to non-salsa people. But once and for all, I am trying to explain it here again.

What is so fun or interesting about Salsa? What brings you going out every night and spending money to do the same shit? How come did you hook up with salsa? Well… Officially I always answer like this.

Probably it is because I can enjoy many aspects of life from the salsa and activities related to that, such as the musical aspect, the sport like aspect, the social aspect, the artistic aspect, and, yes of course, drinking aspect (my major contribution to the salsa world).

I like salsa because, of course!, I can enjoy the music. It is so rhythmical, emotional, passionate, stimulating, and improvising. All of those makes me high, passionate, stimulate my instinct, and joyful. I used to play the guitar, and I liked it very much. But the difficult part of playing instruments was that I had to practice everyday by myself to keep me at a certain level. After I graduated the college and started working, eventually my job got so busy that it was so difficult to keep me practicing everyday. Dancing is a little bit different. Although you have to practice hard if you are a pro, but it doesn’t have to be everyday for us, normal social dancers. It was right after I quit playing guitar when I stated dancing salsa.

I like salsa because it is like a sport. It makes me sweat (actually I do a lot). It burns my fat (hopefully). It blows your stress from your daily life. Sometimes, you’re gonna get hard to breath. Sometimes (now it is very rare to me though) even you can feel sore muscle on the next day when you danced hard. Sometimes people even get cramp! Yeah, it is a sport.

It is a sport like thing, but at the same time it is an artistic activity. If you are good enough, you can express your emotion, feeling, or any kind of inner part of you (oh yeah). Through dancing, even if it was in a dark shitty club of a nameless small town in a frontier world where you don’t even understand their language, you can make an art and make people admired, impressed and pleased (only if you are a good dancer). This requires skills, knowledge and practice. But this is definitely an art, which is a challenging and interesting thing to do. I like it and would like to do it.

I like salsa because I can have a lot of friends from all over the world in many kinds of people. From Japan, Boston, NYC, San Francisco, LA, Paris, Bangkok, Hong Kong, and of course, DR, PR those Latin countries. Their job types are very different too, like lawyer, taxi driver, scientist, marketing person, musician, accountant, person who doesn’t want to talk about his job, person who doesn’t have any jobs, mother, student and artists. Their ages are different, from 7 years old girl to I don’t know the oldest age. It is absolutely interesting to have a conversation with different kind of people.

And of course, I like salsa because I can get close to those beautiful ladies. Many times it is just a relationship for a few minutes during one song. But sometimes you can pick a girl friend from a club, sometimes people marry people who met in salsa world. Or sometimes you can have just a one night stand or, two or three…

And, I have to add this though, one good part in salsa is you can do this with drinking. Drinking makes me forgetting everything I dislike and I just can focus on happy things. (I am going to talk about this later in the next chapter.)

All right. Things written above are all true, and those are surly the reasons that make me continue to be in the salsa world. But…., if I were to say one most reason why I do so, what keeps attracting me is the dancing itself. All above are related to this part, but that is not all.

I always feel dancing is like a conversation, and I like to enjoy this good conversation with my partner through our fingertips, palms, eye contacts, or even the move of her ass! You can have a conversation with your partner without speaking any single word. It could be just like a fun conversation with your long-time best friend. It could be very nice, stimulating, fun interesting, heart-warming, excitiing and/or comfortable. Sometimes I heard the good dance could be even a better pleasure than sex. It is like your body and heart is melting into your partner. Yes, you can fall in love from just one dance, even though it is just few minutes long. This is the very difficult part for me to explain to the people who don’t dance. But this magical moment, chemistry between your partner, or you can say instinctive relationship is definitely there. I don’t think people who doesn’t salsa can understand ever. Some precious privilege only we, dancers, can experience. I don’t even try to explain this to people since they would never understand this.

Posted: Sun - November 20, 2005 at 03:14 AM          

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