Latin Practica : Sept '17 Chapter

Ladies Salsa Shine

Beginners Salsa Shine : Pharrel Williams -- Happy

Salsa Shine: Beginners / Improvers Level

Lead v/s Follow: 5 quick tips for a suave Salsa experience

Leaders:

1. Keep your leads lucid and distinct. What is easy to understand is easier to execute.
2. Leads need to be timely, not forceful.
3. Look at the dance from your partner’s perspective with respect to movement and direction; ‘her left, my right’ will put you on a collision course sooner or later.
4. Make a mental note of how your partner responds to cues. Start slow and improve upon what both can manage; discard movements that your partner clearly doesn’t understand.
5. Set your partner free. Shines are a good way to test how comfortable either partners are with musicality and free movement.

Followers:

1. Be cognitive, not pre-emptive. Trying to guess the lead is just too speculative and it robs you of the time to use the music.
2. Let the music set you free. There is never just one way of interpreting the music/lead. Keep experimenting.
3. Give subtle cues to the partner if he/she is being too rigid or forceful.
4. Don’t let styling get in the way of your dancing. You need to make sure that your styling goes with the flow of the dance and does not catch your partner off guard.
5. While most men struggle with basic lead and timing, followers can communicate a change in rhythm and pace by adjusting the frame/body language or sometimes even through facial expressions. You can lead too, without the partner even realising. 

Salsa Concepts: Reverse Cross Body Lead

For some reason, most of the basic (travelling) Salsa concepts favour movement from a single direction. The lady’s left and man’s right -- the movement for either gender may not necessarily be co-related.

I believe it is important for beginners to explore movement from either side of the ‘line’ of dancing; especially men. Women do get the opportunity to travel / turn across both sides, but generally movement for men remains lop-sided. Consciously creating patterns from either side can help men add at least 30% more variation to their partner-work and make them a lot more unpredictable (hopefully).

There isn’t any content available on the internet -- either via videos or literature -- on the Reverse Cross Body Lead (RCBL). Even in the classroom, most instructors don’t specifically focus on the RCBL, unless it is built into a pattern.

Here is an attempt to fundamentally break down the footwork for the RCBL. Rather than keeping the footwork (for men) as a mirror image to the Cross Body Lead (CBL), a variation has been attempted by yours truly.

How to:

For simplicity of understanding and execution, the RCBL is almost a mirror image of the CBL.

Women’s Footwork:

(1,2,3): Regular back basic

5: Step forward with left foot

6: Step forward with right foot

7: Pivot 180 degrees over the right shoulder and end with left foot next to the right

Men’s Footwork:

1: Step with left towards the lady (regular step)

2: Right foot shifts out to the left side (behind the left leg or even surpassing it as the case may be)

3: Left foot moves next to right. Ensure  you continue to face the lady; however, the frame / feet do not create any obstruction for the lady

5: Step back with the right foot (tagging the lady for the RCBL lead)

6: Shift the left foot (to the right) and attempt to get the feet back in to the line of dancing

7: Pivot 180 degrees on the left foot as you slide the right foot back (right foot finishes next to left)

This variation in footwork for men helps create a different angle for the lead (less predictability), makes the movement sharper (adds finesse), and assists in adding more push / pull variations (integrates concepts better).

There isn’t much to tinker around with the women’s footwork, considering the lead serves as a means to an end (execution).