Mr Chips...
Salsa is a street dance, a dance that belongs to club culture. Try asking any Latino and they’ll tell you that it has everything to do with all the elements of club culture, including the ones I mentioned. I can state this as fact because I’ve run Latin clubs for the last ten years and you’ll find many Latinos in the club, most all tell me that we run Latin clubs authentically including our Salsa club.
I’d say the most offensive of posts so far in this thread are the ones offered by you to the people of Cardiff especially the Ladies, and in particular to the post from Welsh Lass! I’d not be at all surprised to find out that you’re not an amazing dancer but you are most definitely arrogant; Neither are you the messenger as you claim, you are the protagonist... Possibly a troll.
You talk as if Salsa was divorced from Latin club culture, which if you knew anything about Salsa you would know it is not. It is not just a dance, or is it, just about the music, although both are important. This is where some people including you it seems, miss the point.
If you want to learn a specific dance without accepting that other people might have a different take on it, then as I said in the previous post you should go and learn Ballroom where everything is more structured and is much more about the dance, with categorization and qualification central to the culture. Or at least learn, practice and socialise in a church hall, social centre or gym. Because people get drunk in nightclubs, they smoke in nightclubs; they bump into one another, sometimes they bump into one another in more pleasant ways and that’s the way of it... So why don’t you just leave them to it and stop trying to change a culture that’s been around for decades, one which I think you’ll find most people are happy with?
There are many people in Salsa who will vouch to having met their life partners or having had other kinds of liaisons with people they met in Salsa clubs; Sadness and loneliness have little to do with it. I know at our club we’ve had more weddings result from people having met each other than Cilla Black had with blind date.
As for your final paragraph and the reference to my final paragraph...
‘My business depends upon it’
Primarily we run a nightclub... We also teach people to dance and in that order of priority because we don’t consider ourselves to be a dance school with practice, but a nightclub with classes. If we didn’t also teach people, there wouldn’t be any dancers in our club, unless we were prepared to poach them from other promoters, which we never have. But I can tell you that our focus remains on the real reason for learning to dance Salsa i.e. To enjoy the culture in the way it was meant to be enjoyed, furthermore, unlike you we don’t judge any of the people we teach, or for that matter that come into our club to dance. And most if not all of the Latino Promoters and teachers I know, would agree with that sentiment.
