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John Bebbington FRPS

This is the story of needing help, as a beginner and fading out.  I wrote most of it last year some time and was reminded of it by accompaniment.

It was crossbody salsa, where the woman doesn’t go around the man, as in Cuban salsa, but stays on an invisible “line”. He, in contrast, can go around her. It felt a bit, scary and imprisoning: stay at the kitchen sink; do as I say, not as I do. You are reminded this developed in the seventies, after all. The other main difference: you dance not on the obvious, “one” beat, but on the second beat. It was all news to me, I just danced at socials blissfully unaware of the faultlines and blamelessly uncriticised. Most guys dance Cuban style because it's easier. I discovered though that crossbody guys get a bit irate if you don't stick rigidly to your invisible line. I think it was the chilled out guy running the event who told me all the better dancers dance on the second beat, and that it makes for a less hurried, more syncopated dance so, well, there was that to aspire to. Crossbody originated in New York where much of the best salsa emerged between the late 60s and the 1980s.

Much later a Latin American guy in a milonga said he used to dance salsa all the time and still loved the music but he travels a lot and when he went somewhere new the whole Cuban /crossbody confusion got too intense. He didn't want stress when he went dancing. He wanted to dance wherever he happened to be without fuss so now he just dances tango.

I was attracted because it was a practica. Salsa class, predictably, had not gone well. At a social in the city, admittedly a great Cuban dancer had invited me, but that was all. Most women knew the guys and walked boldly up to them to invite or entice them on to the floor. I couldn't go to my more local salsa socials any more. The stalker now went which gave me the heebie jeebies. Besides, the attention seeking thing was still wildly evident plus the general vibe anyway just wasn't for me.

But a salsa practica - half social, half learning environment, more free, that was more like it. Many of the dancers at crossbody seemed good and experienced. After he had invited me to dance and when he wasn't dancing with other women I chatted to a relaxed, very quiet Colombian about his country and music. When he was I sat on the floor, watching his feet beat out the ceaseless, seemingly innate rhythm on the off beat - one two one.  I discovered he had been a dance teacher but had none of the ego that often accompanies it. His dance with soft, sinuous, patient, immensely attuned to the partner and with that totally reliable, instinctive rhythm.  I complimented him on it.  Mucha práctica, he said. It always is.

Last time I had been I had received two good tips from a British guy I later heard had had a salsa school abroad.  Although not an especially prepossessing example of male virility he was as a light to moths. Women stood around him or walked up to him to ask him to dance.  He danced with the young ones.

This time I might as well have been a wall. Consequently I felt too old, too new, too gauche, too everything, too dismissed.   That all but one of the other men - and he seemed shy - danced with me  should have been the thing to remember, but I had travelled far for a short event to sit often and wondered if I should in fact rather just go to the socials which were at a more convenient time, for longer, with more people, a bar and seats. 

Maybe the guy was waiting for me to ask him questions, to ask him to show me something.  I have always been astonished that so few new people ask any questions at all.  But if he didn’t want to speak to me then I didn’t want to bother him.  But maybe people don't ask not through a lack of imagination or initiative but from shyness, a sense of respect towards someone with experience, a sense of needing less to ask but rather to be shown.

There are many people I didn't dance with at my own tango practica, but they were not new.  Wherever I find them I make a point of dancing with new people.  They are the expansion and continuation of a group of people who want to dance locally. I don't say community, because that implies more cohesion and good feeling than there often is. 

I didn’t “save myself" only for people with lots of experience or with whom I am compatible, not least because if I did I would barely dance. I didn't "save myself" either for when the new dancers become good because of the staggering arrogance of that assumption. Perish the thought that I or anyone would be something for them to "aspire" to. Quite the contrary, I hope they find their own dance by first dancing with experienced people who just dance with them.