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Two salsa resolutions for 2025

TL;DR dance more. 

You know that feeling when you are fully in the grip of salsa addiction? You think about it all the time. You’re always planning your next salsa night. Wild horses wouldn’t get in the way of the next salsa hit. I want to get that back. I have not lost my love for salsa, but now it is very much a love of teaching and seeing other people enjoy it. These are not small things. In fact, these are very beautiful things, and I will write about them separately. However, those sublime moments of purely selfish salsa love are becoming a rarity, and I want more of them.

I’ve been dancing for nearly two decades and I know that there are many peaks and troughs in a salsa life. The good thing is, you’re not always chasing the dragon of your first few weeks of salsa. There are many more exciting and harder-earned peaks later down the line. There are also troughs: times when you realise how much there is to learn; times when you lose confidence; times when life gets in the way, despite your best efforts to prioritise dancing.

What years of experience have given me is a sure-fire method for getting back into the groove and falling in love with dancing again. It involves two things. I haven’t made time for these two things in the last year because of all the usual shite that gets in the way of the things that make us happiest: time, money, energy, and the ever-increasing weight of responsibility that piles upon us with every passing year. The two things are also the perfect antidote to all the previously listed shite. A vicious circle. The first victims of the shite are also the cure for the shite.

Without further ado, here are the two things and my salsa resolutions:

Practise

By practice, I don’t mean rehearsing something until I get it right. I mean practising things I can do even after I have learnt them. Consistent practice keeps the skills at the tips of my fingers and the tips of my toes. It gradually but continuously improves my technique, control, agility, and freedom to respond and contribute to a dance. It also gives me the creative space to express the music. As a bonus, it is by far the most fun and effective cardio workout I have ever found.

The peaks in my salsa life have always coincided with times when I have a regular and intense practice running. The very best of these times are built on group practice. I did manage to maintain a good practice during lockdown; it did the job, but it was not fun. So, my goal this year is to establish a consistent practice, ideally with others. My advice to you is to do the same. It is hard with competing responsibilities and demands on your time, but it is worth it.

Dance out of my comfort zone

Last year I really dropped out of the wider social dancing scene that had been a huge part of my life. There have been times in the past when driving to Manchester for a couple of hours' dancing happened twice a week. Liverpool, Birmingham, and London were all perfectly reasonable distances to travel on the quest for new, exciting, and challenging social dances, especially for New York style salsa. On top of the excuses listed above (time, money, etc.), the frequency of really good value salsa socials has decreased, although the ‘quality over quantity’ argument is a good one here. There were good crossbody socials; I just didn’t go to them. Worse still, when I did go, my mind wasn’t in it. This is because of all the above reasons plus a general low-key funk that I was in and didn’t manage to dance my way out of. That is OK. It happens. But I am determined to change it.

Challenging socials are where I use the skills I’ve been practising. They are where I regain my confidence. They are where I achieve, or come closer to, the quality dances that fuel my love for it all. So, resolution two is to get to those socials. It probably requires a bit more planning than it used to, but it’s going to happen.


No more excuses; these are the resolutions. It's always unreasonable to try to return to past glories. But, it's reasonable to want to create new ones using methods that have worked in the past.



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