Counting a little differently with Captain Salsa
- Thread starter Tom Schueler
- Start date
Don't you live closer now? There is a direct flight from Bogota to San Juan. I flew to other side of Europe for the workshops.
I believe in San Juan it would be cheaper and you'd get more personal attention.
Edit - are you talking about Terence or someone else? My first assumption was Terence. Instead of ambiguous references to “he/his” and “this”, you need to specify the specifics
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No Terence doesn’t say random words. He is most of the times terse but fairly accurate. Sometimes accuracy may be out of main context, but very rarely incorrect.
He has been repeating many things over the years. The new people don’t understand that he has explained many of those before, therefore he keeps it very short.
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Words.
Some people can dance and make others better dancers, but when they talk about dancing it makes no sense to me. In some cases even if I try.
Agreed with bolder. None of above is revolutionary. It is a minimum you expect from a Salsa teacher. All of above, my instructor did it, I seen FM do it, ET do it. I am sure few others teach all those too. My impression has always been that shines are not taught to the counts but to the singing of the rhythm.
Agree. My instructor had eyes on back of his head! He could tell I am on wrong timing plus five other people exactly what each one was doing wrong, in a row of 12 people or class of 25 people. I think a good instructor after an experience develops a feel. It is like a chess master playing simultaneously with 25 chess players. They have a feel for the game and can remember different board position plus envision probabilities several moves ahead.
Also a minimum I would expect from a good instructor.
Your minimum is a high bar in reality. For me minimum would be teacher who keeps students engaged until they are brave enough to social dance by themselves.
And for me I appreciate everyone from whom I can learn something useful. Sometimes it's also not only about material, but right time, place, and me being ready. Many things seem obvious in hindsight, but have taken years from someone saying/showing it, til I incorporate that in the dance. At one moment it clicks and becomes natural. (btw. One of the reasons why term 'natural' is so controversial in dance teaching. What's natural to one, might be alien to another, and then become natural much later)
To me as a non-musician, counting is about how the beats are spaced in a note (quarter note, half note, one-eight note, etc). In most music (we dance to) the beats are spaced evenly. The beat may be implicit or explicitly played, but the spacing in temporal domain is even. If the music changes the tempo, it is no longer even through out the song.
Therefore whether you count 1,2,3 or 1&2&3 or 1&ah2&ah3, you are subdividing the note. To me as a dancer counting is same as keeping the meternome or its subdivisions. Certain rhythms and accents in the music may occur on certain counts, the phrases in the music may be made of certain number of counts (beats that is) or phrase will start at certain fixed interval of counts, etc. That is how I see count synched to the music.
However when dancing the rhythm and melody (and harmony) and what is happening there, is more important to me than the counts. Clave to me is a rhythm, not a count though it can be expressed in a count. But that is a simpler example.
Yes or maybe. That is why I avoid having discussions about salsa instructors
I was lucky to have an instructor that set a high bar from day one.
Some of the drills or what was taught, has only clicked 10-12 years later!!
DJ Yuca
Son Montuno
Hopefully I'll be able to do it one day. But I'm still curious: what does Tito teach that could be considered controversial and/or heresy?
I decided there's enough controversy already in this thread.
Hopefully I learned something from it.I looked it up. It was probably 8 years ago, when I went to Rovinj before festival to take workshops from them. https://www.crosalsafestival.com/2011/program/2_pre_festival_extra_days
So I have changed, he has changed, my memory is not perfect. And how can I convey dozens of hours of drilling, talking, experimenting, and arguing here in a good way? Some of my conclusions were based on old mambo videos which he collected, and I've never seen them again.
What's the point of creating controversy? Don't we have enough already?
For me after these classes mambo is mostly about freestyling to mambo music with bunch of quick feet and jumping. Nowadays mambo is controversial topic (at least in Russia they had a lot of debates about music after last week's mambolove event ). I don't want it.
And I don't want to put words in his mouth, when he's available either in salsa events or on Facebook.
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You coward!
What do I do with my popcorn now?
The whole idea is that nowadays mambo has turned into on2 hipster term for what they like in music and dance, marketing brand like salsa or timba. Not everyone agrees, some still remember meanings of olde days, some are still alive who lived and danced when mambo was big. And to add another layer, even in golden days it was not 100% clear what is mambo, and probably had arguments in their fora of coffee shops and speakeasies.
It's more about memory than endurance !!!
You should NEVER judge an era on only a NYC dance style . The States is a vast country and the approach is not always the same as the Palladium may have one believe .
Were some of those elements used ? of course but there was also a ton of partnership work..
DJ Yuca
Son Montuno
That description doesn't really match any of the vids of old mambo I've seen although the freestyling element was definitely a big part of it - shines were far more improvised back then than they are now and I think there were more shines then than now. Partner work was still the majority of the dance though. Jumping is not something I can recall having seen.
The only mambo controversy I know of is the old chestnut that comes up regularly on here: are today's on 2 salsa dancers entitled to call their dance mambo?
Controversies are a great way to learn. Since when did we at SF started shying away from controversies.
Tito is certainly one of the foremost authorities on Mambo and Salsa dancing. ET too often sought his advise and exchanged notes with him. As I had mentioned several times before he and Tamara had a profound influence on ET's students and their style of dancing. Why do you think FM stopped doing endless patterns and jumping around like a monkey
{how's that for a controversy}P.S. - We have debate about music after almost every social. So it is good that people are debating music. I don't see a downside to that.