So, last night we attempted the 2nd salsa night here. It's been four weeks since our last try because the only person who knows how to lead was out of town.
To start: it was great fun and I enjoyed sharing the dancing, the music and the fun with my friends.
But still so much to work on!
The Location: we found a place closer to the city for our last night's event. They have an upper level room that we could use. It has a wooden floor + aircon. I really liked it except the floor was sticky because it was not clean.
Some of our friends will open a cafe in the next few weeks and they offered us a "permanent" home for our event, as soon as they are open - exciting!
The music: I tried to put a "beginner-friendly" playlist together but will still have to work on that. Of course we are still far from DJ'ing, so playlists will have to do for the time being. They liked most of the music, but many songs that I consider "moderate danceable speed" turned out still too fast for first-timers. So any tips for slow/danceable/"easy" (for lack of a better word) music for people who do their very first salsa steps in their lives is greatly appreciated!
The attendance: Currently we exclusively spread the word through Facebook, Couchsurfing (our organizing group is part of the local CS group, which is very active) and word of mouth - FB is our best friend here. We have been announcing the event almost daily to all our friends and networks, created a fb event, and raved about how much fun this FREE event is going to be (people love freebies around here). We even got some plugs from some of my Salsa Manila friends. However, much fewer people showed up as expected: we invited over 350 people through our FB event, out of which we got 18 "attending" + 23 "maybe" but in the end only 8 people showed up (4 of those being the organizers).
Haha, on the upside, that's 2 people more than last time
But we keep on trying! I really, really do wish that we get a little salsa scene going around here.
I'll keep you posted on how it evolves
To start: it was great fun and I enjoyed sharing the dancing, the music and the fun with my friends.
But still so much to work on!
The Location: we found a place closer to the city for our last night's event. They have an upper level room that we could use. It has a wooden floor + aircon. I really liked it except the floor was sticky because it was not clean.
Some of our friends will open a cafe in the next few weeks and they offered us a "permanent" home for our event, as soon as they are open - exciting!
The music: I tried to put a "beginner-friendly" playlist together but will still have to work on that. Of course we are still far from DJ'ing, so playlists will have to do for the time being. They liked most of the music, but many songs that I consider "moderate danceable speed" turned out still too fast for first-timers. So any tips for slow/danceable/"easy" (for lack of a better word) music for people who do their very first salsa steps in their lives is greatly appreciated!
The attendance: Currently we exclusively spread the word through Facebook, Couchsurfing (our organizing group is part of the local CS group, which is very active) and word of mouth - FB is our best friend here. We have been announcing the event almost daily to all our friends and networks, created a fb event, and raved about how much fun this FREE event is going to be (people love freebies around here). We even got some plugs from some of my Salsa Manila friends. However, much fewer people showed up as expected: we invited over 350 people through our FB event, out of which we got 18 "attending" + 23 "maybe" but in the end only 8 people showed up (4 of those being the organizers).
Haha, on the upside, that's 2 people more than last time
But we keep on trying! I really, really do wish that we get a little salsa scene going around here.
I'll keep you posted on how it evolves
) is helping out some friends with an independent movie. They shot a scene at our salsa night. I wonder how this will look like in the movie. The scene was about a guy snatching a girl from another guy, they dance together, he hits on her during the dance and in the end they leave together arm in arm. Almost everybody involved in the scene had 0-3 nights salsa experience, and I was a beginner again because I tried out leading since we were short of leaders, so the whole thing must look pretty funny. On the upside, some of the movie crew said they wanted to come back next week to try out dancing. We asked them if we could use some of the scene to promote our salsa night and they said yes, so we're getting some footage.
Hey, in this follower-heavy part of the world it's not unrealistic to expect only girls to show up.
