Salsa dancers are always walking a fine line of etiquette. We have to look good and smell right, but our chosen activity seems to fight these very qualities. Temporary halitosis is a nemisis on the dance floor. We seen it’s many forms and use unique ways to identify it’s presence among us.
Submitted for your amusement is a smattering of identifiers;
There is the time honored “His breath is kickin’ like” series. Just insert the latest karate name at the end e.g. Bruce Lee, Jet Lee, Jackie Chan, Kung Fu Panda are but a few. Also in the kicking vein are the animal set (e.g. mule, and rodeo horse).
Some get right to the point; “I think something died and crawled in her mouth.” or “Someone must have slipped some pooh in her drink.”
My favorites include the use of local props to drive home the point; “His toungue must hold it’s breath when he sneezes,” or “I think I saw his teath ducking when he exhaled.”
Lastly, you still manage to hear the educated set using the venerable Latin terms to identify potential hazards; “Hmm…looks like a classic case of ‘Inkiestae Outhmus.’” “I have to agree doctor, with an outside chance of deteriorating into full blown ‘Ittyshae Reathbus’”
Please feel free to add to the list!
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All kidding aside for a moment, I am shopping for a new brand of breath mint. I consider gum to be a bit tacky (don’t ask me why.) After a tiny bit of research I have discovered that any breath corrector that contains sugar is a huge faux pas. Apparently this is akin to throwing a cow into shark infested waters. Namely the sugar feed on the sugars and throw out by undesireable by products that smell like rotten eggs or used gym socks. So stay away from the old school peppermint candies that you see at the checkout in restaurants.
I usually roll with rolled mints. The fancy containers tend to make noise while dancing. My old brand was tic tacs, and my current brand is “Breath Savers.” According to the packaging, it’s supposed to last for 3 hours. I’m not sure about that. I read about these “Zox breath mints” (http://www.therabreath.com/art_breathmint.asp)
Has anyone ever used these? They contain Xylitol which my dentist has mentioned before as a tooth and oral beneficial.
What works for you?
occurs while the feet are still separated from the break step in on2 style. In on1, the pause occurs while the feet are together in neutral position (i.e. the break has been closed/replaced). You said:
), I think he shouldn’t do them all the time.. but its his style I guess.
jovi 1:38 am on February 27, 2009Permalink |
where is salsa?
I got this idea from topological maps. High areas of a region are colored white(e.g. top of the mountains) and low regions are dark green. You can see an example in the link below.
http://www.weltkarte.com/europa/spanien/topographie-mallorca.png
So i was thinking it would be nice if there would be a map but instead the hight of the area the color would be based on number of salser@s.
Would be fun to see, how salsa is spread all around the world and where the most salser@s are
more concrete:
1. people can enter their location
2. a simple visualization of the data is presented(don’t need to be as complex as in the example, bars or icons wold be satisfyeable)(google maps api?)
3. integration with Anthony’s point 4 ?
Marco 6:32 am on February 27, 2009Permalink |
This may already be done and I’m just unaware-If so hit me with the bad idea ray gun.
The vids are quite progressive now and the phrase “refer to our earlier videos” is mentioned often.
How about a more robust organization of the previous vids. (The youtube stuff especially). Could be just a simple Vid 1-25?
To take it one step further, separate the dance vids from the non dance tutorials.
There is already something like this on the A2S dance vids site but it is a little inconsistent.
Sorry if this one is rough/harsh..I have serious man love for this site, and I was late getting out the door *before* I decided to post.
Maybe more ideas later.
jovi 3:12 am on February 28, 2009Permalink |
how are you guys thinking about a roadmap from beginner to pro? I mean to define milestones and say if someone reaches this milestone, (s)he should understand/able to do following things:… . To have a “lead” video(for each milestone) which describes best way how to reach the goal(milestone), this video may change over time. And to have further videos for people who didn’t got the idea after watching the lead-video.
tommrod 2:14 pm on February 27, 2009Permalink |
how about adding the actual beat number so you don’t have to be counting while you dance?
or pointing out graphically to the beat in some way…
Anthony Persaud 2:43 pm on February 27, 2009Permalink |
haha. I just had a picture of a Sesame Street like Count Dracula saying “1….2….3… AH..AH..AH..”
Marco 7:26 am on February 28, 2009Permalink |
Does final cut have a mod for lightning flashes? (Sorry off topic)
tommrod 11:48 pm on February 28, 2009Permalink |
lqtm (laughing quietly to myself)
martinho 7:51 am on March 3, 2009Permalink |
Hi
I’ve discovered your website a few months ago and found it amazing!
I’ve read your idea concerning the subtitles for online lessons.
If you like, I’m able to translate it into french, that’s quite difficult to find a good french website teaching salsa with good video quality…
Cheers
Martin
Hi-meh 2:14 pm on March 4, 2009Permalink |
1, 2, and 4 sound good, but I especially like 4.
Seena 3:10 pm on March 5, 2009Permalink |
Hi Anthony,
I emailed you about a similar issue, then found this page, so a bit of a repeat:
(A) I agree 100% with Marco’s comment and jovi’s followup above. Related to this:
(B) I want to download every single video that you have, preferably in HD quality. However, there are discrepancies between the videos on youtube, iTunes, and addicted2salsa. Some sites have different videos or more/less videos.
For example:
youtube playlist: Has 76 videos
youtube videos: Has 42 videos
addicted2salsa: Has 42 videos (I think these 42 videos are different than the youtube ones though)
iTunes: Has 20 videos
As you can see, for example, iTunes only has 20 videos. Can we have it so that at least one location has every video, preferably downloadable and in HD?
Thanks a lot for the videos regardless, thanks,
Seena
Anthony Persaud 4:50 pm on March 5, 2009Permalink |
(A) Ok.
(B) The main source for all videos is at http://videos.addicted2salsa.com . Currently we don’t allow HD video downloads directly until we find a better mechanism to remove “scrapers” from killing our bandwidth (scrapers are like web robots that show the video on their site while streaming it from our site).
Currently there is ordering on our videos since we only plan what we will shoot ahead of time. It’s not like we have this great organization of what we will shoot for the next two years
, who knows, we might be bankrupt by then.
What we will do is organize the videos on videos.addicted2salsa.com to let you know what “we feel” is a beginner, intermediate or advance move – but that is really subjective given the different learning curves for individuals.
Anyways, just wanted to say “I hear you requests, I just haven’t figured out the best option yet given our time and my (very small) budget”.
valvare6 8:27 pm on March 6, 2009Permalink |
I vote for the following:
==> A world wide salsa night club / events page.
Although, I would also suggest sending out a survey for upcoming videos. Perhaps you can tally who wants to learn what and go from there..
susieqsalsa 12:21 pm on March 8, 2009Permalink |
Oh, I got an idea and if you did this, it’s something I would pay money for this service…..
I take dance classes in a group setting where there isn’t much opportunity for personal growth through constructive criticism, the harsh truth we need to be able to fully embrace improvements needed to grow in our salsa journey.
I would like to be able to film myself dancing with my partner the moves I am learning from your collection of videos and upload them to you so you can critique me and point out areas of strengths and weaknesses. Then you can suggest tips to improve my moves. This is something that I think people may want to pay for, as everyone who joins your group most likely respects your opinion and would want to hear it….
The other idea I got would be to create a gallery where people who are learning and doing the moves learned in your videos can upload videos of themselves where members of the group can vote on the favorites. And maybe the members can even share comments, tips and pointers based upon what they see in the video (like youtube). It would be a virtual community based on videos and not just a worded dialogue. And if you want to make money on this idea, you can charge the user a small fee to upload their video to the community for review, perhaps.
I think that would be a fun way to foster unity within our salsa community! What do you think?
jovi 2:19 am on March 9, 2009Permalink |
Good question, bad question.
It is ok to ask “what can I improve?” but it is not ok to say “Tell my partner what he did wrong!”. Don’t forget to ask your partner to movie him AND to be alowed to upload the video. (I would not like somebody movie my mistakes and show them to the rest of the world without my permission!)
“people who are learning and doing the moves learned in your videos … members of the group can vote on the favorites.” prety funny, I would also like to see the best Anthony&Julie dancing clone.
other question is if Julie&Anthony want to face this competition?
Julie 4:25 pm on March 9, 2009Permalink |
Agreed- respect for your partner is always important. It sounds like susieqsalsa is looking for advice for herself though, which is great.
As for people dancing our combos, I would love it! “Facing the competition” is absolutely not what this is about, the whole point of the website is to share salsa with the community, and I by no means claim to be among the best dancers. Please do share videos! We all have something to learn.
Julie 10:22 pm on March 8, 2009Permalink |
Great idea! What some people have done in the past is to upload your video to Youtube, and then paste the link on this website to receive advice from the Addicted2Salsa community. It seems to work out well, since you get a variety of constructive feedback. It is wonderful that you recognize (and seek out) criticism as a method of improvement – so many of us hate that criticism, even though we know we need it! Feel free to post a link, we’d all be happy to give you feedback (you can also ask for any specific feedback you may be looking for)
Susieqsalsa 1:08 am on March 16, 2009Permalink |
Thank you, Julie! I finally got to record while I am dancing but didn’t get permission from the partner to upload to the internet. So, in honor of that person’s privacy, I won’t upload it. But I will wait til next time to record when I am dancing with my regular partner where we do many of the addicted2salsa video moves that we learn.
This recording is the first time I’ve seen myself dance since I started taking lessons about 7 months ago. It was fun and exciting to see this and I also spotted things I didn’t like about the way I dance and started making changes to that right away. I also like that I can track my progress as time goes by. I know I will be grateful for that someday!
And I also am making an effort to record the end of my classes so I can review the moves and practice at home.