For those who are ready to add something extra to their cross body leads in salsa dancing, this video will provide three ladies’ styling techniques to bring your salsa dancing to the next level. Julie demonstrates three cross body lead variations for ladies: “the hop,” “crosses,” and “the booty roll.” Now that the men have their styling video, we have to spice up our dancing as well!
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The often-requested men’s styling for salsa dancing has arrived! Once you have a solid basis for your cross body leads, the next step is to be able to do variations of it. In this salsa video, we teach ways to spice up your salsa by adding style to your cross body leads. Anthony will teach you how to do a monkey move and a hook step into a cross body lead, and at the end how to add a shimmy. For the ladies, see the sister video with ladies’ styling, taught by Julie.
Credit of the “Monkey Move” goes to David Stein from Majesty In Motion.
Continue reading ‘Men’s Styling for Salsa Cross Body Leads’
If anyone out there is wondering, “what can I do to improve that doesn’t involve the natural process of getting good over time,” I have some answers for you. Using body language (one of the main ways people communicate), you can improve how you look when you dance simply by remembering these easy tips. Look at it this way…for dancers who are taking classes or doing what they can to improve their dancing over time, these tips will help you look good while you are in the process of learning. Often, when a dancer is learning something new, the basics are thrown out the window. What ends up happening is that the body language suffers, so while you may have a great new footwork pattern, you’ve sacrificed some important basics. While you learn, keep these tips in mind, and you’ll always look great!
1. Chin Up
The saying, “chin up” is popular for a reason! With your chin down you come across as self-conscious or sad, hence describing personalities as generally “down” or “up.” When dancers learn something new or lack confidence in what they are doing, the chin tends to go straight down subconsciously. By reminding yourself to keep your chin up every once in a while, you will give off the perception that you are confident and happy with the dance. An additional benefit is that keeping your chin up enables you to literally “look up to” your partner as you dance, which will be understood as a sign of respect. Continue reading ‘Quick Salsa Styling Tips for Ladies’
In this episode of Addicted2Salsa Dance Lesson show, we travel a bit to the East Coast in order to show you a very common and popular move to do at the salsa dance nightclub. The first move, which I call the “Cyclone Bounce” for no apparent reason, can be seen in many salsa dance congress on the East Coast. The second dance move is really taking most of the concepts from the The Windmill Combo salsa dance episode and putting a different spin on it. In the end, Julie will have a special section to showcase ladies’ styling for the follows. Credit goes to David Stein for the inspiration for these moves.
We would like to thank our sponsors Gabellini Dance Shoes for providing us with my favorite pair of salsa dance shoes. Remember than you can use the coupon code: A2S10 for $10 off your next purchase. It is a thank you for being our loyal fans.
In this episode, we will provide you with three great ways to improve your salsa dance spins. While most of them tend to be ‘known’ to most intermediate dancers, we have noticed it does not get addressed soon enough to early beginners. Here are the summary of items this episode will cover:
- Frame and Position
- Dance Prep
- Spotting
This video Cha Cha lesson of Addicted2Salsa will teach you the basics of Latin style cha cha dancing. We will go over the basic step of Cha Cha dance for beginners and instruct you with basic dance partnering. If you are coming from a salsa dancing background, we will show you how you can transfer your salsa dance moves and patterns over to Latin Cha Cha by exchanging the pauses in the salsa dance steps with the Cha Cha (triple) step. At the end, we provide you with a set of intermediate cha cha dance moves for the Latin dance club.
Again, we’d like to thank our great sponsors, Gabellini Dance Shoes, for providing us our favorite dance shoes for Latin, salsa and cha cha dancing. Use coupon code ‘A2S10‘ for a $10 discount (while supplies last).
This is part one of a short series of salsa dance instructional videos to encourage you to incorporate salsa footwork and Latin dance shines in your social dancing. Most beginners will compose their dance in a never ending series of turn patterns. This should help you get started on adding simple footwork dance segments to your dancing so you can allow the lady to enjoy herself by styling on her own.
And as a big thank you to our loyal salsa dance viewers, our sponsor, Gabellini Dance Shoes, has decided to offer Addicted2Salsa members a $10 discount on your next order of salsa dance shoes! Just use the COUPON CODE: A2S10
In this episode of Addicted2Salsa salsa dance video lessons, we will show you how to perform a basic salsa windmill combination into what we call the “hourglass copa“. The Windmill is very similar to other moves you have done that require an cross-body lead with an outside turn, except this is just a variation in styling of that basic move. The hourglass copa is based off of basic copa move (a.k.a in-and-out), except that the lead requires the use of two points of contact on the ladies’ shoulder blades.
At the end, Julie will break down some basic ladies’ styling techniques when performing this move. Finally having a woman’s voice in the video is refreshing!
For those new to our series, we have started a new page on Facebook @ 
http://facebook.addicted2salsa.com .
We would like to thank our sponsors Gabellini Dance Shoes for providing us with our favorite pair of dance shoes.
This episode is our first episode available in High Definition on YouTube. Just click the button “Watch in HD“:
I am very happy to have found out that interest in learning to dance on2 (NY/PR) timing has started becoming very popular on addicted2salsa.com. To help everyone become more familiar with the clave and the VERY important conga slap, I have edited the original salsa clave track I created in Garageband for Episode 25 : Finding the Salsa Beat and modified it for an easier learning experience. This should help everyone make it part of their daily schedule to play the track at least 3 times a day while they do some other task. Doing this will allow your brain to sink-in that conga beat and rhythm subconsciously - so that it starts becoming easily recognizable by your ears.
At first, I recommend forgetting about the clave when listening to the soundtrack. Focus on the ‘tu-ku (small pause) PA!’ (conga) sound first. The ‘tu-ku’ sound happens on the 8-AND and 4-AND counts. That ‘PA’ sound are your 2’s and 6’s when dancing on2.
I have loaded the waveform of the track and added some cue markers for you to understand what is happening in the beat. You can do the same with any audio editing program, for example, the free Audacity. Please remember that this is not a perfect graph of the waveform, but it is very accurate if you focus your attention on the peak points. (No noise reduction or normalizing was done).
The exercise video (recommended) is posted here : Salsa Beat and Rhythm Exercise. You can download the soundtrack version here: Salsa Clave Practice Soundtrack.
Salsa Clave and Conga Audio Waveform
In this episode of Addicted2Salsa we show you how to perform a basic blind cross-body lead with a loop-over lock salsa move. While the move may look easy at first, it is the timing and the proper leading where some may have difficulties. Also, we will take it and chain it together, going from a cross-body hammer-lock to a reverse loop-over. I consider this a more intermediate dance pattern because you have to be very careful on how you lead this move. These moves done incorrectly can hurt the girl in VERY bad ways. At the very end of the episode, we decided to add one of our bloopers from filming. Enjoy!
Before we continue, over the years I had been receiving a lot of questions on the much nicer dance shoes that I wear during the Addicted2Salsa dance video episodes (nice white shoes) compared to the original series (big black heavy shoes). I’ve worn A LOT of dance shoes since I started dancing salsa, from regular rubber dress shoes, to BLOCH sneakers, to jazz shoes and shoes with Latin heels. As a male dancer, there isn’t much of a selection for a great dance shoes - until a few years ago when I met Giancarlo from Gabellini Dance Shoes. 
He has made some of the most fabulous dance shoes for men that combine a great sense of style and utility. I bought my first pair in November 2006 and have never bought any other brand since. Giancarlo has taken time to really focus on what makes a great dance shoe for men: a lightweight shoe that allows a better placement of your center of gravity with enough support to provide you with better control on spinning and footwork. We all appreciate anyone who that takes time in designing things very carefully and well, and Gabellini has done this for mens’ salsa dance shoes. I’d like to thank him for being the first sponsor for the Addicted2Salsa show.
[Updated] The song name is Lunes Locos (Crazy Mondays) by Los Gatos. Also, for those who were asking, my favorite shoes are the ‘White Leather’ (with a black stripe).
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